“The biggest thing that we learned is that 78% of them were struggling to share those stories with their consumers, the biggest reason being a fear of feeling inauthentic.”
“What do I mean by the organic model? I mean that the influencers we're engaging for these brands are not paid.”
Ashland Stansbury, age 23, is building a new category with her startup, Because Intelligence. Belief Marketing helps brands create genuine connections with their customers. She’s funded by Launchpad and BOSS Syndicate.
Highlights include:
Sal Daher’s Intro
Correction: Enterprises Manage to Capture 5% of the Value They Create Not 2% as Stated
What Because Intelligence, Ashland’s Startup, Does
Common Misconception that Only Expensive Products Are Environmentally Conscious
The Founding Story of Because Intelligence
“So, we took this approach of going out and talking to as many of our customers as possible. We got on the phone with over 50 different enterprise consumer brands.”
“The biggest thing that we learned is that 78% of them were struggling to share those stories with their consumers, the biggest reason being a fear of feeling inauthentic.”
“…I knew I was really good at was convincing other people to follow my mission.”
“…if we can prove that giving back is actually good for business, that it actually impacts the bottom line, then we can financially motivate corporations to get involved in our key social and environmental issues.”
How Ashland Stansbury Won Over Investors Skeptical That Her Startup Could Be Profitable
“…we have all these metrics around how consumers are buying, and essentially proving the facts and figures behind this mission.”
Sal Daher Talks About One of His Favorite Portfolio Companies: SQZ Biotech
If You Are an Accredited Investor Do Check Out Sal’s Syndicate at AngelInvestBoston.com
Go to Market Strategy for Because Intelligence
“What do I mean by the organic model? I mean that the influencers we're engaging for these brands are not paid.”
“Our long-term vision is to eventually become the social platform for talking about causes and beliefs.”
Where Ashland Expects the Company to Be in Five Years
Ashland Stansbury’s Father Is a Repeat Founder Who Inspired Her to Be a Founder
Ashland Stansbury’s House Painting Company Started When She was a Freshman at Babson
Entrepreneur of the Year
Crazy Story from Her House Painting Company Days
Pros & Cons of Early Entrepreneurship
“…and I went off and did this crazy path of not taking a salary, living off of ramen noodles.”
“I'm that annoying person at the gym that's always on the phone.”
Sharing Your Wisdom: Getting Funded by Launchpad & The BOSS Syndicate
“…we have really been trying to bring on investors who bring tremendous advice and network and value to the table on top of just capital.”
“Last summer, I spent the entire summer building up my founder network.”
“…when you go in to get advice from an entrepreneur, they will open up their network to you.”
Because Intelligence Is Hiring
"Be fearless in what you stand for and talk about your beliefs…"
Transcript of, “Because Intelligence: Belief Marketing Platform”
GUEST: Ashland stansburY, CEO & Founder
Sal Daher’s Intro
SAL DAHER: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston. I'm your host, Sal Daher, an angel investor who delights in the fascinating tech companies being built in Boston's singular startup ecosystem. Because of the unique concentration of great universities here, Boston is a massive exporter of great startup ideas and a big importer of capital. This idea-rich and capital-poor environment gives me the opportunity to invest early in the startups that VCs will be fighting over in a few years. Case in point: SQZ Biotech. That's S-Q-Z Biotech. More about SQZ Biotech later.
Now, I'd like to introduce my guest today, Ashland Stansbury, founder and CEO of Because Intelligence. Ashland, welcome to our studios.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Thanks, Sal. So excited to be here.
SAL DAHER: It's awesome that you could be here. Ashland, I should mention that I'm really grateful to you for putting in word for Oana Manolache, who I interviewed, the founder of Introvoke. She was an awesome interview, so I thank you very much for that introduction.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Of course. Always trying to plug other female entrepreneurs, so happy to make the intro.
