“What you do intentionally is as important as what happens unintentionally.” - Sophia Amoruso

Checkout this week's new episode of the #NoLimitsPodcast featuring the Founder and CEO of Girlboss, Sophia Amoruso:

Welcome welcome. This week we are doing a special No Limits crossover episode and this week it’s Girlboss radio. You’re about to hear from Sophia Amoruso - she’s the Founder and CEO of Girlboss. And not only does Sophia have a fantastic podcast of her own, Girlboss radio, which I highly recommend she interviews me in this week’s episode by the way. She’s also the definition of a trailblazer. Since publishing her memoir Girlboss 4 years ago, that hashtag has been used more than 10 million times. And in my opinion even more importantly than the hashtag, she’s helped ignite and continue an honest conversation around leadership - what it really takes to build a business, the real ups and downs of having your own company. And in this episode we met up with Sophia at her offices in LA we talked about everything from her childhood in Sacramento… It was a little Lady Bird like, to how she turned an eBay store into a multi-million dollar company, what she learned from watching her life story or some version of it becoming a Netflix series, what happened when her business went bankrupt, and what it really means to come out even stronger on the other side. Here’s the story of Girlboss and Sophia Amoruso:

R: Sophia Amoruso. Welcome to No Limits!

S: Thank you for having me.

R: Thank you for having us here at your headquarters in LA.

S: Yes, Silver Lake.

R: This is the cool part of town.

S: People say it's like the Brooklyn of L.A. It's really far east so most people who work in like big offices in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica where all the tech companies are this is quite the hike. But we love it.

R: There is great breakfast burrito around the corner.

S: Yeah they have a really good overnight oats that’s pre-made and it's called “mush” and it's really good.

R: Are you a foodie?

S: I'm a foodie but I don't eat out that much. My grandma… Kind of my homebody-ness kind of usurps my foodie-ness when I travel I try to go. Like what's good in New York, what's good in San Francisco. I want to experience that.

R: Let me know when you're in New York we’ll go to some good places.

S: OK. I would love that.

R: So I look back on your history. And when you released the book Girlboss this was 2014.

S: Was four years ago.

R: This conversation was not happening back then.

S: It wasn't. You know it wasn't. There was Lean In and there was Girlboss and Girlboss was called Lean In for misfits. And I was like OK. If that's what you can compare to, that was a very successful book. Sheryl Sandberg is super impressive. But there was Lean In and there was Girlboss. And in some ways in the book world and I can't attribute this completely to Girlboss but it's opened up a category of business books for women who aren't that pedigreed. You know Ivy League-educated women, which I think is a really cool thing. That aside, it is a time for women. That wasn't happening in 2014.

R: Your story starts out - you had 10 retails jobs?

S: I don't know how many jobs I had. I had jobs to just pay my rent. They weren't I didn't understand what a career was. Nobody told me about a career. It seemed like something that was for squares. I mean, my first job was at Subway and then no one really showed me that vision and you're supposed to pick a lane, and go to college, and I just couldn't. I wanted to be a photographer. I mean that's really what I wanted to do. That's what I wanted my career to be. I really wanted to go to art school. I still want to go to art school. Learning full time is such a luxury. I would love to do that. I didn't want to go into student debt. You know, I don't even know if anyone would have given me. I mean I think my credit was just completely wrecked. I'm not sure how that works. Maybe they pardon you when it comes to.

R: Were you worried about money, when you say you didn’t want to go into student debt? Was it a part of your consciousness at that point?

S: Debt was always something that I was told is a really bad thing. I watched my parents go bankrupt and cut up their credit cards in front of me in a credit counselor's office. And I think that has always stuck with me. That being said, yes I have a mortgage and I did have a company that ended up with some debt. So it's something I have a little bit of experience in. But I guess I'm grateful that I'm not super sophisticated in debt and it's not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about or navigating.

R: You grew up in Sacramento.

S: I grew up in Sacramento. It's a lot like Lady Bird depicts.

R: Was that your relationship with your mom?

