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The journey of the small business owner is often a lonely one. For many people, particularly first time entrepreneurs, starting a small business can be overwhelming. But today, with the tools that are available, there has never been a better time to start a business. Having said that, most new small businesses don’t make it to five years. What we need is a better support system for small business owners.
My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Carolyn Rodz, the CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Alice. She has thought deeply about the multifaceted challenges facing small business owners and has built a business around it. They now have a community of 1.5 million small businesses they support in a number of different ways.
In this podcast you will learn:
- The frustration that led to the founding of Hello Alice.
- How they help small businesses improve the health of their business.
- What the 1.5 million small businesses they work with have in common.
- How their business credit cards, loans and grants programs work.
- Details of their enterprise partnerships and how that is helping business owners.
- What data goes in to determine their proprietary business health score.
- The primary concerns for small business owners today.
- How Hello Alice makes money.
- How they are riding the small business creation wave.
- What more we could be doing as a country to encourage small businesses.
- Why they decided to name their company Hello Alice.
- Her vision for Hello Alice.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 489 – CAROLYN RODZ
Peter Renton 00:01
Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One podcast. This is Peter Renton, Chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus. I’ve been doing this show since 2013, which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.
Peter Renton 00:27
Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Carolyn Rodz. She is the CEO and co-founder of Hello Alice. Hello Alice, super interesting company doing important work in the small business space. They have basically built a resource center and community, they have 1.5 million small businesses in their community. They obviously provide a range of different things, credit card, business credit cards, loans, they talk about different partnerships with some of the large banks and tech companies. They also work with small businesses to get grants, which is not something that I’ve seen many fintech companies do. They’ve also developed a business health score, which helps small business owners keep track of the financial health of their business, which is really interesting. We talk about their recent series A and how the growth in small business creation has helped fuel Hello Alice’s growth, and much more. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show.
Peter Renton 01:39
Welcome to the podcast, Carolyn.
Carolyn Rodz 01:41
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Peter Renton 01:43
My pleasure. So let’s kick it off by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. Why don’t you hit on some of the highlights of your career to date?
Carolyn Rodz 01:53
Sure. Well, I am a child of an entrepreneur, a grandchild of entrepreneurs. And so I think entrepreneurship was always in my blood. I started my career off as an investment banker at JP Morgan. And after leaving the corporate world, launched my own company. And I’ve had two companies prior to Hello Alice, my first company was a failed venture. I think probably the one that I learned the most from. My second business I sold after about seven years. And it was really the mix of both of those experiences that led me to launch Hello Alice, recognizing that the same entrepreneur with different access to resources, to capital, to networks, to opportunities, can have vastly different experiences. And it’s really become my life’s mission to help connect every entrepreneur with the right resource at the right time to help them grow the healthiest business that they can.
Peter Renton 02:55
So what was the, do you have an aha moment where you kind of realize you needed to start this business? I mean, tell us the sort of the founding story of Hello Alice.
