Taking a Leap: Anika Zaman of Brevy
Name: Anika Zaman
Hometown and Current Location: Houston, TX
A year ago, Anika Zaman became an entrepreneur almost overnight. Deciding to quit her job at Microsoft after the opportunity of a lifetime presented itself, the past year has brought her new experiences that have allowed her to grow and learn in unanticipated ways.
Her confidence and ambition, partnered with her emphasis of the impact she can have through representation and social responsibility, set Anika apart as someone who is poised to be an admirable, change-making business leader in the future.
TAKING A RISK
Getting Started
After graduating from Rice University with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 2018, Anika began her career as a Program Manager at Microsoft. “It was a role that I truly loved and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do,” she begins.
However, she knew it probably would not be her long-term career. “I was enjoying that work, but I knew I wanted to move to a new kind of opportunity where I could take more ownership,” she explains. “And while I loved my product management role, I wanted to take that to the next level and build my own product. I wanted to take on more responsibility. I was floating around the ideas of either going to a startup or starting my own thing.”
The opportunity to make a change presented itself sooner than expected. In May 2020, Anika and her husband, Mohamed Abedelmalik, found themselves back in Houston, quarantining with family. With the extra time on their hands, they were able to devote time to thinking about startup ideas, and they landed on an idea for a software solution targeting businesses. A close friend, Mathew Pregasen, who was well-connected in the startup space through his experience at Y Combinator, encouraged them to pursue the idea and apply for Y Combinator’s 3-month accelerator program.
With no expectations of hearing back, they took a chance and applied to Y Combinator’s program at the very end of the application period. To their surprise, they were granted an interview. On the night of their interview, they were accepted immediately afterwards, and then had to make a quick choice as to whether they accepted the offer to join the program, which would be starting immediately.
At the time, it was a frightening prospect for both Anika and her husband to abandon their job security and take a risk. Their third founder, Conder Shou, had to evaluate whether taking the leap would be a good idea as well. “We just had a couple hours to decide if we wanted to quit our jobs and, you know, start over. But it was a really good opportunity, so we all decided to go through with it,” she recalls. In hindsight, this moment was a turning point for them all.
Accelerating
Y Combinator selects startups with high promise for their 3-month program to help founders accelerate their growth with the help of resources, community, and financial support. Companies like DoorDash, AirBnb, DropBox, InstaCart, and Twitch all had their start at Y Combinator, giving the program a lot of leverage through its alumni network.
For Anika, Mohamed, and Conder, the Y Combinator experience was extremely helpful to allow them to figure out their goals and ambitions. Halfway through the 3-month program, they realized their business software solution idea wasn’t exactly what they wanted to do. For the remainder of the program and the following months, their product evolved. Originally, it was a chrome extension that allowed users to leave a comment or highlight on any page on the internet, with some additional social media features. However, they realized that they needed to refine their product further, and decided to focus on taking user feedback to inform their decisions.
What they quickly realized is that their web annotation and communication software was being used heavily by Product Managers in software engineering — coincidentally, the same job that Anika held at Microsoft. “It’s pretty messy and scattered to have to give feedback and leave feedback on different websites,” Anika explains. “Currently, what people have to do is literally take screenshots and try to spend time describing where the feedback is rather than actually giving the feedback itself.”
With this, Anika’s team recognized that there was a huge opportunity to build a tool that facilitates the feedback and bug reporting process in technological product development. The tool, Brevy, is an integrated chrome extension that can be used by software development teams as they test and roll out web-based products. It can be linked to the team’s internal communication methods, like Slack or email, to seamlessly document feedback and give the specifications of the feedback to the developers in line on the web page. It captures all of the information that an engineer might want in order to truly understand a glitch or issue reported by a user and sends it to the team’s PM tool (for ex: Jira, Asana, Trello, etc.).
The journey to land on this as their product was winding, but feels natural to their team. “In a lot of ways, we pivoted to something tangential to what we were working on, but at the same time, we took leaps,” Anika notes. Once the idea was developed, the team got to work on building out the functionality to make it into a reality.
A major milestone was their launch on ProductHunt in March, where their product demonstration video garnered a lot of positive attention. Further, at their Y Combinator Demo Day later that month, they received millions of dollars for their seed round funding.
With significant investment in their product, Anika and the rest of the team at Brevy are able to now focus heavily on expansion and further development of their product. They are recruiting new people onto their team and extremely excited about a high-growth future.
Seeking Growth
Now that she has been working on her own company for almost a year and Brevy has supportive investors, Anika is really learning to savor the experience. “We’ve been building our own company and our own product, with this really amazing balance of autonomy and learning. It’s been, honestly, a really good experience, and I know it’s something that I want to keep doing,” Anika enthuses.
Nonetheless, the experience hasn’t been without struggles. “Always feeling like there’s a lot to do and not enough resources is something that’s been very interesting for me, because I’ve worked in a huge company and now I’m working on my own startup, and I’ve found that it’s always the case: always, somehow, a scarcity of resources.”
