Empowering female founders building unicorn startups through Treehouse NYC
Khushi Shelat grew up in Brisbane, Queensland and is studying statistics with plans to pursue a masters in data science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During her gap year, Khushi built LearnTogether providing weekly skills-based courses alongside a cohort of like-minded tinkerers. Recently, Khushi interned in the investment team at Bessemer Venture Partners, scoping early-stage investment opportunities. Her latest project Treehouse NYC is a community empowering the next generation of women building unicorn startups.
What piqued your interest in the startup/tech space?
My interest in tech and startups sparked when I was in Year 10 when I had my first experience designing a product. I saw one of my friends go to this competition called the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge at NASA. The following year, I put together a team and we designed a product. We ended up designing a wearable tech wristband for preventing people from getting lost and injured when they’re at the beach or in national parks hiking. It was an RFID system that used a mesh network that would be able to locate people’s precise locations. We ended up winning and that was the first experience that was like this what it feels like to be an entrepreneur. My dad when I was very young built his first business, which was a solar retail company. He would talk a lot about entrepreneurship and opportunities.
Then another time, I started the first Lego league team at my state high school where a lot of people were into tech and startups and then every year would go to nationals, and we would get to meet all sorts of people.
A collection of different and former experiences early on in high school led me there. This would culminate in Change-makers Australia- a national nonprofit focusing on getting young women and girls into STEM careers and entrepreneurship. I saw a lot of young women go from that conference to building products of their own. I think that all these experiences together are the reason why I care so much about startups and entrepreneurship.
What has your experience been like building LearnTogether?
I built my own company for the first time during my gap year. I came up with the idea in January 2021 and found a co-founder around the same time who went to Stanford and was also in a gap year at the time. Learn Together was a marketplace for cohort-based courses with three-day long courses and super intensive courses with live instructors on topics such as product management, product design, machine learning, and teaching skills where people can level up. The idea was that you would come in with a skill you wanted to learn on Friday and leave on Monday with a project for your resume. They were designed like hackathons for learning. I was super passionate about this concept- I still am. We started as a slack group. We had a couple of really strong mentors who had built companies of their own.
Over eight months, we built LearnTogether, we iterated until we ended up with the final website and a final cohort of like-minded individuals. We would recruit the instructors. We would design the courses with them, took two weeks to design a course that would typically take a professor, probably like six months to put it together. We were completely bootstrapped, and every single course was profitable.
Biggest Learnings:
My biggest learning is that a part-time entrepreneur does not exist, even if you must do like a job on the side. It’s all or nothing. We were interested in obtaining different experiences interning at certain places. We worked a minimum of 40 hours a week at the company, so it was an intense time. Even when you’re working a job, you’re always thinking at the back of your mind that I love that there is a different energy to building something of your own and putting it out there. I think putting it out there is the biggest thing. I’ve always had an idea and tinkering on side projects and hosting events. I liked the personal accountability it requires as you’re immediately inclined to fix it. My other big learning is to start with small experiments. Start with a low-fidelity prototype. We never even made a website. We made a notion doc and shared it with those who signed up.
A part-time entrepreneur does not exist, even if you must do like a job on the side. It’s all or nothing.
There’s a proliferation of cohort-based courses. What are your thoughts on product differentiation in the edtech space?
At the same time, Maven was delivering courses, and a number of VCs were investing. Obviously, beyond Maven, there are so many education tech models and that’s what makes the industry so difficult. I think we picked a very difficult industry when we look at consumer education technology. What I learnt was that when you continue iterating on your idea, you remain open and you find a way to make your product. You win, even if it wasn’t the first one there. There are so many examples of this i.e., Facebook was not the first social network that came up, Dropbox had like super sticky marketing technique and that was the way that it differentiated itself. Then Bumble, for example, had a very specific marketing technique and there is no shortage of dating apps around that time.
How did you navigate wrapping up LearnTogether?
It was heartbreaking however it was the time summer came around. Last year, I was coming back to school, and I had to think about classes. Then my co-founder decided that she was no longer interested in edtech and there was a divergence of interests as she became more interested in health tech. She’s focused on learning and building healthtech right now.
What has your experience been like investing with Bessemer Partners?
Last year, I was quite well-versed in the startup landscape but did not know much about the VC landscape because I thought that VC was not for me. I was set on working for a company as I had done during my gap year. My first venture capital experience was with Playfair Capital in London. It was meant to be a six-month internship that I left early. I did it remotely from Australia, with clashes in time zones and working hours.
I thought it was fun to be able to talk to entrepreneurs one-on-one and be given the responsibility of identifying whether a specific company is likely to become investible. I oversaw their entire inbound. I would speak to something like 40 entrepreneurs a week. Then the Bessemer’s internship came up in one of my group chats, with my good friend. I discovered that they were the ones who did the cloud 100 reports. From there I learned about how they invested in, you know, Pinterest, Twilio, LinkedIn, and a range of companies that I’ve respected for a while. I interviewed for them and, I went in with no expectations, and had a bunch of conversations. I had the advantage because I’d done VC calls before and knew a lot of the landscape. And then I got the offer.