Correction: Enterprises Manage to Capture 5% of the Value They Create Not 2% as Stated
SAL DAHER: She's really outstanding. Actually, that reminds me, during the interview with her, we talked about the impact of enterprises, of companies, and how the investors only capture a very small fraction, and I said that the economist William Nordhaus had... According to a study of his, he estimated it was 2%. Actually, it's 5%; this is a correction from a previous episode, so I just want to mention that. The number was 5%. Still, the new enterprises throw off massive benefits to consumers that cannot be captured by the investors, the people who make them up, so every enterprise is a social impact enterprise.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Mm-hmm (affirmative), right, right.
Bio of Ashland Stansbury
SAL DAHER: Every new company. Now, Ashland had early exposure to entrepreneurship, and we're going to go into this. This is a really interesting story, this is really cool. But first, we're going to talk about her company. She started several ventures in business and philanthropy. She's also worked in sales and marketing in the software industry. In 2018, she founded Because Intelligence to help brands access cause-driven influencers. It's a new area in the marketing technology world. Her startup has received backing from Launchpad Venture Group and from the BOSS Syndicate, and these are two very serious groups of investors, so it's proof that she's really cooking with gas here.
So, Ashland, kindly tell us what Because Intelligence does and why it's important.
What Because Intelligence, Ashland’s Startup, Does
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Sure, sure. Well, super excited to be here. Thank you so much for the kind introduction. To tell you a little bit more about our mission and why we exist, the name of the company is officially Because Intelligence, but we go by Because for short. And really, our mission is to help enterprise consumer brands who sell very difficult-to-differentiate products, whether it's a pair of sneakers or yogurt, to really help them to differentiate those products based off of something deeper than product features. When I originally started this company, it was a mission to help marketers connect with their consumers in a way that felt more human. I'd always looked to Patagonia as an example of-
SAL DAHER: Outstanding company, love their products.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes. Well, their products as well as their environmental mission. I'd always looked to Patagonia as an example of a company that had a great product, but really stood for a greater environmental mission and was making that clear to not only their employees, but also their greater consumer base. So, the ultimate vision and mission of our enterprise software platform is to help marketing teams to really connect with their consumers based off of common beliefs and social causes and environmental work, which is colloquially known as corporate social responsibility. Really, in the space today, enterprise brands are giving quite a good amount of resources and dollars to corporate social responsibility, which is actually known as CSR for short, actually a total of $15 billion annually. But they're struggling to share those stories with their consumers, and so we really come in to help them share those stories, connect with organic influencers who support the same causes, and get their message out in front of millennial and Gen Z consumers.
SAL DAHER: Yes, I can see the value. For example, Patagonia, to take the example of Patagonia, it's a company that has just really amazing products, and by emphasizing its dedication to the environment, I think it's a way for them to make evident to consumers how much care they put into their products. I can think of this little winter outfit for babies that my wife bought from Patagonia. It was expensive, but it was really unbelievable. It's on its third baby right now, and it is so warm, and it's so well thought out. Just a great product. And so, you think, these are the kind of people who really care about the environment, they care about their customers, so it's all part of coming forth with somebody with integrity and someone who's really well centered in their views of the world.
Common Misconception that Only Expensive Products Are Environmentally Conscious
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, no, I think you actually made an interesting point there, is that sometimes there's this common misconception that only the expensive products like Patagonia are the ones that are socially responsible, and really the ones that have an opportunity to connect with their consumers based off of environmental responsibility and organic ingredients that are going into their products. But I think the interesting point you made is that these brands are really starting to figure out how to connect with their consumers on a deeper level, whether it's through their supply chain and how those products are made. But even if it's a company like Walmart that maybe isn't selling as high-end products, there's an opportunity for them to connect with their consumers based off of the way that they treat their employees, their labor practices, the way that they operate with carbon emissions and the environment around them. So there's all these different stories that companies have an opportunity to invest in and to tell, and that's really the purpose of our Belief Marketing platform.
SAL DAHER: Yes, yes. I mean, in the case of Patagonia, the initial purchase cost may be high, but you get so much use out of the thing that it's... you amortize it over time, and it's not expensive, because it works so well and so many kids will get to use it.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Definitely a product that's built to last.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. So, Because Intelligence, "because," maybe it's going to be "cause." How did that come about?