However, those resource concerns were definitely lessened once they had investors on board. Their investors vary significantly — from founders and ex-founders of startups to venture capital firms to angel investors. Their relationship with investors thus far has been extremely positive, with periodic sync-ups with investors for advice as well as monthly updates on their progress.
Visualizing the Future
Anika does not know exactly what the future will hold, but she does know that she wants to have a positive social impact. “I want to be able to, in five years, have enough credibility where I’m also able to start making kind of like societal changes at scale,” she divulges.
Nonetheless, she knows she can get started on this goal now: “I shouldn’t just be thinking like, ‘Oh, in the future, I want to be in this position where I can make these changes.’ I should do what I can right now, and I can make changes at a local or micro level.”
And Anika is doing the work now to help make these goals a reality. This past fall, she sat down with her co-founders at Brevy to talk about what matters to them beyond the business itself so they can not lose sight of it as they build their product.
LEADING AND REPRESENTING
Embracing Womanhood
Anika recognizes that it is unfortunately rare for someone of her background to be in her current position, and she has felt the impacts of that lack of representation. “There’s just such a lack of women to begin with in tech, and then on top of that, especially when it comes to tech leaders or tech founders, there’s even fewer women there. When you don’t really see people like yourself doing what you’re doing, it takes kind of like a toll on your confidence.”
Nonetheless, her success in the startup world thus far has helped her build confidence and “hype herself up” despite the challenges.
Her experience as a new leader in her own startup has also allowed her to reflect on the male-dominated culture within tech and the inclusive culture she would like to establish in her own company. “There aren’t many women in tech, and there’s a reason for it,” Anika notes, recalling how she witnessed microaggressions against women while in big tech, and even now, as she enters the tech startup world, she sees it in action.
Realizing that she was complacent with this while in big tech working at Microsoft, Anika is working to use her newfound leadership role to make changes, utilizing her ability to “see things like that, call it out, and try to do something about it.”
She continues, “And especially, for example, with the three of us building this company, I feel like we truly have the ability — when we become a bigger company — to build a culture around trying to break those stereotypes and not reinforce the patriarchy that exists, especially, in the tech industry.”
Religious Identity
Anika also holds tight to her religion as a part of her identity as she becomes a leader as well. “I’m in this industry where there aren’t many people like me. And then on top of that, I’m Muslim, and that’s a big part of my identity. On top of that, I do wear the hijab, so I wear my religion on my body.”
She adds, “So if I ever go anywhere, people see me and they know I’m Muslim, and a lot of times they’ll have assumptions based off of that, especially if you’re a Muslim woman who wears a hijab — you know, thinking you do certain things or you don’t do certain things or you can’t do certain things.”
Those assumptions made by outsiders can make Anika feel as though she has to always be on her best behavior. She shares, “I think a lot of times, when you’re a woman who wears a hijab, you’re kind of representing your religion, and I feel like you almost put yourself at risk of being scrutinized a bit more because whenever you don’t do something that’s perfect… there’s an inherent responsibility of representing your religion.”
Although she knows that others may perceive her a certain way because of her appearance, Anika takes pride in her individuality and complexity. However, it can sometimes put pressure on her to feel as though she needs to break stereotypes. “I feel this weird urge to make sure that they don’t make those assumptions about me. People are often surprised I work in tech or that I was born and raised here,” she continues.
Above all, she knows that she cannot let others’ perceptions drive how she lives her life. She reflects, “Religion is one of those things where everyone has their way of practicing and following certain things, while maybe not following other things.”
Advocacy Outside of Work
Anika also places a lot of emphasis on the importance of fighting racial injustice, not just for herself, but for her husband, who is Black.
After being married in the summer of 2019, the increased emphasis on racial justice for Black Americans in 2020 was especially salient for Anika: “I feel like it’s put me in this position where I’ve gotten firsthand learning from a Black man on his experience in America without being marginalized or dealing with prejudice myself. And I think it’s also kind of just made me a lot more aware of this issue.”
Beyond caring deeply for her husband, this issue is especially close to her heart because she knows that her children will be Black, and she will need to be equipped to help raise them in modern America: “As a Bangladeshi American, I’m in a multi racial relationship, and it has opened up my world and mind to this entire other culture and race. I need to be prepared for the day that I do have kids in the future because they will have both of those identities.”
Anika’s interest in service doesn’t stop at racial justice, though. An avid cat lover, she is passionate about working with local cat rescues in Houston. “I’ve been able to work as a side project with different rescues in Houston to save homeless cats from the streets and help them find secure and loving homes,” Anika gushes. “That’s been a big part of my life when I’m not working on my startup.”
INSPIRATION
What inspires Anika as she moves toward achieving her goals? Check out the list below for role models and media recommendations.
Role Models
Media
- Inside Bill’s Brain, a documentary miniseries
- How I Built This, a podcast
- Knock Down the House, a documentary
- Mr. Robot, a show on USA
- Product Hunt, a publication
- Tech Crunch, a publication