S: That wasn't the relationship. I mean that mom is pretty rough. My mom is really sweet. You know there's a Netflix series about my life and there's a mom on there who is my mom is super bummed that the woman that was depicting her role in my life had left the family when I was young, and was an alcoholic and all of these things that my mom is not.

R: What did you want to be when you were growing up?

S: I mean I wanted to be everything from a marine biologist at some point to… Oh man, I mean I wanted to go to Reed College and do like interdisciplinary studies and just figure it out. But I always learned in a really different way and I think navigating the college experience and you know picking a lane in terms of a career was something that was always really challenging to me because I am a really curious person and I shifted gears pretty quickly. I would be curious in one thing and you know kind of understand that, and then he'd be like this isn't for me and I'd move onto the next thing. But I mean I think starting in high school I wanted to be good at something I didn't just want to be good at something, I wanted to be good at something for my age.

R: Did you want to be the best in the thing?

S: I wanted to be… Whether it was like a musician or a guitarist or a photographer. There's only a certain period of time where you can be precocious and there's a certain age where you're no longer precocious, you can be really smart or brilliant or impressive but I wanted to be precocious and it ended up. I mean I can't say I was precocious at any point but I ended up being good at something for my age. But it was an eBay store. Who would’ve thought?

R: So you’re famously you found this Chanel jacket for $8 dollars? S: For $8 dollars.

R: Was it really $8 dollars?

S: It was really $8 dollars. And I found two and they were both $8 dollars. At The Salvation Army I used to sit. I mean I used to go in there with my Starbucks. What is it, Starbucks venti soy. No water, no foam, chai kind of thing. And I would I wasn't really.

R: Which cost you more than the jackets.

S: Probably more than the jackets, but I was subsisting on Starbucks and Boston Market. And would you know I was a scavenger. I would spend hours in there. And there was not a single piece of clothing that I left unturned. If it was the men's department or the little boys department, I would find a navy blazer with little gold buttons that I could call a shrunken fit woman's jacket that looked like Band of Outsiders or some hot brand at the time who's making you know three quarter length sleeves blazers for women. And yeah left no piece of vintage unturned. And I would wait for these women who worked at The Salvation Army it was a big Salvation Army out in Pleasant Hill, California an hour from San Francisco who not only did I look at everything that was on the racks in that store. I waited until they pushed out shopping carts full of the brand new, not new but the items that had just come in. And it was weird. They were on to what vintage was, but they would ask sixty dollars for a faux fur jacket because it looks like something that should be expensive but they like didn't identify yeah two Chanel jackets that when I was digging through they were grocery shopping carts they would bring the clothes out in and laid flat. And when they would go take a handful to hang up, I would walk over there and just kind of flip through and raid the cart and was like Chanel jacket flip flip. Another one? And didn't act too excited.

R: Yeah exactly.

S: I didn't want them to you know get onto it. You know I negotiated at The Salvation Army I was like this has a small stain. Can you give me 10% off? I'm getting this many things. Can you just give me a bulk rate negotiating in a thrift store. Wow.

R: Good negotiating tactics.

S: But that's where it started.

R: That reminds me I was with my grandma shopping in Naples, Florida many years ago now and she found a nightgown and it had a little hole in it and we walked up to pay for it and I said to the person at the counter can we get a discount and he said how big of a discount do you want I said 99% off and he said okay! So we got the nightgown for 13 cents and my grandparents from that point forward were like you need to talk to our roofer, you need to talk to the utility company because they thought I was going to negotiate for them.

S: Wow. I should have been asking. You don't get what you don't ask for.

R: I want to cover that idea by the way negotiating around salary. But I want to come back to you finding the Chanel jackets, you post them on eBay, this is the beginning of Nasty Gal.

