W. Tsu: I am so excited to be able to spend the next hour or so with you all. If I had to think about the best way to introduce myself, I'm going to go a little bit off script, and say that the way in which I would describe myself is as an amplifier.  That’s manifested professionally in my career as an investor, where I was a partner at a pretty big VC fund here in New York for close to six years, and then also as a founder, having founded a fertility care company. For me, when I think about what it means to be an amplifier, it is the ability to help other people achieve their greatest form of human potential. You all are in probably the best institution here in the United States. The goal and purpose of that opportunity is to be the best version of yourself. I feel very lucky that I'm one of the few people that people call myself an ” investopreneur”; an investor turned entrepreneur who's had the lucky pleasure of being able to do both. 

By way of more personal background, I'm from California and grew up in Silicon Valley. My family still lives near Palo Alto in a not so little town called Cupertino. My husband's family is also from the Bay Area. We met at UC Berkeley 17 ago. We've been dating for seventeen years.  We have been married. We're here out here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where we live and have been living. I've been in New York the last seven years. And so I can certainly speak to what the differences are between those two different ecosystems as they relate to tech, entrepreneurship, and VC. 

S. Tabibian: That’s awesome that you've had that dual experience. We have kids from San Francisco] like me, from international areas like Alyssa, and then also a lot of kids from NYC and Massachusetts. So this will be a great way to dive deeper into that. I believe you said you wanted to get to know some of our members?

W. Tsu: Yes!

[Members introduce themselves]

W. Tsu: That was so fun. A few things that I jotted down for myself is, one, how incredibly diverse this room is in terms of where you all are from. A lot of Massachusetts, got a little New York, got a little Georgia. We got some Utah, Saudi Arabia. Lots of incredible diversity, and I seem to have some pockets of areas of interest. Maybe we can think about what the role of AI has at the intersection of entrepreneurship? What does the role of law have at the intersection of entrepreneurship, as well as AI? What does investing in venture capital really mean? And what are the implications of AI in the world of investing? So, hopefully, we can touch on a bit of that. It's helpful for me because it helps me kind of orient how I may be able to be of service to you all in answering some of the questions. But, alright, let's do it.  

S. Tabibian: The first thing we were very interested about is what attracted you to New York City after living in Silicon Valley for all of your life, and what makes it different from the traditional Silicon Valley startup and investing ecosystem?  

W. Tsu: That’s a really great question. First and foremost, Silicon Valley and New York are the two best places, I think, to live in The United States. Think about where they are geographically. If you were to remove the industry of tech, and if you were to remove all the amazing industries that are in New York, they are two cities that are geographically located in the most desirable places to live. 

If I were to add another one, it'd probably be Los Angeles. So it's not surprising to me that when we look at the GDP that each of those three cities adds to the development of what is The United States economy, those three are the biggest hubs. It is because of the essence of the cities; they are cities that people actually want to live in. Now, when I analyze the difference between the Bay Area versus New York, tech is vibrant in both places. 

I was starting my career as a venture capitalist post Stanford Business School at 26 years old, so I was young for my business school class. After graduating, I joined this firm called AlleyCorp. It was founded by who's still known as the godfather of tech in New York, who I very deeply admire. His name is Kevin Ryan. I was 26 when I met him, and I was 26 when I started working with him. There, I really got to see how he built the ecosystem of tech as a founder and as a CEO. Building what was one of the first few companies to go public, actually, back in the early 2000s when the concept of the Internet was just coming alive. Now AI is coming alive. 

I have a quote that he would share with me that I always really appreciate about why he chose to be in New York.  Back in the early 2000s, when the Internet boom was happening in the Bay Area where I grew up. (I was probably 11 years old when the Internet was coming to life.) The quote he said was, “In New York, what you have is natural Darwinism; and what I mean by that is when you're in New York — only the best survive.” Think about it. The best restaurants survive. The best theaters, the best plays —they survive. What you have in New York is an ecosystem that supports this concept of being the best you can be, in whatever industry you are in. 