Carolyn Rodz 03:06
Yeah, you know, it’s funny because I had no intention of it even becoming a business. When I sold my second company, I just had my first child, I had absolutely no intention, I was really kind of taking a break, mentoring other businesses. And because I had sold the company, all these opportunities started opening up to me, people were inviting me to come speak at conferences, I was getting invited into networks, this world of business opportunities opened up to me. And frankly, I found it quite frustrating because I thought they were all such great resources that I wish I had had when I was actually running a company. Here I was, focused on my child and my family in this phase of life. And so I started connecting other business owners into these resources. I said, you know, this is a great conference, this person should go be on this panel. This is a great network, you should invite this person in. And I made it my mission to connect as many other, at the time really focusing on female business owners, into these opportunities that they might not have known about. And in doing that, I realized this is a bigger, a bigger issue. I started really digging into the statistics around capital that was going to different pockets of entrepreneurs around the country. I realized there was so much happening in New York, and in Silicon Valley at the time in terms of the startup world. And what a disconnect it felt like. Even as a business owner in Houston, which is the fourth largest city in the country, it still felt like there was this lack of connectivity to these great startup resources. And so I decided to launch a small business accelerator, and the goal was to make it 100% virtual so that it didn’t matter where you lived, where you were. It sounds very normal in today’s age, but at the time, there were no virtual accelerators. There was Y Combinator and a handful of others in New York. And there was such interest that we had people from around the world, like we had an electric bike company in Mongolia, we had a, you know, a breast milk bank in Oregon. I mean, these companies that were so interesting and so unique, but incredible entrepreneurs that were doing really amazing things, that we were able to bring investment to, we help them raise over $300 million in capital. And at that time, I was having discussions with my now co-founder who was working for the United Nations Foundation. And she was looking at a macro level, at a global level, what a huge opportunity there was with small business backing. I was really looking at a micro level. What a difference this connectivity could make to every single business owner who has access to them. And when we had the we, were in a series of conferences together, have a series of discussions around it, and decided to launch a technology platform that would help really understand who a business owner was, make sure they had the right resource that they needed, whether that was the right capital, the right network, the right program, or opportunity. It helped to make those connections in a much more automated and streamlined way, versus the historical word of mouth path that had been going on to date.
Peter Renton 06:16
So what is your does your company actually do today? Take us through that.
Carolyn Rodz 06:21
We are a data driven company that is essentially making smart matches. So we help business owners, at our core, we’re helping them improve the health of their business. They come in, they take an assessment around the health of their business, with the information that we’re learning, we’re saying, here’s how you need to improve your health, here are the actions that you need to take. But every step of that business health improvement journey, we’re saying, Hey, here’s what, here’s a loan that you’re qualified for now. You know what, you’re ready for this program that you can apply for. Here’s a network that you should be tapping into, here’s an event that you might want to consider. Understanding the insights and information around that business owner, that are ultimately going to help them grow. We’re using, you know, the data across now 1.5 million small business owners to say, here’s what works for businesses like yours, whether that means you know, the industry that you’re operating in, the city or state within which you operate, the stage of growth that you’re at, the number of employees that you have, really understanding all these data points. Here’s what companies like you that are growing, are doing. And here’s how you can learn from each other. And here’s what to avoid, here’s a red flag that you might want to be aware of.
Peter Renton 07:35
Interesting. So then you got 1.5 million small businesses, that’s a huge number. I’m curious about is there anything in common with these businesses? What, like, who are they? And is it just across the board? Or are they have anything in common?
Carolyn Rodz 07:52
Yeah, so the great thing about small businesses, as unique as everyone’s journey is, there are no two small business journeys that are identical. We’re also all the same. Across the board, everybody’s top concerns are customer acquisition, access to capital, talent management and acquisition. But primarily we find is, business owners not surprisingly, want to put more money in their pockets. A lot of them think they need to go acquire capital to do that. And so access to capital is consistently the number one barrier that they cite. Typically, when we dig into it, it’s not necessarily that they’re even ready to access the capital markets, what they really need is a healthier foundation for their business, they need to drive the revenues, they need to solidify their core business model, they need to get some initial traction. And so a lot of what we focus on with them is helping them get enough traction and enough proof points, that they can then go successfully tap into the capital markets.
Peter Renton 08:53
Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. So then, I was looking at your website, and you’ve got a number of different offerings and obviously I understand the business credit cards, that’s ‘s an important piece, loans we’ve touched on already, but you also talk about grants. And it’s not something that I think anyone’s really focusing on, tell us a little bit about, about what you’re doing there.
