Female Founders: Lisa Thee of Minor Guard On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder

Building your company brand — Coming from large companies, I never had much of a need for a website, Linked In, or Twitter. I could lean on the brand of my employer to open doors. It is critical to ensure you own your pipeline and have regular touchpoints with your potential buyers to move them through the customer.

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lisa Thee.

Lisa Thee leads Launch Consulting’s Data for Good practice, helping the world’s most innovative healthcare, and global technology companies to improve digital safety, anti-toxicity, and apply machine learning for innovation. As an entrepreneur was the CEO and Co-Founder of Minor Guard, an Artificial Intelligence software company focused on making children safer online and in real life, and a TEDx talk speak on “Bringing Light to Dark Places Online: Disrupting Human Trafficking using Artificial Intelligence”. She is the Co-Author of Demystifying Artificial Intelligence for the Enterprise and the Navigating Forward podcast host. Lisa also currently serves as an advisory board member for Engineered Medical Solutions, Humaxa, Spectrum Labs and Marketplace Risk.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I have always been drawn to a challenge and enjoy taking an idea into a reality. I spent the early part of my career in corporate America, where I was the most satisfied when I could come into a situation that was not functioning well and could bring in the vision and execution to improve the situation quickly. I also learned that once something was functioning well, I was bored and wanted to move onto the next challenge which makes entrepreneurship a good fit.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

I entered the software startup world to address a very specific issue; children creating and distributing illegal images on their phones. In order to identify this material and block it from being saved on the device we had to train an artificial intelligence model to recognize nudity. I will never forget the call I received my first month as CEO from my CTO sharing that they needed millions of “hot dog” photos to train our models. Apparently, it is not hard to find millions of pictures of naked women we could use but men were a bit more challenging. I am grateful that a friend tuned me into a website that had what we needed, so I could share that vs having to go find it all myself!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Launching a business from the ground up is the best street MBA I could have given myself. Overnight I went from an engineering and sales leader to head of marketing, IT, legal, HR, and janitorial services. Because I was bootstrapping the business with my co-founder, we were trying to be as frugal as possible. I did not have a computer of my own, so he gave me an extra one he had, a Mac. I have been a lifelong PC user, and set myself back to 1st grade levels of proficiency doing email and presentations for the following six months. That “free” computer cost me more frustration and velocity than anything. If you bet on yourself, invest in yourself for what you need to come out of the gates swinging.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My co-founder worked at Apple when we first met through our kids preschool. The day the iPhone 10 launched, he called and said “I’m not under NDA anymore, there is an AI accelerator chip on the new phone, I think we can use it to better protect kids online. Let’s quit our jobs and go all in. With most popular apps having end to end encryption we knew that the image detection had to be done on the camera of the phone itself to prevent a child from creating and distributing illegal images. The goal was to free up law enforcement time to go after prolific predators that are abusing hundreds of children online at a time vs a teen making bad decisions. We raised a seed round to fund our beta product and didn’t look back. When we started our company, it took 130 choices to block your child from taking an explicit image on their phone set up, today with a family IOS account and you can block it with a single setting. Our technology incubation set into motion a chain of events where families are better set up to succeed online, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?

Risk aversion. Most of the successful female founders I know are driven women who have succeeded in a traditional career path before deciding to make their own path. In my own experience, it was really hard to let go of a “successful” career to purse my own company with a focus on “significance”. I had a very non-traditional experience raising a seed round where people I had worked with in corporate America invested in my idea from day one and I started with $250K to get off the ground. I don’t think I would have had the guts to go all in had I not had the support of many male allies including my board members, co-founders, and husband.

Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?

I have seen many incredibly talented female founders struggle to access capital, especially women of color. Their companies are often MUCH further along in product market fit, and achieving revenue goals yet the investors are not moving from conversations to checks for series A rounds. The implicit bias in access to capital needs to be compensated for so that the next founder of Bumble or Spanx doesn’t give up before she disrupts her industry.

This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

According to Forbes, 1 out of 4 women want to start a business post-pandemic. After 18 years of playing the game in corporate America, I have found much more satisfaction bringing my whole self as a leader than spending calories fitting in to what was expected from me from some else’s company culture.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?

The myth I would like to dispel is that entrepreneurship is a young person’s game. The majority of successful founders in technology companies are over 40 years when they start their business. This allows them to bring experience and judgement to take calculated risks, not risk for risk sake.

Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?

I think the traits that increase the likelihood someone will be a successful founder include Persistence, Passion, and Curiosity. If you work to live and bring your fullest self to the world through your hobbies, family, or faith; then a traditional job may be a better fit. When it is your company, there are no more uninterrupted vacations or weekends till you have an exit. It is important to make sure you are spending your one life on that areas that energize you, and only you can answer what lifts your energy and what drains it.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, What are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Clarity of vision — In order to lead it is important to know your “Why” and make that transparent to your team. Your company culture should be aligned with that Why. Integrity in how you operate will lead to long term loyalty and growth for those who choose to join you on this crazy adventure of inventing the future.
2. Relentless focus on the customer — Many founders fall in love with technology for technologies sake. They don’t understand the need in the market or how to help potential customers become aware that they are addressing that pain point. There is much more to running a business than building cool stuff.
3. Building your company brand — Coming from large companies, I never had much of a need for a website, Linked In, or Twitter. I could lean on the brand of my employer to open doors. It is critical to ensure you own your pipeline and have regular touchpoints with your potential buyers to move them through the customer
4. Wellness practices are not a luxury — The best day and the worst day as a founder are often spread out by hours and may happen a few times a day. Wellness practices are required to be effective for the long term. In order to recharge my batteries, I use meditation, walks, breathwork, and time with family and friends to recover from some of the harsh realities of an entrepreneurial life.
5. Done is better than perfect. If you are proud of your first product when you launched, you launched too late. It is important to get feedback from the market and keep iterating, you can’t do that if you are keeping all your ideas hidden until it looks Instagram perfect.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Minor Guard was a female-founded company with a social justice focus. We were able to scale our technology roadmap into major players in the technology industry, leveraging cutting edge artificial intelligence capabilities. This benefit marginalized women and children while making a profit — showcasing Shared Value. Today I advise early stage companies on how to grow revenue, leverage technology innovation, and raise capital in order to ground the best ideas into products. It is such an honor to be able to align with primarily diverse operators to help them make their vision a reality.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

According to a recent survey from Forbes, 61% of women surveyed are planning a major career change post-pandemic. In addition, 1 in 4 women surveyed are interested in starting their own business. Emily Kennedy and myself are successful startup executives who have built our social impact businesses from scratch. We have released an Entrepreneurship 101 e-course series to help accelerate women towards success. Our course is titled Spark Passion, where we demystify the process of founding a company and provide guidance on free resources to launch your business, find your customers, build your minimum viable product, and prevent burnout with community and wellness practices. We have partnered with Women in Data to create coaching and community for women founders around the globe.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

My goal in life is to do something impactful enough to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for Super Soul Sunday. I have dedicated my career to protecting vulnerable women in children globally from human trafficking and child sexual abuse material online via technology. I would love to raise the global awareness of what these crimes are and how everyone can demand more from government, companies, and ourselves to stop the demand. The crime of human trafficking is a $150B industry; the front-line protectors of these victims need the best tools to help them. AI can be a great tool to accelerate the tactical things that machines do well so that investigators can focus on do what humans do best which is to investigate and add wisdom for cases.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.