The Founding Story of Because Intelligence
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, so I originally started the company with a mission to make marketing more human. I felt like as a millennial consumer myself, I was seeing this shift in how consumers were buying from brands. I think this idea of Patagonia having great products is really a good example, that having great products isn't a question today, you have to have great products to exist as a company, but investing in those products in a way where you actually are making a positive impact on the environment and investing in causes that align with the resources you have to contribute is the new way that brands are operating.
As a millennial consumer myself, I started to see the way that I was buying from brands. I started to buy from brands that supported women's empowerment, because that's a cause that's always been important to me. But I also saw myself not only making purchase decisions based off of those values and beliefs, but I saw myself making long-term loyalty decisions. And I started to do a bunch of research in this space; I learned that 90% of consumers today are belief-driven buyers, which means that they are buying from brands that stand for the same values as them, but in the same token, they're avoiding and boycotting brands who do not. So, this is not just a question of should brands stand up for causes, but what is the risk of not doing so?
So that was the original mission of getting into the space. We actually took a really non-traditional approach to starting our company, though. The traditional tech startup, I'm sure you've interviewed many of these on the podcast-
SAL DAHER: Yes, yes, yes, uh-huh (affirmative).
ASHLAND STANSBURY: ... they have an idea for a software platform, and they get a bunch of coders together in a room, and they say, "Okay, let's build up this idea." And then they say, "Let's go find customers," and the customers say, "Well, this isn't really what I-"
SAL DAHER: They're presumably not... They do an MVP, and then they test it, presumably.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right. But then their customers say, "Well, this isn't necessarily what I wanted," and we have to pivot and iterate on that MVP.
SAL DAHER: Minimally viable product, MVP.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
SAL DAHER: Avoid buzzwords. Okay, so please continue.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. So, we wanted to take a bit of a non-traditional approach. This was actually really inspired by The Lean Startup. If anyone has read that book, it's-
SAL DAHER: Minimally viable product is from the lean startup movement, yes.
“So we took this approach of going out and talking to as many of our customers as possible. We got on the phone with over 50 different enterprise consumer brands.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes, yes. So we took this approach of going out and talking to as many of our customers as possible. We got on the phone with over 50 different enterprise consumer brands. These are all household brands that you would hear on a daily basis or probably use in your own homes. And we got on the phone with their global marketing directors and their global corporate social responsibility directors, CSR for short, and we asked all of them, "Are you using the more than $15 billion worth of corporate social responsibility work that you're doing as a way to connect with your consumers through marketing?"
“The biggest thing that we learned is that 78% of them were struggling to share those stories with their consumers, the biggest reason being a fear of feeling inauthentic.”
The biggest thing that we learned is that 78% of them were struggling to share those stories with their consumers, the biggest reason being a fear of feeling inauthentic. And when we asked them why that was, it was really this decades’ worth of relying on agencies to tell these stories, where these brands would hire a big agency, they would produce a big cause marketing campaign that shows how they give back to some politically correct cause, and then they'd put it in a Super Bowl commercial.
SAL DAHER: Oh, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right? And that then leads their consumers to feel like they're greenwashing, or they're virtue-signaling, and that their stand for that cause really is not authentic. That's really where a lot of these brands are today, and what really motivated us to get into the space.
SAL DAHER: Excellent, yeah. You founded Because Intelligence as a solo founder, and then you recruited highly experienced people to help you out, some of them not being paid. How did that come about? Please tell us that story and how you managed to do this amazing feat, which lots of founders would like to be able to do.
“…I knew I was really good at was convincing other people to follow my mission.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, yeah. I think honestly, this whole experience has been so new for me, and one of the things I was really interested in sharing with a lot of the viewers and listeners of the podcast is... You know, I'm 23, fresh out of college, a first-time founder. I started a house-painting company back in college, but that's a story for another time. But going into this, it was definitely a new experience, but the one thing that I knew I was really good at was convincing other people to follow my mission.
When I first started the company, it was really this approach of, "Okay, I'm inexperienced and young, and a lot of the stuff that I'm doing is going to be for the first time. I need to surround myself with people who have experience and who are not doing it for the first time." So I started to recruit a team of, we have almost six people now, who were all mostly twice my age, which was pretty scary at first.