Carolyn Rodz 09:15
So when we looked at the capital continuum for small businesses, there were a lot of gaps. Again, you know, I said that across the board for all these businesses, access to capital is their number one pain point. As we wanted to help them get through points, you know you think about two businesses, right? One starts with $5,000. And one starts with $100,000. You could see how the business with $100,000 is able to attract good talent, they’re able to get some proof points, they’re able to deploy marketing dollars. So naturally, that business is going to grow. The company has $5,000 has very little capital deploy, very little to invest, and they’re scraping by, trying to make things work. What happens is that gap continues to widen between that company starting with 5000 and the company starting with 100,000. Where that company with 100,000 was able to access the capital markets, are able to get a credit card, they have better credit because they’ve been able to make their payments. What we wanted to focus on is how do we help these businesses that are starting with nothing? Which the reality is, the fastest growing segments of entrepreneurs tend to be businesses starting with very little capital, meaning women, people of color, veterans, people with disabilities, these are really rapidly growing entrepreneurial groups. And so we wanted to fill in those gaps. We started with a grants program that we launched back in 2020. The pandemic certainly changed how we employ that grants program, and what that looked like. But there was a ton of interest from the corporate sector in terms of wanting to deploy capital efficiently, but also wanting to track how was that capital being implemented? How was it actually helping companies? What did it mean for companies that have received that capital? And we saw a real marked improvement in the health of those businesses that have received even $5,000 of capital is making a massive amount of difference. On average, we see the sweet spot being around $10,000, for an early stage business, to be able to build enough of a foundation that they can go either access the credit card, potentially get a small business loan, it was enough to start to kind of bring them over some of those really early stage hurdles. Our credit card was a really similar strategy. So there’s a lot of small business credit cards out there, the world doesn’t need another one. What the world did need was, what happens for all those people that don’t qualify for a credit card? It’s typically the first working capital that a small business has, many of us take it for granted that you apply for a card, you get a card. The reality is over 50% of small businesses were financially unhealthy, meaning their credit score often doesn’t qualify them to get a credit card. And so what we found was that historically, their secured cards, where they were asked, they apply for a card, they said, You know what, you don’t qualify for a traditional credit card, and you can get a secured card. So you have to pay money, you have to go deposit $500. For someone with very little money in their bank account, $500 can be a significant amount. So we started utilizing grants through our equitable access program to help de-risk that card deposit for the bank, but also open up access to capital where a business owner could get the credit card, could actually use that credit card as a credit building tool, and then start to improve their path on that capital continuum. And then on the loan side, I’ll say similarly, with loans, with a lot of loans out there, a lot of them are are not necessarily fair market loans, they can be quite quite predatory in terms of the rates and what they’re offering, because business owners are highly in need. We’ve built a loan marketplace that only includes fair market loans, it has over 92 lenders. And so we’re really looking at how do we help businesses get over these very, very early stage hurdles, so that they’re able to build a stronger foundation and sustainably grow.
Peter Renton 12:58
Right, right. I’m also curious about the the enterprise partnerships that you have. I mean you’ve got some logos on your website, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest tech companies. I mean, what’s that about?
Carolyn Rodz 13:11
When we started Hello Alice, one of the things that was so important to me was recognizing that business owners are scrappy. They’re patching together every dollar they can. And so to think about a business model that we were going to ask companies to pay for access to things, didn’t make sense. And so we really flipped the script and said, Okay, if business owners grow, who benefits? Government benefits, because there’s more tax revenue coming into these communities have healthier, healthier communities, the general public benefits, there are more jobs generated, communities are stronger, corporations are going to benefit because they are able to have a bigger customer base, many of these companies are selling into small businesses, ultimately, that’s a huge piece of their of their customer base. Albeit one that’s highly fragmented and very expensive to acquire. So we said if we can support these businesses, and we can help them grow, and we can help build trust with these businesses, and bring them really good products when they need them most, what a benefit for enterprise. And so what we work with a lot of corporations is, on multiple sides, there’s the impact side, many of these companies are running incredible programs to support small business. Oftentimes, many these corporations are running hundreds of programs internally, to support communities to support small business in various capacities. So we make sure we’re connecting those programs really efficiently into business owners that they’re relevant to. The other side is a pure transactional side. They have products and services they want to sell. They want to make sure they’re getting in front. If somebody’s thinking about hiring an employee, it makes sense that they know about what payroll services are available. And that we’re bringing the best discounts, and the best pricing, and the best offers around those payroll services. If they need to, you know, they’re working on an emergency preparedness plan, thinking about their insurance and thinking about various products that are relevant to them. So we make sure that we’re surfacing those in a way that’s meaningful, that’s value added, that’s helping the business owner, because that’s always most important for us, but also in a way that supporting corporations.