S: This was Nasty Gal vintage. This was my eBay store. I posted the Chanel jacket and you know and made it clear it was a Chanel jacket and took photos that I thought were really beautiful of it. And put it up on eBay and a woman from London and a woman from Australia and a woman from New York all duked it out over the course of 10 days for it and eventually sold for over $1000. And oh my gosh I went to dry clean it because I wanted it to just be perfect for the woman who bought it. And I took it to the local dry cleaner. And I mean this is an 80s probably 80s Vintage Chanel jacket and the buttons are you know were made at that time, and they're Chanel buttons. They lost one of the buttons in the dry cleaner. I searched high and low in every machine under every machine. They completely lost one of the buttons. I was so upset and I had to tell the customer that one of the buttons had been lost because I really wanted to have it be pristine for her at the dry cleaner. That's the only thing that's wrong with it. And I had to call in Beverly Hills just seemed like this place that didn't really exist. It seemed like the wizard like the land of Oz or I don't know the never ending story whatever that land is just…This place that didn't really exist and now whatever I’ve been to Beverly Hills many times, there's a lot of therapists over there. But I called the Chanel store there and told them what had happened and they said send us a photo of the button. We have an archive and I had no no no they had me mail. I had to cut off another button and mail it to them for them to match it. So that was even scarier putting another one of those buttons in the mail when I mean $1050 minus $8 dollars was my profit on this thing and that was so much money to me at the time for one item and it worked out. They found another button, they sent it back to me in a beautiful kind of box with tissue paper and I got it sewn back on and the lady was very happy with her jacket.

R: It was meant to be.

S: It was meant to be.

R: How did you go from there to building out Nasty Gal? What was the timetable like between those first sales and then bridging Nasty Gal into something even bigger that went beyond the eBay store?

S: Yeah I mean everything that I've done in my career has been in a response to some signal that I'm on to something. And I wouldn't have pursued eBay had it not been clear that there was a demand for what I was doing, I was increasingly better curating these goods that people for some reason you know gravitated toward the brand I created with the very unsavory or even repellent name. But it was something, it was just me and it was something you couldn't forget. Nasty Gal Vintage everything else was you know lady in the dust. You know it was like hippy dippy vintage and I was like Nasty Gal!

R: When you came out with that name did you ask anyone else what they thought of it before you used it?

S: Honestly I'm not sure. I liked it. My boyfriend at the time liked it, it was the name of an album by a woman named Bette Davis that I really loved. And I feel like it spoke to the attitude of the brand. And I didn't think I was building a brand. All the things that you do to curate the clothing, choose the model, style the model, the model’s attitude, the way you describe the product, the graphic design, I learned Photoshop enough to make a tiny graphic that I coded with basic HTML into my eBay listing template. All of those things combined. I was also looking at the cues of other brands that were you know maybe Nylon magazine or these other very cool kind of up and coming publications or brands or you know a lot of Australian fashion was coming up at that time and you know I was I'm a millennial and I had been sold things and it was the very beginning of brands talking and acting like real people. And that's kind of a given now. That's something that we see even the biggest companies, Toyota Prius commercials there's a ukulele and we're all buddies. It wasn't like that. It was a big company coming down from the, you know mountain top and saying buy our stuff. And you know the brand had a very different voice one that met our audience halfway that spoke in her language, that was very conversational, disarming and you know that's my voice that's the voice of Girlboss. That's what's continued in the history of my career. But as far as going from an eBay store to a full blown business you know I didn't anticipate my eBay store becoming my career. Like how long is this going to last. And then it kept growing and my auctions became more and more and more in demand and eventually my average you know order value was $150 on something I probably spent no more than $20 to acquire. And I was like wow you know, this is growing I'm on to something I have a good quality of life. But I want to do something bigger. I don't want to rely on this platform. Ebay was a great place for me to learn how to sell online. They have this framework for you. And there's so many more of those tools now there's Squarespace and Shopify and Etsy and you know Stripe. None of these things existed. Building an e-commerce website back then was like what kind of a random you know e-commerce platform can I cobble together to make a website. And eBay was a place that had rules. It was a place where I was competing with other people, where my audience that I was bringing in from the MySpace audience that I had cultivated was com

ing to eBay and it was my traffic. But then at the bottom of my listing it was like more from other sellers and I was like why should I benefit all these other people I think. It's maybe a little bit too greedy but I was like I want to own my audience. I want my brand to be fully represented in the environment that it lives in. And so I decided to leave eBay and launch this web site and it just sold out right away. Whowhatwear.com covered it. Daily Candy covered it, and I didn't have a publicist, these editors were just customers of mine. And you know it blew up from there. So our first year of business just our, my year of business I think we did. I did. $70,000 in revenue which to me was like I don't even think I'd had like a I don't even know what it is, is it a W2. I don't think I made more than like 25 grand a year jumping from job to job and there's my business. And I didn't take a salary out of this. I didn't take. I mean I paid for my living expenses. I had no wants you know eventually saved up and bought a Nissan. But it was years on.