That's the reason why even though I spent my last fifteen years working in tech, investing in founders, starting my own company as well, raising around $7 million in venture funding, in New York versus the Bay Area was because I wanted to be in a space where many industries could coexist at the same time. That is a big difference between the Bay versus New York. You have this natural element of one, wanting to be the best we can be; and two, being the best we can be in all varying industries. That was very important to me because as much as I love The Bay Area – and we are certainly seeing a wonderful renaissance of technology in its purest form, where people are rallying the Bay Area to create. I see this when I fly back to board meetings. You hear in coffee shops people talking about AI. It’s a technology that really helps creators become true entrepreneurs.  

The piece that I find exhilarating across both is that they're vibrant cities. What you get in the Bay Area is an area focused on tech first. For those who really, really love tech, I think The Bay is a great place to be. But, if you appreciate diversity of thought a bit more, if you're building a landscape where the industry might not be tech first – I think of fashion and sustainability efforts that happen in New York – there is a richness that comes from being around people from around the world and a greater celebration of the different kinds of voices that can be heard.  

S. Tabibian: I really resonate with your point about San Francisco because as someone who has lived there for seventeen years, most people there are software engineers, and most people there are focused on developing software products. That can make for a very tech-first ecosystem, as you said. At the same time, you do lose a lot of diversity of thought, and it's just not as dimensional as you would get in New York City.

A. Schoonmaker: I can really understand. Even coming from an international perspective, I see New York as the Big Apple. It's where everything happens. Whereas Silicon Valley is the pride and joy of California.

W. Tsu: You know what's beautiful, though? I imagine a lot of you are thinking about where to go to school, and certainly location plays a factor into that. You know what? The beautiful thing is that most companies now are so bicoastal. The ability to design your year where you can spend some time in New York, some time in Los Angeles, some time in The Bay. Atlanta also has a really great media ecosystem for those who are interested in media and the intersection of that and AI, for example. What's beautiful now is that I think that founders are also waking up and realizing that with AI, you can create a global workforce now; and certainly, a much more spread-out ecosystem for where people can work.  

A. Schoonmaker: Wow! That is so interesting, thank you so much. Our next question is, what was your involvement in AlleyCorp 2 years ago? How did you split your time between the incubation studio and general investment?  

W. Tsu: My time at AlleyCorp when I was an investor was a really special period. A little bit about me: my parents immigrated here from Taiwan in the 1980s. I really had no connections into the world of venture capital. I actually had zero connections to the world of tech, software tech at least. So, my time at UC Berkeley and then my time at Stanford Business School was just my way of getting to know myself. I was just curious about understanding how founders work, and what is the psychology of a founder.

If you think about starting a company, it is incredibly irrational. When you've observed the founder's journey, it's actually irrational to say to yourself, “Oh yeah, I want to be a founder.” You know? Because it’s a really hard journey.

What was cool about my time at Ally Corp is as much of it now being a firm that is an incredible venture capital firm, we also found companies from scratch. The companies that the firm has founded include Business Insider, and MongoDB went public a few years ago (and many, many other companies). When I think about my time there as an investor, I really think of myself as a founder coach. Because as an investor, your job is to be that partner in crime to a founder in their journey, when the idea for whatever they have in their head is created. We all have ideas that are embryonic and very sensitive. They could literally die at any point in time.

My time was probably mostly spent helping build the firm. Back when I joined, no one was there. It was just the founder of the fund, Kevin, our incredible chief of staff, but that was it. I remember when he was about to present the offer, there was no actual physical offer on paper.  

It was a handshake. In that handshake, he said, “Now we should go draft your actual offer letter.” I remember downloading that on Google after that, my actual offer letter, and then coming up with the title, coming up with the salary, etcetera. So, during that six-year run that was AlleyCorp, it was just the three of us in the beginning, and then it became the partnership of around eight or so partners, which is quite large when we think about the growth of a VC firm. We would go on to launch a search fund that would help companies place their top executives within the healthcare perspective.  

That's really, I think, honestly, my reflection of AlleyCorp. Yes, I invested. Yes, at my peak, I was probably on the board of 10 or so companies (my favorite company being a company called Meetup). Yes, we also founded some companies along the way; some have died, some have really survived and thrived. But I think my greatest time, though, was helping build the fund, and helping bring together some incredible people who are still there and are, frankly, for lack of better phrase, just crushing it.  

