Champion Story 07 | Tami Zuckerman
Recorded on December 4, 2018
Biography: Tami Zuckerman is the Founder and President of The Little Campus, a private Early Education & Daycare Centre that offers premium, high-end childcare services. It is a personalized daycare with highly trained educators and a teaching approach that puts your child’s health and well-being first.
Prior to founding The Little Campus, Tami was the Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer of VarageSale, a virtual garage sale app that lets users buy and sell items in their communities. Tami spent her time helping new communities launch, leading her ever-growing team and coming up with new product ideas to improve user experience. Before that, she was a Kindergarten and Elementary educator at Lester B. Pearson school in Montreal and a representative for the Educational Technology & Digital Citizenship Program.
Tami grew up in Montreal and graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor of Education. She currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.
I am excited to be doing this interview with you, especially after we shared a mental health panel together [at Canadian Innovation Exchange]. What’s your story as a founder?
Alright. I'll start at the very beginning. I want to say it was six and a half, almost seven years ago.
I was a teacher. I taught Kindergarten. I taught all elementary school, but I had my permanent position in Kindergarten and I was on maternity leave. I was bored and I'm not the kind of person that can sit still.
I started selling stuff, making room for the baby. I started on Kijiji and Craigslist. That quickly became very creepy and scary, and I almost got scammed.
I turned to Carl, my husband. He is a serial entrepreneur and a very technical person who can build apps and websites. I said, "Can you build something for our little community here in Montreal?" I lived in Montreal then. "I just want to build something different for people to feel comfortable selling and buying gently used items. It's almost like social media, think Facebook meets Craigslist. I want an app that is not anonymous, where you can see who you're dealing with. I want to build a strong community."
We lived in the west end of Montreal. He said that he's busy and he didn't really want to do it. I kept pushing him and eventually he agreed. I essentially built VarageSale for me to solve my own problem of having to use creepy Craigslist.
I would have these exchanges at doorsteps, I would meet other moms or moms to be, and I was a mom to be. I learned that it wasn’t only about the item I was buying or selling, it was about the meaningful conversations that would take place. There was often talk about loneliness. You know, "Oh, it's so nice to meet you. It's a lonely world out there when you have your baby. It can be pretty isolating."
The item seemed to be the ice breaker to open conversations with complete strangers, coming from the same “village.” That's when I started to notice some momentum in what we were doing.
It wasn't just about the item, it was about the relationships forming with fellow moms.
Fast forward six months later, we had our baby. Upon going back and looking at this community we built, it had grown from 200 members to 2,000 members. Today, in that same community, there are 25,000 members. And there are hundreds of other communities like it on the VarageSale platform. In fact, we’ve got millions of users viewing billions of items, daily.
After that first Montreal community, we started opening up new ones. VarageSale became an empire platform for local communities where moms would exchange their household items. Eventually, it became a marketplace, like a Craigslist (but not) that was no longer anonymous or creepy.
VarageSale became a very popular app. Retention was incredible. 50% of our users would come back to the app at least six times per day. When we went out to raise money, investors were super interested in that retention. I remember one of our investors, Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures said, "We haven't seen retention like this since Snapchat."
Sequoia led our series A, Lightspeed our B, we ended up raising over 50 million dollars to grow VarageSale.
For a Canadian startup, it was all pretty flashy and amazing. We became this overnight, famous startup, but inside I was experiencing some major imposter syndrome, saying to myself: "What am I doing? Who am I to be doing this? I’m a teacher, not a tech founder!" That dialogue played over and over again in my head, on repeat.
All the articles. We were in the National Post, Inc. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, a bunch of newspapers, on the news, instant spotlight, what pressure!
Moving forward, we’d soon step off cloud nine. Soon after raising 50 million, about a year later, the climate in Silicon Valley changed. It was 2014, the year the stock market had crashed and everybody was closing up their wallets. Our Sequoia partner came to us and said, "Listen, I know that you guys will need to raise money in the next year, but it’s not gonna happen. This is not going to recover soon enough. You will need to extend the runway- lay off staff, so that you have money for the next two or three years."
We cared so much for our people, it was incredibly hard to do. The good news was that we had such talent on the team, that it was easy to help them all find new jobs- we spent time making sure of it.
Everybody was super appreciative of that.
To our surprise, the impact wasn't from the people who left. The team morale suffered and culture completely changed. People started not to trust us and wondered, "Why were we actually doing these layoffs?"
They didn't trust our reasoning, they didn’t understand it.
It was interesting because our partners at Sequoia and Lightspeed were very shocked at the reaction. In Silicon Valley, this is very common. It’s cut throat, they put how much runway they have up on the wall and make whatever moves necessary for the startup to survive. Here in Toronto, it was different. People saw us as their career. They had families to support. Scrappy startups aren’t as much of a thing.
The startup mentality is different in California than it was here, from what we witnessed.
Fast forward to a year after that. Things really started to shift. We made some adjustments on the team, we rehired for some of the attrition, and we started to come out of that lull.
The problem is, there's always going to be the next problem, the next hurdle. The first hurdle was morale and then culture change. But we grew stronger and actually had and still have the strongest culture. VarageSale folks still meet up for a reunion post acquisition. Most people show up. It's crazy. There's still such a bond with the VarageSale team.
Next hurdle: a bunch of competition entered the space. VarageSale wasn't alone anymore.
Maybe you've heard of OfferUp or Letgo. Then finally, Facebook Marketplace came into play. First, Facebook buy and sell features appeared in groups. When we started VarageSale, there was none of that. When many players came into the space, we decided to shift our focus geographically. We were mostly in the States, but we made a goal to take over the Canadian space and have a good Canadian business.