R: Do you still drive the Nissan?

S: I don't I drive a very different car now. It's like a private plane on wheels. It's like L.A.. You know it's just a bubble bopping around LA. I should probably drive a Tesla. Only when I wear this one, drive it into the ground. But I had no wants I was 23, 24 years old as all of this was happening I think it was on eBay for about a year and a half before I launched the website. And 70 grand, 250 grand. The next year 1.1 million, the next year we started buying non-vintage goods that we could buy inventory into: a small, medium, and a large. And that became a quote unquote pivot and it allowed us to quote unquote scale even though I didn't really know what those things meant. I just knew I didn't I could sell five things by taking one photo instead of one thing. And that seemed like a pretty good deal.

R: When did you start hiring?

S: My first employee was maybe a year and a half in. I had a part timer and then I hired a full time kind of assistant vintage, retail kind of. She shipped orders, responded to emails, did things like measure the clothing before we put it in the store, steamed clothing, did the things that were essential to building the audience. I kept doing social media, photography, styling, buying all the things that were super essential and she ended up staying with me for about gosh six or seven years. It was a Craigslist listing and she was the one person I interviewed.

R: That's such an important thing though. I mean deciding when to start hiring. It can really be the difference between success and failure. Who you hire obviously has a huge influence on that as well. How did you know though, what was the thing that said I need to hire now.

S: You know what I think when the demand is something you can't keep up with anymore. I worked 24 hours straight for a few weeks and you know almost I think I maybe had pneumonia at some point I just was really killing myself. And at the time, she had a job and she needed full time work. And I was like oh my gosh I don't know if I can afford that. And I paid her $16 an hour when I was paying myself I don't know $12 or something and I was like oh my gosh full time. This is a big commitment. I don't know if I can afford this. And as soon as I made that commitment you know I like to talk about Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail and he steps out onto the bridge that you can't really see and takes the leap of faith - that's when you're able to manifest great things and you're willing to kind of. It's not a lay-up. I don't know how you describe it, but you take those risks and sometimes it doesn't work out. But it's only if you take those risks then that bigger things can manifest as a result.

R: When did you decide to start bringing in venture financing?

S: Yes so we, I bootstrapped the business to almost $30 million dollars in revenue before investors started showing up. So we were profitable.

R: How many employees did you have when you were $30 million?

S: I don't know maybe 15, 20. I had some people shipping stuff I had a few customer care people, one person processing inventory that was inbound. I did have an early COO but I didn't pay him a ton. We had an HR manager, we had one person doing like marketing stuff, one graphic designer. I think we did actually have a controller and a planner but there weren't any proper merchants yet or buyers who understood retail math that was just all gut. I had oh man. You know I moved to L.A. after a year and a half of you know at that time I moved to L.A. with 12 people and then we kept our warehouse fulfillment center functions up in the Bay Area until we eventually moved it to LA, and then moved it to Kentucky. But venture capitalists came knocking when they somehow caught wind of this thing called Nasty Gal and I didn't need them to invest. We were fine but they seemed like really smart people. And I did a lot of research. I bought a book called ‘How to be smarter than your venture capitalist,’ and I'm not sure if I’ll ever. I mean I guess I'm smart but there's a lot to learn about venture capital even now as I'm raising money and it seemed like a good deal to sell a small percentage of the company for $40 million dollars. You know I still owned most of the company, I controlled the board. The risk was pretty low. But what happened after that as a very kind of fabled long story to tell.

R: What are some of the highlights of that fabled long story?