SAL DAHER: Oldsters at 46. 46-year-old oldsters.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: For me, right?
SAL DAHER: Yeah.
“…if we can prove that giving back is actually good for business, that it actually impacts the bottom line, then we can financially motivate corporations to get involved in our key social and environmental issues.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: But it was definitely one of those tactics to make sure that I was surrounding myself with experienced, knowledgeable people. Diversity was important from the very beginning. My first hire was another female in tech, which was important to me. I think really, the core of how I've been able to recruit all these team members and get them to work nights and weekends for free for over a year now, you know, for equity, is because of the love of the mission. At the end of the day, the reason that we get up every day as a team, and the reason that we push forward through all the hurdles of startup life, is because we genuinely believe if we can prove that giving back is actually good for business, that it actually impacts the bottom line, then we can financially motivate corporations to get involved in our key social and environmental issues.
And I think many of the people on my team come from cause-driven backgrounds, some of them from nonprofits, where they understand the strapped resources of government and NGOs to be able to solve those issues. And we believe that if we can actually prove this is impactful from a marketing outcome perspective, that we can financially motivate these corporations to get involved.
SAL DAHER: Very impressive. There's a perception that "social impact" is not a scalable activity. How did you confront that in your raise? I imagine early seed stage investors, "Yeah, it's very nice, but you can't build a business out of this."
How Ashland Stansbury Won Over Investors Skeptical That Her Startup Could Be Profitable
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. Really good question, and one that I'm definitely passionate about, because we've run into some challenges along the way and have, I think, figured out how to navigate them, at least for the early part of our venture here. I would love to share any learnings that I can for other folks pursuing social impact. I think first and foremost, our mission aligns well with this statement that social impact is not just a good business decision, but it is a good-for-business decision.
So, one of the things that has really helped us to combat this concern from investors, that perhaps this isn't a scalable venture or more lucrative a venture as a non-social-impact type startup, is using hard facts and metrics around the trends of today. So, when I go in and I say, "90% of consumers are buying like this, and this is across all ages and all income levels and all markets," those are the types of numbers and facts and figures, especially from reputable news outlets and reputable research papers, where I could hand those to investors and hand those to people to educate them, to say, "This isn't just something that I believe, but this is something that's been well researched and proven, and this is where the market is moving."
“…we have all these metrics around how consumers are buying, and essentially proving the facts and figures behind this mission.”
So that's specific to our startup, that we have all these metrics around how consumers are buying, and essentially proving the facts and figures behind this mission. But I'd say for any social impact startup, really being clear about the trends and the metrics and how you can financially support what you're saying.
Sal Daher Talks About One of His Favorite Portfolio Companies: SQZ Biotech
SAL DAHER: Very good, very good. Well, that sort of brings me to the thought of how you plan to go to market. But let's hold that thought for a moment, because before that, I want to talk a little bit about the company that I mentioned before, SQZ Biotech. I led the first round of funding of that company some years ago, and it has, since then, inked a $1 billion-plus non-dilutive deal with big pharmaceutical company Roche. I've also interviewed the co-founder, Armon Sharei, on this podcast. Really interesting story, how they pivoted from a tools business into the therapeutic space, which they're in now. And actually, I'm really excited right now, because SQZ... That's S-Q-Z, "squeeze," just dosed its first patient in a clinical trial a couple weeks ago.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Very exciting.
SAL DAHER: A treatment for HPV-plus cancers, positive cancers. What's exciting is that it's a treatment which uses the patient's own immune cells. They're taken out of the patient's body, and then they're engineered using their patented technology that can do this at scale, and then injected back into the patient, hoping to create an immune reaction to the cancer, specific to the cancer. And it's worked well in non-human trials, and we're hoping that it's going to have outstanding results on humans.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Awesome, very exciting.
SAL DAHER: So, it's like tricking your immune system to attack a cancer that it can't see. Cancers are very good at disguising themselves.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: That's incredible.