S. Tabibian: Wow. That's absolutely incredible. One thing we really want to emphasize through WIF is that finance can be very entrepreneurial. You were just there when it was a team of two, and you grew it into this team of eight. That journey, though, as you said, isn't completely rational, and you can encounter a lot of painful experiences.  But there’s also a kind of joy that you don't get from going into a large corporation. When you build something that's your own, you have agency over that. 

I also really enjoyed listening to some of your podcast episodes. If any of you are interested, there are some great podcast episodes by Wendy. Go on to Spotify or Apple Podcast. In one of them, you explain four factors for evaluating a startup idea: annoying pain points, old incumbent processes, ignored customer segments, and fundamental shifts. Could you please elaborate on each one?

W. Tsu: When I was reminded of that question, it is so fun to be able to see how thought has changed over a period of time. I must have done that specific podcast you were talking about three or four years ago, pre-AI. But a lot of it is still largely the same. 

These are the four elements that we often talked about as investors, in which we would, in some ways, score companies (for lack of a better phrase) as we're getting to learn about them. It’s certainly, to some extent, the framework that I was using with what the concept of Branch Care, as a fertility company, could become.  

So again, one, you have got to make sure you're solving an annoying pain point. What I mean by that is when you are irrational enough to say that you want to be a founder, you have got to make sure that you are being incredibly purpose-driven and incredibly service-driven. Because being a founder to be a founder, that's actually a very ego-led reason. The kind of energy that's going to sustain someone when they're going through the founder's journey, of which there are many beautiful highs — but also many, many, many, many lows —is a connection to knowing that you are serving humanity and serving society in a way where you're truly solving a pain. What is cool is that [the] pain could be anything.  

Right? So, one of the companies that AlleyCorp, in my time, had founded is a company called Zola. It's a wedding registry company. At that point in time, the pain that existed was people didn't really want to be physically going to Macy's and Bloomingdale's to ask for gifts in their wedding registry. Nothing existed that really made it cohesive for them to have a digital experience. All these couples are wasting so much time going to physical locations, and that's a pain point. You know you're onto a pain point when one of the best ways to solve your pain point is by calculating how much time someone is wasting and also how much money they are spending, when they really wish that they were spending less. Because at the end of the day, people are usually motivated by time. You have to make sure you’re solving something of value. If you're not adding value in some way, why would anyone ever actually want what you're building?

The second piece then is sometimes a way to figure out if you're adding value is if there is some sort of company that's solving the problem right now. That’s what we call the incumbent, and it's been a bit since they've innovated. Think about Facebook, for example. They've been around for, what, twenty years. They haven't really innovated that much to meet the pain that used to be felt back then — which is when I was in college, there was no way for people to really connect outside of email. So they solved that pain. They created this digital place for people to meet. But Facebook itself, when you actually look at the product, when was the last time any of you all logged on? I certainly haven't logged on in a bit. That is why we saw so much new innovation emerge. We saw the Instagrams of the world and the Snapchats of the world because they looked at the incumbent, which is Facebook. They said, okay, there is a pain to be solved, which is that people want human connection. But Facebook is not really innovating anymore. They are the incumbent now.  

Then that leads to this third area where we're thinking about company creation, which is — in some ways — the ignored consumer segment. I remember being one of the first users of Snapchat when it was first coming out. It was called Picaboo back then. I was at Berkeley, and then Evan was at Stanford. A lot of my class of people, who were at Berkeley, were playing around with the Snapchat product.  Who is the ignored consumer segment? In that case, it was college students because everyone on Facebook, they sort of age, they started getting older. Right? And so, they are aging out. So, you had this consumer segment, that was college students, that were being ignored. The piece that now I think about a lot is the fundamental shift. AI is absolutely that trend. Right? For Snapchat, the big shift was the phone. Facebook was built for desktop first/computer first. Then 2008 rolled around, and that's when the iPhone came out. That was the innovation that Snapchat latched onto. People did not want to be on their computers all the time. College kids aren't on the computers all the time. We wanted to be on our phones. 

That is really how the four ingredients kind of break out. That is how I tend to view things for companies that are a bit more exciting versus others.  

A. Schoonmaker: Your Facebook example is so helpful in explaining each section that makes a successful company. Similar to Sophia’s question about your podcast, in another episode you mentioned how being a CEO is an egoless job where you should have a team that almost makes you irrelevant. So you have been on both sides, evaluating founders and also being a founder yourself for Branch Care. How do you establish a strong founding team?