S: Raise $40 million dollars, shock to the system, company has no infrastructure. Try to grow by $100 million dollars in a year.

R: That was what the venture capitalists wanted you to grow by.

S: Yeah we tried to go from 28 to 128. We hired 100 people. They had very little guidance. They all showed up at the same time it was like the Tower of Babel. We raised it a $350 dollar valuation that that was our first money in, in 2012. And when we tried to raise money after that e-commerce, we were kind of e-commerce 1.5: we were One Kings Lane, Fab.com, BeachMint, these companies that none of them survived. One Kings Lane did but it wasn't a great time. Once all of that happened, it was it was a lot more challenging to raise venture capital for an e-commerce business. And then we began having conversations with private equity guys. And then we weren't profitable once all of that had happened and it just became this really challenging environment to navigate to continue funding the business. And I had this very complicated culture that I hadn't grown intentionally I didn't know what culture was, I never worked in an office, you know it exploded and I was very young and I didn't really know how to hold the company accountable. And a lot of things happened most of which I'll probably never know.

R: That's an interesting thing. When you say that what do you mean by that. Like things were happening outside of you and conversations were happening that you weren’t aware of?

S: Absolutely. You know there's executives that I hired that had way more visibility into the business, a lot more experience than I did. You know my conversations with them were limited to my understanding in the learning curve.

R: So you were the founder and they were the people talking to your venture capitalists and getting marching orders and setting the tone for the business.

S: I fully delegated putting board decks together, the finances of the company I didn't understand the finances of the company, and people expect that a founder or CEO, I guess I was both of those things, knows everything that's happening in a company. They look at you and they say of course you know this, of course you know these things are happening you know under the hood - and that's not the case. There's no way for any executive in any company to have a full grip on what's happening. The best thing you can do is create an environment where there's transparency in what's happening and people are given guidelines for what they should be doing. And you hire people that are really autonomous and understand what the goals of the company are. But I don't think I understood any of that. At 24, 25 years old when I had an eBay store that exploded.

R: How were you feeling? As all of this was happening did you have an awareness that things were trending in a negative direction?

S: Eventually yeah I mean we tried to go from 28 to $128 million dollars in revenue. And when that didn't happen I mean we didn't base that plan in any history, we had no history to base these kinds of predictions on. And I really didn't understand what signing a 500,000 square foot lease meant which we did in Kentucky and thought we’d just grow super quickly into it and everything would just keep you know hockey sticking in terms of growth. And that's just not always how it works and yeah, the board meetings started to become more challenging but I don't think I don't know if we were challenged as much as we could have been and I honestly didn't know how to respond to a lot of the challenges that came up.

R: Was there a feeling that this baby that you had created was being torn away from you or?

S: I felt there were times where I felt like a lamb led to slaughter, like I can't escape this I can't quit I can't be fired I’m being held accountable for things I don't understand. I didn't intend but now I'm being criticized for and held accountable for. You know it's like what you do intentionally is as important as what happens unintentionally and sometimes you don't really know what the effect of those things are going to be and you learn through experience. When you're winning, it seems like you're responsible for all of that, you can take credit for it. Wow you're really smart you're such a great businessperson because things are all looking good. And then you realize that's not always the case. You can create a lot of value, you can build a great business, you can get really far in your career, and then have your ass handed to you and just realize that was a good time. But there were things lurking that I didn't know and now those are being exposed to me and what do I do with it.

R: When the company ultimately files for bankruptcy what was your mentality at that point?

S: I mean I probably shouldn't say this but after 10 years of hard work, I like to say my entire youth but 22 to 32 the only thing I had done in my adult life. The thing that the last two, almost three years of my career I felt completely trapped in, unable to make change - positive change within, had been through many a PR crisis. Layoffs, reports of toxic culture, all the things that I never could have anticipated. I was taking advice from HR experts and employment attorneys and all these people who said look this is what you should be doing. And in retrospect there’s a lot of things that I wouldn't have done the same. But I was held accountable regardless. By the time we filed, I was ready to build Girlboss. It had been three years since the book came out. We filed on the day Trump was elected, and it became really clear that this was an even more important time for women. And the book I had written three years prior was something that was a conversation that I needed to carry on - our audience had carried it on for us when we founded Girlboss a year ago. There was three million uses of hashtag #girlboss on Instagram and now there’s over ten and a half. And so the conversation has been growing, and it feels amazing to start over and not be burdened by the legacy of the decisions that I didn't even make.

