Meet Jesse Genet — CEO and Co-Founder of Lumi
Highlights from the AMA with Jesse Genet on Elpha
Jesse Genet is CEO and Co-Founder of Lumi, a company focused on making packaging supply chain more data-driven and sustainable. She is a Y-Combinator W15 alum and last year raised their series A of $9m. They currently have a team of 50+ people at their LA office.
Jesse started her first business at age 16 and became CEO of her first venture, Inkodye, in 2010. She raised over $270,000 on Kickstarter and maintained employees while studying Product Design at the Art Center of College of Design. She has also been featured on Shark Tank and the Home Shopping Network.
These are the highlights of her AMA on Elpha, where women in tech talk candidly online. You can check out the entirety of the conversation on Elpha.
Q: How did you overcome your insecurities as a young founder? What advice do you have for learning how to run a startup when you don’t have any formal management experience?
Jesse: Overcoming insecurities and balancing the demands of growing up and through challenges while being a CEO is something that is never “over” or “complete.” The odd thing about being a first time CEO of a fast scaling startup is that it’s your job to lead and navigate people through situations that everyone is well aware you’ve never navigated before. It doesn’t take heavy LinkedIn research to know that I haven’t taken a company public or negotiated 9 figure business deals quite yet… but at some point I intend on doing all of these things. And when I do those things my team and the world will know it’s my first time doing them. That’s an interesting sensation.
At the same time it’s not an accident that I’m the CEO of this company, far from it. I’ve doubled down on the risk of starting and running this company at every single juncture and never backed off from the challenge. For me, I know that I want to run a company and I don’t waste time wondering what my life would be like on a different trajectory.
I optimize for learning and have decided that I learn more things faster running a company than I would on any other path and therefore I take the pain with the learning and don’t look back. That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard, it really, really is. That’s the other thing, let it be hard, let it be painful, don’t worry that you’re doing it ‘wrong’ because it’s hard or painful, there is a liberation in that.
Q: How did your YC experience turn out compared to your expectations and hopes going in? What was most unexpected/surprising about it?
Jesse: I think there is no quicker way to getting a masterclass level understanding of how venture capitalists think and prioritize and what a startup ought to focus on in the first couple years than the YC program. It is not perfect and can be a frustrating experience as well, but there is nothing else I can think of that only takes 3 months that can give you a similar set of experiences, so that’s how I think about it now.
Q: How did you grow Lumi? What did acquiring the first customer look like?
Jesse: I’ll be candid and say I that I don’t have a crazy clever growth hack that Lumi used in our early days, we really just spent a tremendous amount of time with our customers, trying to sell them a variety of things they probably didn’t need before landing on a group of solutions and things that they DID need. Perhaps one of the most powerful things we did early on though is actually choose a customer.
I don’t think this is discussed often enough… deciding on a core customer is very powerful.
For us, a huge variety of companies in the world use a lot of packaging, but early on we decided that Lumi is being built to help e-commerce companies scale. That is a very specific customer choice that allowed us to build software and solutions just for them.
Q: What was the biggest adjustment when going to 50+ people? Were you able to maintain a positive, hardworking culture?
Jesse: The transition from 25 people to 50 was momentous not just because its double but because a 50 person organization is completely different to manage. I’ve found that one of the most powerful things I can do as a CEO as the company has been scaling is to take the time to write out my thoughts as frameworks so that priorities and ideas that I used to be able to spread at lunches or informal chats are actually somewhere where everyone can reference them, even if you started working at Lumi yesterday.
I think that work ethic scales with an organization if you’ve hired well, but that the harder part is to maintain a sense of understanding where the company is heading and how to get things done quickly together, which is where frameworks can be very powerful.
Q: How did making sustainability a core part of your product affect your audience and customers? Did you build your brand or frame things differently to affect audience perceptions?
Jesse: Sustainability is not only core to our philosophy but conveniently it’s also good business! By picking this value early on we were able to weave it into how our employees prioritize things as well as how we talk to customers. By creating an expectation that sustainability should be considered at the outset I think that brands trust us to give them candid advice instead of trying to up sell them “something sustainable.” This is a forever topic and goal at Lumi and we have a long way to go on it, but it feels integral now to our approach, not something that we pasted on to get brands attention.
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