W. Tsu: That is a really fun question to think about! One of my favorite roles as an investor was being, in some ways, a recruiter. One of the hardest things to do when you're a founder is to assemble the team. Because why would they work for you when you're just getting started, when they could work somewhere else, where they get paid a lot more money, for example — where the product and the pain point you are solving for is so much more proven? 

When I think about the founding team, or what makes for a really good founding team (I love my cofounders at Branch Care, and it would not exist if not for the amazing cofounders that we have) at the end of the day in that initial team, they need to have what is the sense of deep commitment to the purpose of the business. They need to feel as if they are willing to suffer for almost five years. There's a principle — it is called the “five years.”  If you want to be a founder and you're asking yourself, “should I do this idea?”; what if you were to double the amount of time it would take to actually achieve success? What if you were to halve the amount of success that you could achieve? Would you still do it? We as humans tend to underestimate how long things take, and we also tend to overestimate the glamour of what could happen once we've achieved that success. That's why they call it the five year principle. 

 When you all go to college, ideas are going to be everywhere. You are going to meet so many interesting people. You might even have a friend of yours or roommate who says, “You guys should come join me in this company I want to create.” Or maybe you have an idea for a pain you want to solve; you want to convince your classmates to come join you.  Maybe that's already happening right now. They need to feel as connected to the mission of the business as you. They need to see the dream of what you hope to create, almost as if a movie scene is being played— that you are telling the world you want to create. They need to visualize that same movie scene as you. That is what it means to have vision.  

You know, I really struggled with, “What does vision mean?” People always start with, “Oh, a founder has to have vision.” Or they say that a person has to run through walls because they are so committed to the vision. But what does vision really mean? For me, what I’ve come to learn is that most founders don't really want to be founders. I didn't want to be a founder. As an investor, I saw the founder's journey.   I was like, “Do I really wanna do this? Seems kinda hard.” I think vision is the movie scene that you start to play in your head, as you dream what the future could look like; and the movie scene is so crisp, it's so clear that you feel compulsion. You feel compulsion to make it happen. When I was talking to my friend who’s a very famous movie director for Marvel, I remember asking her, “Why do you write the movies that you do? Why do you do it?” And she says, “Wendy, because sometimes I see the scene in my head, and I just have to write. I have to. It’s the compulsion to write that makes it so that that self-doubt goes away, that the worry of being cringey goes away.” 

Ultimately, I think that’s what makes a good founding team. They have to see this vision. It's your job as a founder to paint the vision, to paint the movie scene for what this idea could look like five years from now. But it's also their job to see the vision, and the picture, and the movie scene as clearly as you do and to walk hand-in-hand together, knowing that when you get into arguments, that's okay because you're both connected by this same movie scene you want to have happen. Hopefully, that's helpful. That's my very nonbusiness-y way to answer that question.  

A. Schoonmaker: Thank you so much, Wendy. That was so incredibly insightful. I've heard from a lot of founders, and they put it just like you. People will follow a good idea, first of all; and second of all, you need to treat your company as if it is yourself. Every criticism, everything about your company, it is a product of you.

S. Tabibian: I agree. I think it is also just the concept of obsession. When something is obsessive, discipline doesn't even matter anymore because you have to satisfy that compulsion to do what your brain wants you to do and what it's obsessed with.  

W. Tsu: You nailed it. Discipline. People talk about discipline all the time, right? But, I actually think that discipline is inherent in us. I think we all have discipline. It's just that some people exhibit it more than others because they merely are connected to some sort of ‘movie scene’ in their head that is compulsing them to be disciplined. You know? So, I really love what you said there, Sophia, in terms of how discipline exists so long as you feel the compulsion.  

S. Tabibian: I completely agree. I think it’s why manifestation works. Because you're always envisioning what will happen in your head. You become so obsessed and attached to that idea that the discipline flows naturally to work towards it, and then it happens. 

This is kind of shifting a bit, but are there any market trends that you're particularly excited about in the future? One thing I really liked that you said in one of your podcast episodes is you should be able to bet your 401k on the market that you're working on. So, what does that mean and what markets excite you?  