R: You mention there are some things you would do differently. Is there one thing if you could go back and do it differently you would do?

S: There's a million things I would have done differently. I wouldn't have fired people without telling them they weren't performing. I did. I did a lot of that.

R: Because of employment attorneys told you don’t tell them that they’re not performing?

S: Nope. Because I was impatient and I was told very early in my career ‘hire slow fire fast.’ And in retrospect I could have been a much more proactive manager, I could have been more a more proactive leader, I could have been someone who helped coach people to get there but because I didn't know how to get there because I had never had that job or a job for that matter. I wasn't really capable of that. And by the time someone who wasn't performing or was toxic to the culture was because I didn't know how to coach them in that regard... By the time I came like realized that it was so wrong or damaging the company that this person was still in the company. I felt like I had to just make a decision really quickly because that damage became exponential with every day that that person remained at the company and there's so many things that I could have done proactively to avoid a lot of the things that happened that I didn't know any better not to do.

R: Was there a retrospective that you sort of put yourself through and said look backwards, evaluate, and think about how the next thing is going to be built differently?

S: I think I internalized all of the advice I got along the way but didn't know how to implement. You know you don't make change in your life when someone says stop biting your nails or you should stop picking your face which I'm trying to figuring out or I'm not figuring out how to do.

R: Well why would you ever give that up? (jokingly)

S: I know it's such a blast. But you stop biting your nails when you're ready stop biting your nails, you start exercising when you’re ready to start exercising, you stop ordering Pad Thai Postmates when you're ready to stop ordering Pad Thai Postmates which I'm not ready to do.

R: There have been three Pad Thai references in the span of a very short period here.

S: I know I'm a really sophisticated lady.

R: I’m a big Pad Thai fan myself.

S: I'm just giving myself like flack for doing it. But it was a, it wasn't a low moment I just really deserved it because I,

R: You like Pad Thai.

S: I don't like it that much. I just ate it yesterday and it was somehow the highlight of my weekend. But I, I listened to all the advice but it didn't land. I wasn't at the time in my life where it was ready to land. And this new company you know it didn't it wasn't. Yes there's been a lot of thinking and talking about what I want to do differently in this company but I didn't stop. You know I got up. We filed. November 8th or whatever the date was and we held our first conference with 500 women and 50 speakers in March of 2017. We did our second in November of 2017. We just had our third here in LA.

R: And it was you and Gwyneth Paltrow taking the lead.

S: We did that.

R: Pretty cool!

S: It was cool she's become a bit of like a buddy. I don't even know how we were initially connected. And she's a great entrepreneur, she's a really smart woman. I think there's a few people in the public eye who came out of entertainment who have been as close to their businesses as she has. She really knows her stuff. And so it's a pleasure to interview her and building I mean goop has been around for 10, 10 years now since she started that newsletter. And there's also not a lot of women entrepreneurs at least who have raised venture capital who've been in that long. And I think that's a really interesting thing because again it's easy to celebrate when you're like killing it, but it takes that long to really experience like the highs and lows of building a business. I don't really take breaks between things to lick my wounds, or reflect or you know, you strike while the iron is hot. There's windows of opportunity that exist in your career and a lot of it comes out with the wash. You expect to just sit around and kind of like you know meditate on a mountain and figure out what went wrong and that's not really how it works, you figure out what went wrong by applying what went wrong into doing it right.

R: What’s the toughest lesson you’ve had to learn along the way?