We looked at companies like Auto Trader, for example. Craigslist has the auto market in the States, but Auto Trader has it in Canada, and it's a multi-billion dollar company. Thus, we shifted focus and our Canadian numbers started to really go up quickly. We didn't shut down our American groups or anything, but we just made sure that all of our marketing spend and all of our work was going to be done for Canada. That was a really good move for us.
When competitors come into the space, it’s one of the hardest things for founders. All of a sudden, your idea has been copied. Then people go out and raise money and they raise more money than you. Letgo had raised something like $300 million, and then OfferUp raised something similar to that, followed by Letgo raising another round of 900 million.
How do you even compete with that?
Tami, thank you for being real about this, and the struggles you faced as a founder and your business.
I am curious to ask then: How did you deal with this? It sounds like a lot of pressure. I know that as founders, we are dealing with change all the time.
It's funny because nobody tells you about these struggles. You really do feel alone in them. You feel like you'll never come out of it. You feel like you’ll fail.
Every time something terrible happens, like somebody raising $300 million and getting ahead of you, it feels like the end. I can't tell you how many “ends” I had through my six years at VarageSale.
And then, it's not the end. No company makes it to the top without going through all of these peaks and valleys. If I could have told myself in those six years what I know now, it's this: “These things are not the end of the world, and you need to get through them logically and come up with a new plan.”
Founders are so hard on themselves. The competition will always be out there, the struggles are always there, and we just need to recognize that this is normal. This is normal. And feeling this way is normal.
Yeah. There are other ways we can lead, and it is important to come to healthy terms with the companies we create. Appreciate the advice you shared.
Yeah. That's exactly it. The overwhelming reality of creating a company is that it's going to be hard, like really painful and hard, but that’s normal.
That kind segues into, “What can you do about it?” That's where I like to talk about Founder City, a group of folks just like me, struggling, winning, struggling again. Sharing my honest story with this group of people (we call forum) that I fully trust, helps. With them, I could let the tears flow with no judgment. You can share your darkest moments and biggest fears.
With Forum, it's not about, "Well maybe you should try this" or "Maybe you should try that." It's all about, "I remember when..." We share experiences. When I heard all of their experiences, I didn't feel so traumatized. It was like, "Oh my gosh. I'm not alone in this."
Having an award winning startup that turns heads, is hard on the inside. Everything looks so glamorous and everybody looks so well put together. And all of these talks, panels and fireside chats- people get up there and they have such profound things to say. But nobody's talking about the struggles and how it's normal to be freaking out. So you don't think it should be that way. Founder City normalized things for me.
The other thing that really helped me was my coach. I went through a couple of coaches that just didn't do it for me. You know you have the wrong coach when you're kind of dreading that hour because you don't have time for it. You really have to find the right person.
For me, I found this one great woman. She was out of Silicon Valley, and she was more than a coach. She was a mentor and one of my biggest fans. We became friends. There was this bond that we had, woman to woman. She would share her experiences, which would make me feel like I could share mine. Then she would share her learnings through her experiences.
She made me realize why I was part of the success of the company. She helped with my imposter syndrome. She helped when I felt like everything was crashing down. She would bring me back to reality. She had been there before and I trusted her.
How do you balance family with the company?
That was really hard for me because my parents were going through a divorce, while I was selling the company and miscarrying a baby. It came to this weird crashing end.
I've spoken to a lot of people who have guilt about their family. They don't see their parents like they used to. Their mothers are like, "You don't call anymore."
But it is really hard when you're running a multi million dollar company, with investor’s money, expectations, and deadlines. Then you talk to your friends, who are in different careers and they're talking about things that don't seem relevant to you.
It can feel like they didn't get it. That's where the loneliness comes in. Your friends and your family, who you used to have so much more in common with, just don't get it.
Your life has changed, you've changed. It's a hard adjustment on both sides.
Another struggle I'll quickly talk about is Mom Guilt. Mom Guilt is a real thing. It's at the core of your being. From the day you conceive, you worry that you’ll miscarry. Then finally, you have the baby and you worry about things like SIDS: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Then, your baby hits two years old and you want to make sure that they don't choke and so you're cutting up the grapes in a million tiny pieces. But you also have this huge multi-million dollar company, and you're traveling to a different timezone every few weeks.
You're trying to be this professional woman, but on the inside, you feel like you need to be a mom and you're not there for your child. Then, I'm hiring nannies… The mom guilt was a real thing for me.
I can't remember who said it to me, someone brought up the whole forgiveness thing. They told me, "You need to forgive yourself for not being the perfect mother. Your son is gonna look up at you one day and say, 'I can't believe what you did.'”
The love is there. You have unconditional love for your child. It's the number one most important thing. They're not gonna remember all the travel that you did in those early years. And you know, if you're still traveling and you have older kids, they will look at that and say, “That’s my ambitious mom. And then she comes home and she makes the time she has with you count.”
It's all okay. You don't need to be there for every single thing all of the time.
With social media, it’s a world of photo sharing, proof that you’re a good mom. You need to be at every event, and share it. You need to make lunches in these Bento boxes and make sure that you have the perfect balanced meal. You need to breastfeed, bottles are poison. There's all these expectations, all these things you need to do. How do you breastfeed when you're in Silicon Valley, you know? And the pressure that other moms will put on you is intense.
You just need to put it all aside and be confident that you love your child unconditionally and that you’re doing enough.
That's the number one thing. You just do the best that you can for your child, and you do the best that you can for your company and your family.
It goes back to that same thing, where you just need to forgive yourself for not being the perfect everything, that the world tells you you should be.
Thank you so much for sharing. This conversation touched me.
I so appreciate you being open about your journey as a founder and also as a parent. Grateful that you're a part of this movement.
You're welcome.