W. Tsu: Well, that’s a question that my former boss, the founder of AlleyCorp, would say to us: “What are some trends that you'd be willing to bet your life savings on? That you're willing to believe are going to foundationally change the way we operate for at least ten years?” So in hindsight, one could argue that Google was that awesome trend that happened. One could argue that the movement towards everything that is AI is absolutely that. I think we can all walk away saying that it absolutely is. 

What trends excite me? Honestly, I'm frankly more excited to hear what excites you all. So, you know, at some point, maybe we can pass around the baton to hear what excites you. Overall, I get very excited more by the essence that AI is able to create. I think it'd be so fun to be a founder right now. Just starting your business right now in the Zoom. You want to know why? Because back when I was creating the company Branch, this was six months before all the models came out. You needed to have an engineering team to make anything happen.  

The truth is, I think you still do need a really great engineering team. But now, you can vibe code the beginnings of an idea in your head into reality. You can start to see if that idea has legs enough, where you can feel a sustaining level of compulsion — that could endure you for five years if one wanted to be a founder and create a business. Whereas back in the day, it's just a few years ago pre-AI. It's not even that back in the day.  

And the truth is, I think you still do need a really great engineering team. But now you can vibe code the beginnings of an idea in your head into reality. You can start to see if that idea has legs enough where you can feel a sustaining level of compulsion that you could endure for five years if you wanted to be a founder and create a business. Whereas back in the day — it's just a few years ago pre-AI, it's not even that back in the day — kind of harder to test. You really just have to take that leap of faith. So for me, the biggest trend I get excited about are all the tech stacks that founders and CEOs need to use to be able to ideate and brainstorm ideas into reality.

The companies that get me excited and the trends that get me excited are companies like Flora Fauna AI; you know, they just raised a $6,000,000 seed round. They're based here in Williams, Brooklyn. Mike Volpe, who was the guy behind a lot of the amazing social internet companies of the 2008 genre: he’s an investor. Heck, I just used them to create a children's book idea that I had in my head, and I've been sitting on it for the last five years because I never had the ability to go hire an illustrator. I literally created that book (with Flora Fauna AI) within an hour.  

Or Framer — I love what Framer's doing. The ability to make websites now has become very, very easy. They have already raised a Series E; they've been around for a bit. What it means to enable yourself to be a creator now, and create digital presence, I find very interesting. 

Another company that I wish I invested in is a company called Stan Store. You guys have probably seen them on Instagram. They're partnered with Gary V, big time, entrepreneurial influencer. They're partnered with Steven who runs Dowery, the CEO of the biggest podcast right now in business. What they do is they just make it easy for any creator to create their own online business presence, or all in one hub for any content creator.  

So I find that whole trend of the technology that helps you and me become entrepreneurs, which could very well be a content creator, exciting. Isn't content creation like being an entrepreneur? I find that to be very interesting and very exciting, because what that means to me is there's going to be another big boom in entrepreneurship. That big boom in entrepreneurship is going to look a lot different perhaps than in the past, or it's going to be a lot easier for people to create brands. It's going to be a lot easier to create digital websites. It's going to be a lot easier to create companies with much less capital, which means maybe one doesn't need to raise that much venture funding or any venture funding at all anymore —that’s very exciting, incredibly exciting, to think about.  

A. Schoonmaker: Wow, Wendy. I didn't even make that connection yet. I know that entrepreneurship has recently had a very low barrier to entry, or significantly lower than previous years —because of all the technology that you mentioned. But the fact that it could possibly negate the need for venture capital is mind blowing. That is honestly a little scary because I really like venture capital.

W. Tsu: What it means is that those who are venture capitalists now just have to be really good, right? And that's how it should be.

It means that VC is going to require investors who are really able to win founders over and know that they're able to support the founder end to end, because the founder will walk away knowing, maybe I don't need VC funding anymore. 

I was chatting with this guy; he’s now one year out of high school. He founded this company that's in the weight loss space as a sophomore in high school. He reached out to me because he built his company and is now producing $10 million in revenue.  This guy is not even going to college anymore because he's just going to keep creating companies. He completely self-coded this whole app not having been an engineer, and he used all these different AI tools that you guys are probably all using to create apps. All it really does is that you can take a picture of your food, and it auto generates the calories; it's a calorie tracking app.