Peter Renton 15:09
Interesting. Okay. Okay, so then I’m curious about business health, it’s sort of front and center on your website. You talk about becoming more, what’s the words you use? I think financially fit, you know, and you say get financially fit for free. Tell us a little bit about what you do there, you’ve created like a business health score. So what is that? How do you calculate it?
Carolyn Rodz 15:35
So we looked at all of the things that business owners are being measured on in the market, right? What are banks actually looking at when they’re getting a loan? What do they want to see with your company? What are corporations when they’re looking to give out a contract? Or the government? What are they actually looking for with your company? What are those metrics that help them determine you’re a dependable company, you’re good, you know, we have a good risk profile, you’re a healthy business that’s gonna be sustainable, that’s going to last into the future. You know, same thing that companies are looking for when they’re giving out awards, they’re going, what are all the benefits and perks that happen to our business owner? And and how are those being measured? And how are those being distributed? That’s really the foundation of our business health score. It primarily centers around things like financial management, financial performance, you know, the growth profile of the business, practices and behaviors that those businesses undertake. So are they do they have a budget? Do they review that budget? Do they have, you know, standard operating procedures in place? Do they have talent management programs? So we’re looking at various things around the health of the business. And as they engage with Hello Alice, what we’re doing is understanding where are they strong, and where are they weak? Where they’re strong, we want to reward them and bring them great opportunities, where they’re weak, we want to help them up level and improve. And so they’re put in various programs to help them improve the health of their business. And then as they improve, are rewarded with opportunities that arise. And those might be getting them in front of investors, it might be getting them in front of procurement officers, it might be helping them get media attention, all kinds of different things that are surfacing for them as they improve.
Peter Renton 17:19
So then, is this like a personal credit score where you’re actually taking external data in about the business? Or is this really more focused on how they’re interacting with Hello Alice?
Carolyn Rodz 17:32
So a lot of is how they’re interacting with Hello Alice. We find a lot of it’s largely owner reported data, not 100%, we do integrate with financial data, particularly when we’re looking at that some of these credit opportunities and things that might make sense for them. It’s largely own reported, what we find is that our owners are incredibly honest in terms of the data that they give us. The reality is, if they put bad information in, it’s bad information out, they’re getting things that are not relevant to them, they’re getting (garbled) that don’t make sense that they can’t actually engage with, if they put in information that’s relevant and accurate data, they’re getting very accurate input and growth opportunities. So we work a lot, I’d say one of the core tenets of our business is building trust with the small business community. If we lose that trust, we fail as a business. And so the number one thing we have to do is make sure that we’re always adding value to them, we’re always helping them grow, and that we’re genuinely authentically committed to the improvement of their business health fundamentals.
Peter Renton 18:38
Okay, so said you’ve got a pretty interesting window here with 1.5 million small businesses as part of your ecosystem here. You know, what’s top of mind when you’re hearing from your small businesses in your community? What are they concerned about today?