SAL DAHER: So, it's the first patient on a clinical trial, got the dose. And they made all the doses a patient presumably is going to need in just 24 hours. This is one of the big bottlenecks in this business, because these immune treatments are not easily scalable. It requires a lot of work in order for you to engineer these cells, and these guys have the potential of just turbocharging that. So I'm really excited that I helped put together the initial round for these guys. I really believe in the founder, I really believe in the company.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: It always pays off when you get in early, right?
If You Are an Accredited Investor Do Check Out Sal’s Syndicate at AngelInvestBoston.com
SAL DAHER: Well, it's not so much early, it's just also getting in at the right kind of company that has the right team. They had some tough moments. So basically, this is kind of like telling people, if they're an accredited investor and they're interested in investing in these exciting companies, not in SQZ in particular, because they're not investible right now, but in this type of company that we see here in Boston, take a look at my website, AngelInvestBoston.com, join our syndicate, and love to have you on board.
Go to Market Strategy for Because Intelligence
So, Ashland, the question's about business development: How's the world going to get brands to make the leap from the established, safe influencer platforms into belief marketing?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, great question.
SAL DAHER: Just a word for people who are not specialists in this: Influencer platforms, it's software that helps a brand identify and motivate people who are excited about their product, and these people, so-called influencers, are people who can get other people excited about it. I'm an investor, for example, in another company called Mavrck. It's a more traditional... Well, when they started out, they were... they sort of developed-
ASHLAND STANSBURY: They were the first ones, yeah.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, they were the first ones. But they find people who are excited about a particular thing, a blogger who knows a lot about a certain space, and when they talk about the product, it drives massive sales. And Ashland is doing something which is sort of beyond that, it's a new approach to influencer marketing. So, how is it that you're going to make this leap to get people to believe?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. That was a really great setup, I love it. Yes, I mean, when we think about the influencer marketing world, I think actually Mavrck is a great example, but there's lots of platforms in that space that have sprouted up within the last five to ten years. And the reason that influencer marketing originally started was because brands were facing the same challenges they're facing today, which is, "How do we reach millennial and Gen Z consumers?" These younger consumers who are consuming content primary from their smartphones, primarily on social media, and they're not being exposed to advertisements and marketing in the way that their parents and their grandparents before them did.
And so, influencer marketing first started when consumers no longer trusted advertisers. So brands said, "Okay, if they don't trust us, then let's use influencers in the community who they do trust." A great example of that is someone like Kim Kardashian or some of these famous celebrities. That's usually who we think of when we talk about influencers.
But the challenge with influencer marketing over the last five to ten years, and really where we're bringing in new innovation, is that the core model behind influencer marketing has been a paid model, where if an influencer wants to engage with a brand, it will be for a set period of time and a set compensation. And a specific Instagram or Facebook post could be anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars of cost for the brand to pay the influencer. So this type of marketing is not cheap, but it is very much more effective than advertising, especially when it comes to click-through rates and conversation.
SAL DAHER: Yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: The way that we're going to market is we're starting with the first organic model in influencer marketing. I will note our long-term platform vision is to go much beyond influencer marketing; it's really just part of our go-to-market strategy. But the reason we're capitalizing on this trend is because over $8 billion is spent every year by enterprise brands on influencer marketing. This year alone, they'll lose $1.3 billion on all of the challenges around this paid model no longer working, for things like Instagram introducing like bans, scandals like the Fyre Festival. If you haven't heard of it, go look it up.
SAL DAHER: [crosstalk 00:19:01], yeah, the Fyre Festival, quite a... Yes.
“What do I mean by the organic model? I mean that the influencers we're engaging for these brands are not paid.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, do a quick Google search on that one. And so, all of these challenges have led to this opportunity for the organic model. What do I mean by the organic model? I mean that the influencers we're engaging for these brands are not paid. How do you get someone to do something for free? That's really the question we're trying to figure out.