So we apply this four-step framework.  What's the pain point it's solving for? It's solving for the annoyance that people have to [deal with] when they are manually entering in their calories. I ate a banana.  The ignored consumer pain point… I don’t know if there is really an ignored consumer pain point, but the incumbent? MyFitnessPal, that app is pretty bad. They have not innovated in a long time. The innovation that happened is AI’s ability to do visual recognition. He can take pictures of his food and upload them. He’s self-created this company because he himself was going on a weight loss journey. He was kind of like a chubby kid and wanted]to lose some weight.  He was using all these apps, and they weren’t helping him. That’s so cool when we think about the fact that he never had to raise venture funding. Not even 19-years-old and created this business that now employs 15 people and produces $10 million in revenue a year.  

I’m like, oh, why are you reaching out to me? I should be reaching out to you. I should be learning from you how you're how you're doing this.

A. Schoonmaker: That is so cool, being 19 and having a company with $10 million in revenue. People are getting more and more successful at younger ages — it’s the best. Pivoting to you, as a former investor, what led you to start Branch Care, and what specifically led you to make that jump from AlleyCorp to Branch Care?

W. Tsu: You know, it's funny. During my time investing, what I loved about my time was that I got to be an amplifier. I get to be the founder's biggest cheerleader. I was a Division I cheerleader at UC Berkeley; so it’s in my DNA to be a cheerleader. That’s what I loved about my time investing. But what was hard about my time investing is sometimes you have got to give tough feedback. So it's a delicate balance. There is a great quote, “greatest strength becomes your greatest kryptonite without self-awareness.”

It's a quote I think about a lot. For me, the founder's journey into Branch Care was that I had gone through my own fertility care journey. So, I was going through a round of egg freezing and also embryo freezing. This was right around COVID time. So I just saw how broken and how inaccessible it was to reach fertility doctors. There's only a thousand of them in the whole nation. Thinking about the same companies that I was investing in and the same trends that powered them, I thought to myself: gosh, there should really be a business model around this but for fertility care. Remember how you see that vision sometimes when you see the movie scene? I saw the movie scene.  For me, the movie scene was a way to create a care system so that patients could now go to their local doctor that's right next to them and have this fertility specialist virtually overseeing their care journey, so that patient actually doesn't have to travel. I edited six hours out of their day. So that was the visual that I was seeing. It was the movie scene that I saw. 

I really didn't want to start a company. I will say this, I've never really desired starting a company. But I have desired to solve hard problems. I desired to help people feel as if they could unlock their fullest potential. That is still my north star. If you were to ask me right now, “Wendy, what is your north star?” I would say, to help unlock everyone's intrinsic confidence. It's the kind of confidence that comes from just taking a leap. For my founder's journey, I saw the movie scene, and I felt the compulsion. I had to do this, and I had the confidence in myself to know that I could form an incredible founding team, which I absolutely did. I knew that I could bring on the first set of initial partners, doctors, to really believe in us — which I did. All the while knowing that at some point, the company will evolve [and have] the need for a different kind of leader at the home, because that is also the founder's journey. You have to evolve to what the needs are for the business but also know when the company needs a different kind of leader.

Going back to that question that I didn't answer, which is a CEO's job is to be egoless.  Now with some hindsight and some reflection, I would say that for a CEO's job, you need a little bit of ego because you need a little bit of a boost, right, to do things that feel a little scary. But you need to also see the danger of the ego when you do things for external reasons to look cool. When you do things for their better reasons, which are, again, a purpose to truly solve a pain and ideally a pain you have felt yourself, where you see that movie scene so clearly. That is what it means to be someone who leads with purpose first versus ego first.  

To summarize Branch Care, I didn’t desire it. It happened because I saw the movie scene because I had a lived experience where I could feel it. I had the confidence in myself that I could form a team — because I did it before. By the way, entrepreneurship doesn't just mean doing a company and creating a VC backed way. Entrepreneurship, if you look at it definitionally, it's just the conversion of an idea into action with sprinklings of distribution that are potentially monetizable. Creating a children's book is entrepreneurship if you place it in that definition. Doing what you guys are doing, creating this alliance; that is also entrepreneurship. There is a confidence that comes naturally when you have just taken that leap of faith on yourself. Sometimes if you don't feel like you have the leap of faith, it probably means that the movie scene isn't strong enough yet. Once that movie scene is strong enough, just like Sophia, you were saying, if you feel the compulsion, you don't need to actually be disciplined. It just kind of comes. Taking a leap of faith, just naturally comes when you can see the movie scene for a pain point to be solved so clearly — that you feel as if you have to jump in. That’s what I felt when I was starting Branch.