S: I think just holding people accountable. And that's not doesn't mean like hand holding or you know lording over them it just means like people look people need structure and they want guidance. And I used to think that was like insulting to tell people how they can improve or what they needed to do because I'm very I'm very hard on myself and I find those things for myself and I'm not someone who's good at building structure. I'm not a process person. I can create enough structure for myself to get my job done or at least what I perceive that job to be at a given time. And so I don't necessarily relate to that in the same regard. And so it's been hard for me to intuit and understand and develop the muscle that allows me to give people freedom to run but also make sure that the things that we said a month ago were going to happen or actually happening. It doesn't matter how senior someone is, everybody looks for that. And I used to I hired a bunch of C-level executives and I was like you've been in a career longer than I've been alive. You're going to write your job description every day when you show up and of course you're going to hold yourself accountable because you know way more than I do and that was a really naive thing to do.

R: You seem to really know yourself. Was that always the case? Or have you figured it out along the way through introspection?

S: I'm an only child. And so things that would be natural for someone else, I have to evaluate and be like. Is this normal. Was I weird because you know it's just you don't have that mirror when you're a kid in the same way then you know than someone who has siblings does. And I also had a very critical father and I think he instilled a voice in me that is very critical and I've turned into a positive voice but one where I'm constantly peeling back another layer of the onion so to speak. And I'm just constantly asking advice to the point of it being annoying. I am constantly asking people if I'm a good person. Did I send that e-mail was that well constructed. How are they going to feel about that. I care a lot about how I'm perceived. And you could say and I care a lot about my relationships. You could say that's a really great noble thing but it's also really selfish and narcissistic and in that I want to feel good about myself. I don't have the energy to have tension in my life. I don't have the energy to lie to people, I don't. It's just it's much easier to live that way and I work really hard to feel like a good person at the end of the day.

R: You mentioned looking for advice all the time. What's the worst advice you received?

S: I guess it's probably hire slow, fire fast.

R: Really. How do you fire somebody?

S: Oh gosh. Well not the way I used to. I haven't.

R: How would you fire me if you were firing me right now? If I walked in the room.

S: God I've asked people this question. It really sucks to be put on the spot with this. I mean in the past it would have it would have been… I probably would have waited for them to quit and it would have been so uncomfortable. You know people self-select out. Hopefully they do it before it becomes really uncomfortable. How would I fire you. Oh my gosh. Well you'd be a huge asset to our team so I probably wouldn't fire you. I mean today I'd say, Rebecca we've had a lot of conversations about your work here and as we've discussed you know this may not be a fit and you may have benefited a certain point but the company has changed and I don't know. I don't know! I don't even want to think there's no one here.

R: There’s going to be a massive buy out. I'm going to sue you, just kidding!

S: I've been through it and it tortured me and I regret a lot of those decisions. So that's, I’ve internalized that a lot. I feel like a bad person because of some of the things that happened that I just thought was what I was told to do. Sit there and not say, have any humanity and just keep it. Not say I'm sorry. Just super clinical really brief. Let them process it. Just be what the traditional HR manager would tell you to do. And that's I don't know it's like putting someone in a lab and it's just weird. It's just it's sterile and clinical and inhuman and all the things that you don't want someone's experience on the job to be. I mean I messed up a lot of things doing that. Hiring slow is good but firing fast probably isn't. If you aren't and Patty McCord as I mentioned was on a recent episode of Girlboss radio and it was just like it was so enlightening. And if you're firing someone with no without having given them any indication that they were not performing, that's when you get sued. It's when someone's dignity is removed and they aren't being told over a period of time this. This isn't working, let's see over the course of a certain period of time and you're updating them. And it's just a really awful thing to do to not give somebody that kind of visibility into why they may lose their job so that they can grow from it. And I think I misinterpreted what that advice meant and maybe it does mean fast but maybe not quite as fast as I took it.

R: How old were you when you got that advice?

S: 22. First advice. It was some of the first advice I ever got.

R: And it was from a venture capitalist or?

S: It was from someone who I really actually do respect and who was really helpful to the company.

R: So I ask this question at the end of the interview and I find a lot of the time the worst advice it’s not coming from someone who’s trying to harm you, it’s coming from someone who’s trying to help you.

S: Absolutely.

R: Thank you so much for joining us on No Limits! For anyone who's listening right now you should absolutely check out Sofia’s Girlboss radio podcast.

S: Thank you.

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