What is the day in the life of a VC intern?
I would usually have two to three hours every day to like source companies. Essentially this meant prioritizing the kind of companies I wanted to look at that day, and I spent two or three hours on PitchBook, reading tech crunch, and reading lists on other websites. I would choose a focus area for the day. For example, I focused a lot on PropTech for a while for a few weeks. And then I focused on women’s health for a few weeks, especially after the Roe V. Wade scenario brought a lot of women health startups to the surface.
Then I spoke to a lot of generative AI companies because that was a field that Talia Goldberg, one of the partners was super excited about. I had the opportunity to deep dive into different industries and quench my curiosity in a bunch of different areas. Every Monday, I would draw up a presentation on one to three investible companies to the partners. The three of us were super helpful every Friday we’d go over each other’s pitches every Monday we’d pitch the partners and all the analysts to everyone who attended that meeting. That was the other job- with companies we spoke to we’d take notes, and get the data to present on Mondays. In total, I would have spoken to a hundred to upwards of around 200 companies and presented like 20 startups.
I also started seeing a lot of great Australian software companies pop up and I spoke to a lot of them. I was the only one who looked at Australia at the beginning as I was the one who knew a lot about the industry and the general ecosystem. So that was where I sourced from a lot of startups. I ended up using that to write a thesis on Australian tech and all the partners read it and it got sent around. Like everyone was like, go ahead and do it. No one was like, no you can’t. It was quite autonomous and self-determined.
What are your thoughts on empowering Women in VC?
I think some of the things I observed was that with the partners in VC, women aren’t extremely highly represented. The industry benchmark is around 12 ~15%, but with the associates more than half are women. At Bessemer, they’re putting a lot of effort into bringing in some new faces and uplifting female voices in the space.
Why did you start Treehouse NYC?
I came up with the idea in March of 2022 when I went on a spring break trip with my friends. We were all acquaintances and ended up going on the same trip together and living together for a weekend. It was a reminder that through living together, strong and deep relationships can be built.
A bunch of really sick people building cool things. And I was like, wait, I should live with women building cool things. I wanted it to be for the whole summer. It later evolved to become a two-week program at the very beginning of the summer at a spacious house. I did get a lot of great sponsors.
We got some amazing women founders on board. It was also born out of speaking to a lot of people who’d built co-living houses before i.e. my friend Michelle Fang of Elysian House, who just put her “how to start your co-living community guide” on Product Hunt. I pursued the idea, as it reminded me of a lot of Changemakers. It was just like a brilliant experience living with these women for two weeks. And I don’t know how to explain it.
We’re still good friends with the Airbnb hosts. He’s like an MD at Blackstone. Like some chill dude with a bunch of funky Airbnbs. He was like, oh, you want to throw a party. Cool. Go ahead.
Is it like an application process or is it an exclusive network?
The waitlist is open for the next cohort. We went through like an intense application process with around hundred applications. We did the interviews and then selected women to live in the house. Our main criteria were vibes. We were trying to find people who were super different from each other. The intent is to find people who were super different from each other who would add to like the vibe of the community. They didn’t have to be loud, but they had to be open to meeting people. They had to be a badass founder. We were also looking at companies that we wanted to invest in.
What is your advice for aspiring founders or community builders?
Yeah. I’m not sure I’m like entirely qualified as someone who’s been a VC for like six months and a founder for eight. But I think it’s just about starting small. That’s at least what I’m going to keep doing. It’s like thinking of something you want to put out there, put it out there and just see what happens if it doesn’t work then who the hell cares.
With community, it is about finding a community that you want to be a part of. Make it if it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, join that community and become a leader in that community and take a lot of initiative. I did a course on community-building at lunch with Shriya Nevatia who previously lead the On Deck catalyst program.
Be extremely intentional with the first 10 to 50 members of your community. You need to build a good rapport, and make them ambassadors so that you’re able to decentralize some of the work with scheduled rituals. E.g we have set rituals in place, for example, every Sunday, we’d go out running together, thus Sunday’s community ritual is one that everyone looks forward to.
What are your thoughts on building a personal brand?
I recommend Twitter. And I think the next level that I’m trying to take now is like putting out writing it’s like putting a personal website out or getting a medium up and starting to write your thoughts in a structured manner.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently at school and I’m trying to build my technical expertise and data science. Also I’m going to be doing independent study focused on data science and machine learning. I am giving myself more time outside of school just to come up with ideas and jot things down and put things out there. I am also focusing on a small project, it’s my next community-building project- a women’s lifting group at Penn. I’m thinking in the long term about the next Treehouse NYC cohort.
In terms of what I care a lot about, travel and international experiences in general. My favorite thing about like a semester at Penn is the trips. E.g. going to Boston, DC, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, and all these little trips were incredibly character-building and transformational in their own way.
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