S. Tabibian: I love that you highlighted that, it’s kind of what Alyssa and I felt when we started Women in Business and Finance. I hope it's something that every single person in this room will feel at some point. That also reminds me of how you were distinguishing between a vision and a mission, and what that means. So, when you were working on Branch Care, what was your vision, and then what is your mission? How has that changed over time to meet your ultimate vision?  

W. Tsu: The vision statement is that movie scene. The movie scene that you think of when you're seeing for whatever you're creating five years, ten years from now. The mission, that is the quest that has to happen in the now-now. For example, in Branch Care’s case, when I was first concepting the business, the vision was to create a world where equitable fertility care was accessible in every ZIP code. The mission, which is how we are going to solve that now, in this next year — to create a care system that connects a patient's local doctor to their fertility surgeon. That's the difference. I put purpose in there, right, my purpose is to unlock human potential, of which branch care was a vessel to achieve that.  Family creation is one of the big ways in which people self-actualize, in which people feel as if they can unlock a better version of themselves — by becoming a mother, by becoming a father. So that's why I always say my life's purpose is to unlock human potential and ideally through entrepreneurship.  

In Branch’s case, the vision is accessible fertility care for all zip codes. The mission is the now-now connection between patients of the doctor and the specialist. Vision and mission can change. Obviously, they can change because the market is constantly changing. Just like the movie scene can obviously change all the time. But that gooey gooeyness, that purpose that makes it so that we feel that compulsion, that I don't think that changes too much. I think that's pretty constant. It just takes time for people, I think, to find it. 

There's a stat that came out of Harvard Business School, which is that 4% of people in life ever truly feel a true connection to their work. 4%, that’s actually pretty low. Sometimes when I see people say oh, that person isn't disciplined or that person is lazy. I don't think it's inherent in them. I personally think it's because they just haven't found purpose yet. Because if they did — they would be unstoppable.

A. Schoonmaker: It’s so inspiring. Just hearing your voice and hearing you talk, I can see how much passion you have. Unlocking human potential, that is an extraordinary goal to have. That’s how you change the world.

W. Tsu: Oh yeah. I mean, the reason why I went to Stanford Business School (I only applied to that school, actually) was to change lives, change organizations and change the world. That single motto spoke to me. It creates a lot of pressure sometimes because you're like, man, I better create change in the world. But you know what's so cool? Just a single conversation can change the trajectory of someone else’s life. Just a single conversation, whether you intended to or not, can cause a ripple effect to everyone you meet and everyone you talk to.  

A. Schoonmaker: I think a really interesting thing you said is that some people haven't found their purpose. 96% of people don't feel connected to their work. How does one find purpose? How did you find yours?  

W. Tsu: I’ll tell you this, when you apply for Stanford Business School, their essay (and it's been their essay for forever), is “What matters to you most and why?” I went through a hundred different revisions of what that meant. I had one essay, what matters to me most and why is my dad, which is so true. He does matter to me. I had another version that said what matters to me most and why is to be an educator. But when I start to look at myself and ask, what are things that I really feel like I'm myself? What’s the world that I want to live in? I just wanted to live in a world where people felt intrinsically confident. The kind of confidence that comes from knowing that you took a leap of faith, from knowing that you did something scary when you weren't sure if it's going to work out. It's not the kind of confidence that comes from going to an elite school. It's not the kind of confidence that comes from having a really high GPA. It's not the kind of confidence that comes from how much money one makes.  

Those are all really important things. But that kind of confidence is fleeting. Your job is fleeting. What you do, that will change. The school you go to, that's only a four year gig before you are no longer there. So, to have then your sense of identity and confidence come from something that will naturally disappear — that's scary. To me, that felt scary. That is kind of scary.

I think for me, how I found purpose was through writing. It was writing about what matters to me most and why truly, it takes repetition; it takes time. It took me 100 times to think about that question. You know what I'll say, though? In the last ten years or twelve years since I answered that question, what matters most and why — it has not changed. It has entirely been the same. Now how I see that has manifested and what I do professionally; that changes.  But it is all connected to building intrinsic confidence. What is being an investor, but being a part of that founder's journey who is literally betting on themselves? That was one way I achieved my purpose. Being a founder, that's me betting on myself.