Carolyn Rodz 18:54
Inflation is a huge concern for them. Over 50% of businesses cite inflation as their number one concern, it’s getting really expensive to run a business. There are a lot of technology enablement, has opened up thanks to the pandemic. The reality is a lot of that technology enablement, comes with subscription fees, comes with additional service fees that are cutting into their margins as well. Talent is very expensive, it’s gotten more expensive for everybody to live, which means talent is increasing. It’s hard. I think that is the piece that we keep our eye on most closely because it’s a really complex problem. And it disproportionately impacts businesses that are led by women, by people of color, businesses in certain communities that don’t have as much access to capital. Capital is still flowing, but it’s flowing more selectively than ever. And so that’s an area that we’re really cognizant of. You know, I think the response to that always I think it’s a two pronged approach and where we’ve always seen the ecosystem is, look, we have to meet halfway. The reality is we can’t put everything on small businesses and say you just have to figure it out, you have to improve, you have to deliver more. On the flip side, we can’t put everything on the financial institutions that say you have to give credit to everybody, and give capital to everybody. They’re trying to run a business as well. And so it’s trying to find that middle ground of, okay, we see these gaps in the market, we see these businesses that are struggling. And it’s important to all of us that these companies stay in business, that these companies are sustainable. What does that mean, in terms of, you know, government policy that we’re helping through to make it easier to run a business, that we’re making more business friendly legislation? What does that mean for, you know, for community support? How are we working with foundations and philanthropy out of the ecosystem? How are we going? How are we working with these financial institutions to say, look, here’s what the data is telling us, because that’s how we are really, really collaborative with them. With organizations like Chase or MasterCard, or Wells Fargo, or some of these massive institutions. You think, here’s everything that we’ve learned, we have 1.5 million businesses, we have a lot of information about what they’re working on, what they’re struggling with, what actions they’re taking. Here’s what we see, and here’s where they’re hitting roadblocks. How can we work together to find a solution here? So it really is this like, public, private, sector collaboration, I think where we see the biggest changes being made. And at the end of the day, we all make more money. Hello Alice makes more money if these companies succeed, corporations make more money if these companies succeed, the small business owners certainly make more money if they succeed. And so in that we always start our conversation with we’re all aligned in helping them succeed. What are the barriers that we need to start to lift? We’re here to build the technology and to build the tools and to build the connectivity between that, and to provide more of the insights. But it takes a village to solve some of these massive inequities that exist.
Peter Renton 21:58
And so I don’t see any sort of, you know, Platinum plan where businesses have to pay. Is it through referrals? Or what what are the different revenue sources for Hello Alice?
Carolyn Rodz 22:07
Yes, our key revenue sources are ensuring that we are helping companies I mean, product services, capital opportunities that are relevant to small business owners, how are we helping to connect those in the business owners? So we charge on the provider side, meaning that we work with the banks, we work with the large corporations, we work with a lot of these products and service providers, making sure again, that we are helping to build brand equity for them with a small business community. And that we’re helping to service those offers to the right owners, at the right time. Interestingly, if you look at all the data, small business, one is the most trusted voice in America. It’s a very bipartisan group. But it’s also a very skeptical group. They’re very, very skeptical, because they’ve often been, you know, the sort of neglected market of alot of these companies. Everybody focuses on the big business, everybody wants to think about, you know, these larger kind of mid market and up companies. Small business and micro business has either been historically bucketed into the consumer world, or bucketed into the enterprise world. And they are neither. Reality is they’re typically two to 10 employees, really small and really scrappy businesses, and incredibly resource constrained. But have a lot of ambition, have a lot of talent, have a lot of opportunity. How do we actually start to help companies talk to them in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them? It’s different obviously, you know, the way you spend money for your business is different than the way you spend money for your company. And it’s different than the way a large corporation would spend money for their company. And so we help to bridge that gap.
Peter Renton 23:49
Gotcha. Yeah, we’ve seen a real surge in small business creation over the last, since I really think it was first year of the pandemic, we, I think the numbers started to really rise. And that’s obviously good for you guys, right, but are you sort of, are you riding that wave of the these higher business creation numbers?
Carolyn Rodz 24:11
We you know, yes, I think we’re really fortunate in that we have a very trusted name in the ecosystem. We have incredible partners, everyone from the NAACP to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to the NGLCC, really incredible partners out in the ecosystem that we support that in turn, are helping to share Hello Alice as a resource, because we’re free. We have 1.5 million business owners out there, spreading the word as well. They’re our greatest amplifier. We actually don’t do any paid ads. We’ve never believed in it. It’s not, but we get between 30 and 50,000 new small businesses on our platform a month. It’s still frankly a small piece of the amount of new businesses, there’s over 500,000 new companies starting every month in the United States alone, which is crazy. But it is, I think it’s like a generational shift too, right, the way we want to work. I think the pandemic I always think the pandemic is, it’s like a line in the sand in terms of we all change the way that we thought about life over the over those years. And the way that we’re seeing younger generations, the way they want to work, the flexibility that they want, that ownership over their own future is more and more gravitating towards a very kind of freelance, entrepreneurial lifestyle.