And we have a unique opportunity, by capitalizing on causes and social causes and beliefs, to help brands connect with influencers who support the same causes. The way our platform works is it helps a brand, say it's Nike, that supports #BlackLivesMatter, their work with Colin Kaepernick. We help them to listen in on the conversations on social media, across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, where all of their ideal influencers are talking about #BlackLivesMatter. From there, we help Nike to actually insert themselves into those conversations, insert their brand voice on a local level with the people who already care, and then get those influencers to share out their story and get exposure with those millennial and Gen Z consumers. So we're focusing on that first organic model where these influencers really are motivated by something intrinsic, versus monetary compensation, and allowing us to help these brands really get the same amount of exposure, if not more.
SAL DAHER: How are you getting found by the brands? Are you just addressing them directly, are you... Do you have an inbound sales model with the brands? How are you getting found by brands?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, great question. So, where we're starting with our go-to-market strategy is we formed a customer advisory board of almost 20 enterprise household brands.
SAL DAHER: Ah. She's very good at getting people to do things for free. She got me to interview her for free. Well, I interview everybody for free, but she got [crosstalk 00:20:42], so, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes, yes, [inaudible 00:20:43]. Yes, so we got all these brands together. This was a part of our original lean startup interviews. We then went to brands like Patagonia and Toms.
SAL DAHER: You should name your company Stone Soup, if anybody's familiar with the story.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, that's a good one. So we brought all these brands together, and we formed this customer advisory board. And thus far, that board has really served as helping us to design the right product, but we see those opportunities as our immediate customer opportunities. So we've already started to go into a select number of the brands in that community and start to say, "Hey, we're ready for you guys. We finally have our platform ready. We just completed our pilot this fall. Here are some of our results: We saw a 30% click-through rate, we saw over a thousand influencers engaged, we saw about 15% of them retweeting." So we're really talking about all these amazing results we had with our first three brands that piloted in the fall, and we're now working to get some of these really big whales, if you will, the enterprise brands, as part of our customer advisory board to convert over into our initial platform release.
Revenue Model
SAL DAHER: And what's your revenue model?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Our revenue model is software as a service. This is actually probably a good time to plug more of our longer-term vision.
SAL DAHER: Okay.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, we're starting with a software as a service model, something that is familiar to a lot of these companies.
SAL DAHER: It's the Holy Grail, [inaudible 00:22:00], SaaS, a SaaS business, a fast-growing SaaS business.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: SaaS, yeah. All about the recurring revenue.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, you know, $12 million of annual recurring revenue, oh, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, yeah. So we're starting with a software as a service model, really focusing on annual contracts; it's going to be more focused on the enterprise market. But we are slowly but surely starting to think about how we lay the foundation for a longer-term vision where we are able to expand not only our product vision but also our revenue models. So, bear with me, this is a little bit crazy, but all startups have to be somewhat crazy, right?
SAL DAHER: Sure.
“Our long-term vision is to eventually become the social platform for talking about causes and beliefs.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Our long-term vision is to eventually become the social platform for talking about causes and beliefs.
SAL DAHER: Oh, interesting.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, imagine a world where there's Instagram, there's Facebook, there's Twitter, and there's Because. The idea is that we initially capitalize on all these other platforms, where there's these micro-communities on Twitter and Instagram, where people are talking about causes, where people are on Facebook donating their birthdays to fundraisers. But those platforms today were not built for talking about causes; people are just using them in that way, because there's passionate activists, right?
SAL DAHER: Oh, interesting.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, what we're starting to do as we lay this foundation is start to own as much of the content, the partnership formation between the brands, the nonprofits, and the influencers, as well as all of the gamification around how we motivate the entire private and public sector to get involved in our global sustainable development goals, so that eventually, we're not just engaging on these platforms that exist today, but we're becoming the destination where all of that conversation happens.
Where Ashland Expects the Company to Be in Five Years
SAL DAHER: Very impressive, very impressive. Very good. You've given us a sense of traction already. Where do you expect to be in five years, let's say at the end of 2025?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, so I think that's really when our long-term vision is going to start to come into play. We plan to introduce additional revenue streams as we go into more of that long-term social platform vision, where we can introduce a community membership model, we can introduce e-commerce, and we can introduce certifications, like imagine a Because corporation status.
SAL DAHER: Oh, cool.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, I think a lot of additional revenue streams will start to come into play as we move further along in the business.