I get jealous sometimes when people find purpose so young. I have friends who felt that purpose when they were 13- years-old; some don't find it until they're 45 or 50. But I think that the way you're able to find it is you just have to allow yourself the time to think about that question. What matters to you most truly and why? And to really wrestle with, is that really why? Is that not why? I imagine that this question will be very important as you also think about which schools you want to apply to or how you want to best utilize your time in college. What kind of people do you want to surround yourself with? Are the five people that you're next to people who care about the same values as you? 

If you're lost on purpose, one exercise that I find very helpful is the VIA survey. It's free, and it's a part of Yale's happiness course. It is a 100-questionnaire thing and it's led by the professor of the happiness course at Yale. In that, she says that happiness or joy comes from knowing what your values are and doing things/work that is supportive of your values. So, for me, my values – love, curiosity, collaboration – those three are my biggies. It's true. This is why I love people. Makes sense why I've done the work that I've done. So the VIA survey, I highly recommend it.  

S. Tabibian: What you just said is one of the most important statements that I think every single Andover student needs to hear. Especially in this elite boarding school environment, you are so subject to getting molded by the people around you and falling into paths that you yourself don't really want; but you feel like you should want them. As privileged as we are to be in this environment, at the same time, we're so subject to falling into the traditional paths that people view as mainstream success. Hopefully with Wendy's words in mind we can all think about what our true intrinsic purpose is beyond all of these external influences.  

W. Tsu: You know what's cool? If you live with an authentic purpose, you just inherently become cool because you become confident. People want to be around confident people. But I'll let you know, there's a quote that I think about which is, “embarrassment is an underdeveloped emotion.” We have to be okay feeling embarrassed sometimes because most good things are on the opposite side of cringe: that’s a popular phrase that's been really powering me recently to embrace the cringe.  Another one that's very good is, “the best way to escape competition is just authenticity.” Your own authentic self might piss some people off. But who cares?  

The people who really like you, who like how you're different, they are going to gravitate towards you. That's Tyra Banks' great quote, “Being different is better than just being better because better is subjective. But being different, that's how you escape the noise.” I can only imagine the competition that you all feel.  

I went to a public school in Cupertino, but it was a very competitive school there too. I think what I learned very young is, Wendy, why am I trying to compete with others when I don't even care about what they're going after? I'm going to compete by doing what it is that I love. By way of that, I'm not even competing anymore because I literally created my own lane. If you're in your own lane, you're not competing. It's anyone but yourself. That's it.  

A. Schoonmaker: Wow. I feel so enlightened by this conversation right now. Thank you.  

W. Tsu: These are just my musings — my thoughts. 

S. Tabibian: I feel like I just need to take a pause to fully absorb what you said. But I know we're so short on time. To close off, is there anything else you'd like to share? 

W. Tsu: I want to say what an exciting journey you all are on. Many of you are probably in your senior year, maybe junior year. It can feel easy to have expectations placed on you. If anything, you're probably feeling the expectations a lot heavily on yourself, which I certainly have felt even professional; there’s always expectation. I'll leave you with my favorite quote of all. Because I read a lot of books and so I consume a lot of quotes, I have an ‘encyclopedic knowledge’ of quotes, but the one I will share is “your inner perception shapes your outer reality.” Whatever is going on in your head and how you view yourself and how you're viewing a situation that's happening, you can literally reframe that to be better so that it serves you. You are in the best school, I mean, I think in the world. Embrace the relations that you are about to have.

Be cognizant of how your mind is working. I'll leave you with one last visual. If you are having anxious thoughts, remember that your brain is a computer program. So for me, I like to think of my brain as a set of flashcards. And I have some flashcards that are awesome. That they'll say things like, Wendy, you got this. You can do this. I have got some flashcards like, Wendy, you suck. You need to delete it. Delete, delete. What I'll actually do is I just think I'm flicking away those bad cards so that my set of flashcards that's in my head that's rotating are good cards. That’s what I mean by your inner perception shifts your outer reality. So I wish someone told me earlier that your thoughts in your head are like the email inbox and you just got to flick away some of the bad ones.