Peter Renton 25:31
Right, right. Okay, I want to switch gears and ask about your recent fundraise. You recently announced a series C, and you’ve got some really major A list names on your cap table. Tell us a little bit about that process.
Carolyn Rodz 25:46
Well I’ll say fundraising is always hard. When I hear companies say that it’s easy, I don’t ever think it’s easy. It’s certainly not in this environment. But we are really fortunate to have incredible partners with MasterCard, QED Capital, who led our round, one of the top fintech funds out there, I think, not only investors who have great resources to deploy, but also incredible sector knowledge. And a great commitment to our mission, I think that’s the most exciting part for me is that there’s a lot of decisions that we can make that might improve the bottom line. But I’m a big believer that if we’re going to, if we’re going to grow, and we’re going to grow, optimize our growth over the long haul, that trust is so critical. And so anything that degrades the trust, it might help in the short term, but it’s not gonna help in the long term. We’re really fortunate to have investors that are aligned with that. And the goal of this capital raise was really around looking at how do we better utilize the data? How do we better utilize artificial intelligence to start to build that path in a much more personalized way for small business owners? There’s so much information out there, I think there’s data overload, the hard part is one, having the engagement of the business owner, there’s a lot of data lakes that sit out there, there are very few data lakes that have connectivity to a small business owner. And so our goal is to help get their buy-in, and their opt-in to have them want to utilize the data. To have them want to benefit from the data, and to see the value of sharing their data. Because none of them have to. How do we help them do that? How do we help them understand the benefit? And then how do we use technology to say, based on everything we know about you, based on everything we know about 1.5 million business owners out there, this is the best next step for you. This is where you’re succeeding, this is where you’re struggling, here are the steps we think will help you, here are the resources to help you achieve them, and accomplish them. And then it becomes our job to just really be a bridge across the ecosystem where we bring the best experts, the best knowledge, the best discounts and opportunities to people, and the best and most trusted sources of capital out there.
Peter Renton 28:15
You mentioned before that, you know, there’s not many things that are bipartisan today it seems, but small businesses is one that seems like both Democrats and Republicans are very much supportive of the small businesses. So I’d like to kind of ask a kind of policy question. What do you think we should be doing as a country to encourage, you know, we’re obviously a very entrepreneurial society, obviously, there’s a lot of small business creation. What more could we be doing as a country to encourage small businesses?
Carolyn Rodz 28:47
Yeah, hmm. So many things. I think the biggest struggle that we see is in that early stage, and so it’s very multifaceted. There’s so many different areas. One is making it easy to employ a team, I think there are states that do a great job at it. There are states that make it a lot harder. We are a virtual team. So we work across I think at our peak, we’re in like 27 states or something where we had employees, and you could see the difference of what that meant. We talk to business owners that are running companies in some areas, and it’s you know, there are a lot of doors open for them. And in other areas, it’s a little bit harder. So I think there’s certainly policy around employment law and startup costs. From a grant perspective, the government has some great programs around highly innovative companies that are going to help push the country forward. We have you know, the SBIR grants and a lot of grants given out by the National Science Foundation and others, I think, starting to think about how do we take that same mentality around community development. There’s so much funding towards solving the problems in a community. If you have healthy businesses, and you have entrepreneurs who are growing and strong, I think there’s nothing better you can do for a community. It helps support everything in that community, and there’s such a trickle down effect. The other I mean, and then indirectly, and I think it’s thinking about things like early childhood education is really important because it frees up parents to be able to work, to be able to have the funding to deploy towards business events. We see a lot of entrepreneurs starting, typically, you know, there are a lot of parents that either one or the other parent takes a break from work when they have a child. They have that time and a lot of them end up launching businesses. We see these like inflection points of when entrepreneurs kick off businesses. We see another huge inflection point when the kids tend to go to school. If we can bump that time earlier, it opens up more hours in the day for entrepreneurial ventures. And then capital access. I think just the more that we can start to think about loosening some of the regulation around the capital markets, I think it’ll help tremendously. Yeah, I mean, it’s ultimately I think it’s how to keep more cash in the hands and control of business owners. There’s a lot of tax incentives and things. I think the more of that that we could do, the better. Knowing that that money is getting reinvested into the economy into the community.