SAL DAHER: Right.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: But my ideal vision, and really what gets me and my team up every day, is that by 2025, we have mobilized an entire ecosystem around how to solve our global sustainable development goals laid out by the United Nations, in a way where it actually is good for business.
Ashland Stansbury’s Father Is a Repeat Founder Who Inspired Her to Be a Founder
SAL DAHER: Excellent, excellent. Now, let's switch directions a little bit, because usually at the beginning of the podcast, we talk a lot about the enterprise, the company, and then we get a little bit more into your biography, how you got to be where you are. Now, you grew up in an environment that was just uniquely supportive of entrepreneurship. Please tell-
ASHLAND STANSBURY: That's one way to say it.
SAL DAHER: Yes, so please tell us about it.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Sure, sure. So, yeah, whenever I sit down to tell my story to anyone, this is usually where I start, because I think it explains why I'm 23, doing what I'm doing.
SAL DAHER: Right.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Growing up, I grew up in the South Shore of Massachusetts, grew up on the ocean, but I grew up with a family that's all from Texas. My parents moved here, and my grandparents also moved here.
SAL DAHER: Oh, so that's why you don't say "South Shore."
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right. My parents and grandparents moved here right before I was born, and that led to me eating Mexican food every night growing up in New England. But I was raised by a father who is a multi-time entrepreneur. He has started and sold three enterprise SaaS companies, so I was pretty much doomed to go down this path.
SAL DAHER: How do you pronounce your father's company? Is it X-in, X...
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Xinnovation was his last company.
SAL DAHER: Xinnovation, Xin, Xin, Xinnovation with an X.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, [inaudible 00:25:37].
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Very creative.
SAL DAHER: Scratching my scratchy beard.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: That's one of those names that gets created in the dot-com bubble. So I grew up with this father that had started all these companies, and actually, interestingly enough, even though my mom was more of a stay-at-home mom, she was very much the wife of an entrepreneur, and has that mindset.
SAL DAHER: A patient soul.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Very. Oh, very, very, very patient.
SAL DAHER: Slow fuse. Very long, slow fuse.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I think arguably it can be harder to be the wife of an entrepreneur, because it's just a roller coaster.
SAL DAHER: I've actually thought about having a podcast where I interview the spouse of the founders and get the other side of the story.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh, I'm sure the-
SAL DAHER: Because they're usually heroic people. I know, in the case of Bryanne Leeming, her husband was very supportive. And I know a lot of male founders, I also know their wives. I know Federico Cismondi tells about how supportive his family is. I've often thought about, if I could ever get organized, to do something like that, because it's a really... You know, it's the other side, because entrepreneurship is not easy. So anyway, please, let's not get off track here. So anyway, so tell me, so your mom is patient, your dad is a very dynamic entrepreneur, sold three companies, and...
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, so I remember my dad sat me down when I was probably seven years old, and he said, "I'm going to teach you what Daddy does." And he pulled out an easel and a permanent marker, and he wrote the word "entrepreneur." I couldn't even make this up.
SAL DAHER: So many letters.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, I'm like seven, my brother's five, and we're sitting down, we can't even keep still, and he's teaching us what this word "entrepreneur" is. And I think the core concept he taught us at that age was a simple one. It was "Work for your own dream rather than someone else's." My first chapter book was probably Rich Dad Poor Dad. And I just had this very unique childhood where, really since I was a young kid, I had this dream to take my own dreams into my own hands and be a CEO and founder. I was always intrigued by tech. So that was kind of the childhood that I had, and I think it was just a unique environment that then led me to study at business school at Babson.
SAL DAHER: What were some of your childhood businesses?
Ashland Stansbury’s House Painting Company Started When She was a Freshman at Babson
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, so I think one of the most formative businesses that I had as a child was my house-painting company.
SAL DAHER: A house-painting company.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: When I was a freshman at college, at Babson College, I started a house-painting company through a program called Young Entrepreneurs Across America. Have you heard of Student Painters?