Peter Renton 31:29
Couple of last things before we go, I’ve got to ask you, what’s with your name? Hello Alice, it’s not an obvious name for what you guys are doing.
Carolyn Rodz 31:37
I thought you’re talking about my personal name, and I was like, I guess there’s a hodgepodge too, I’ve got a whole story around it. Hello Alice, when Elizabeth and I started the company, we were actually, I packed up my kids and went up to San Francisco, we had a grant from from Dell to build Hello Alice at Pivotal Labs, which they owned at the time, one of the best software development houses in the world. I always laugh because it was a team of me and one engineer, I had the Department of Defense on one side of me at Pivotal, and Ernst and Young on the other side of me. And then we were this, you know, idea in my head that we were trying to build. Dell was really, really generous on helping us and getting us a grant to start to build there. But it was in San Francisco. So I had my two kids who were two and four at the time, I moved in with my co-founder, Elizabeth, who lived out in the North Bay, we commuted two hours to the city every day. And so we would nanny share, and we were like juggling the kids at work and trying to solve it all. We were reading Alice in Wonderland to the kids, kind of collectively, it’s like, okay, you read a chapter and I’ll read a chapter the next night. And the story just really resonated with the entrepreneurial experience. It was, you know, you’re going down these rabbit holes, you’re getting a lot, you’re in this like, world of the unknown, everything’s unexpected, crazy things are happening all around you. And you’re looking for that guidance and that direction, and sort of the security and everything that you need, but also forging your own path, right, you’re building this adventure. It’s something that’s really exciting, but also scary. And so I think it was that mix of emotions that we’re like, Oh, there’s really something here. Our first version happened to be back in the day of chatbots, which feels oddly quite full circle now, because it seems like we’re moving back to that horrible to love technology. It was more of a chatbot interface. And so we wanted a name. And Alice, we started off we were just Alice, but Alice dot-com was taken. So we got the domain Hello Alice dot-com. And everyone’s sort of calling us Hello Alice and we’re like alright, we’re no longer Alice. Let’s just be Hello Alice, our own investors are calling us Hello Alice, or clients are calling us. Hello Alice. And so we officially kind of rebranded as Hello Alice.
Peter Renton 33:54
Interesting. Very interesting background there. So, okay, last question then. What is your vision of Hello Alice?
Carolyn Rodz 34:01
Oh, this is where I get so excited. I think about the power of every entrepreneur essentially having the best mentor, advisor, and investor in their pocket always, and having 24/7 access to that. And the idea that little by little that entrepreneur is uncovering more information about their goals, and their objectives, and their journey and what they’re doing, and the type of person that they are, and the type of business they’re trying to grow, that that information can be protected, and can be utilized by the best experts in the world, and aggregating insights from this global community, if not entrepreneurs, what power is that? You essentially are given every opportunity to build the best company that you can. And I think that’s something that’s been historically reserved for a select few, and to be able to open up that access and kind of build that level playing field where it really does depend on who has the best idea, and who’s working every resource to the best of their ability, those are the companies that are going to come out on top. Not the haves versus the have nots.
Peter Renton 35:17
Okay, well, we’ll have to leave it there. It’s an exciting vision and something that I think is very important. As a small business owner my entire career, I completely support what you guys are doing there. So thanks for coming on the show today, Carolyn.
Carolyn Rodz 35:30
Thank you so much. It’s always something I love, love talking about.
Peter Renton 35:35
Well I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.