SAL DAHER: Yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, Student Painters, College Pro, a lot of people have probably hired them to paint their houses in the past. It's a program that empowers about 500 students each year across the country to run their own house-painting company. I started this program because I wanted to get almost a crash course at being an entrepreneur before the-
SAL DAHER: Oh, yes, you will. You will.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right? So I started this program. I was one of probably 30 women around the country out of 500, so it was primarily male-dominated, given that it was house-painting.
SAL DAHER: Yes, a painting business is mostly male-dominated, yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yup. So I started this company-
SAL DAHER: And around New England, mostly Brazilian males. Yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yup, definitely, so it was very out of the ordinary for a 5'2" blonde girl from Hingham, Massachusetts, to be running a house-painting company. I had never picked up a paintbrush in my life, I had no painting experience.
SAL DAHER: Not even your nails?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh, yeah, definitely my nails, not-
SAL DAHER: Texas girl, yes, your nails, yes.
Entrepreneur of the Year
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Not actual houses. So I started this company, and I just remember a lot of the other guys in the program definitely underestimated me. They were like, "What is this girl doing? She's not going to be able to run this company." But I proceeded to break the 27-year company record for most sales in a weekend, and then I proceeded to set the record for Entrepreneur of the Year. I ran the biggest and most profitable business that year.
SAL DAHER: Hot dog, amazing.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, almost a $200,000 business in six months.
SAL DAHER: Wow.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So that was my first real experience with entrepreneurship and learning everything around what to do and what not to do.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. A lot of people say entrepreneurship can be taught and so forth, but there's also a certain amount of just being able to put up with the emotional cost of all the uncertainty, all the responsibility you take on. Some people just are not suited for that, they prefer not to have that, and other people embrace that. [crosstalk 00:30:17]-
Crazy Story from Her House Painting Company Days
ASHLAND STANSBURY: You're reminding me of one of my craziest experiences. I ran my house-painting company, and there was one morning where I totally overslept. I had three crews running on any given day. I was opening up one crew at 6:30, the next at 7:00, the next at 7:30, in three separate towns. I was dragging a trailer that my grandpa built with 16 ladders on it behind my 1996 Jaguar. I got a flat tire on my way to the job site. I get to the job site, my entire crew had quit that morning, they were so mad. It was the worst day of the summer, and I ended up having to get a whole new crew. Just one of those days where you're like, "The sky is falling, but I'm somehow going to figure out how to be resilient." Definitely very formative experience.
SAL DAHER: That is so funny. It reminds me of... There were these three very entrepreneurial brothers. They started a landscaping company, you know, like in high school, and they were doing landscaping. They were really nice, really great guys, and some of them went on to be very successful in their own enterprises and so on, founding something other than landscaping business, much more sophisticated enterprises.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: You always got to start getting your hands dirty.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, exactly. But I never forget that one of the disasters was that my sister had a bush that they mistook for weed, and they assassinated my sister's bush. She was always going, "Oh, those bush assassins."
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh my gosh, yeah.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: We definitely had many experiences like that. There was one house we painted that required a 60-foot ladder. It had an elevator shaft in the back.
SAL DAHER: Oh my gosh.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I don't know how I was responsible for putting 18-year-olds up on ladders. It was pretty terrifying.
SAL DAHER: Shades of Duddy Kravitz.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right.
Pros & Cons of Early Entrepreneurship
SAL DAHER: That's a very dark side of entrepreneurship. It's a funny... it's very funny, it's a Mordecai Richler novel turned into a movie. Anyway, starting being an entrepreneur so early, what's the pros and cons of that, and both in business and personal terms? I mean, it must have a cost, but it must also have advantages. Want to speak to that?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. No, I think that's a topic I'm pretty passionate about, and one that I'm only recently starting to open up on, because it's definitely... There's a lot of personal challenges that go along with starting a company at this age, I think the biggest being, even though I went to Babson and that's a very entrepreneurial school, not many people start companies right out of school.
SAL DAHER: Babson, by the way, for those who don't know, is a university outside of Boston, in a beautiful suburb, that's dedicated to nothing but entrepreneurship. It's really an awesome place.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: That's where Walnut meets. There are two angel investing groups that meet at Babson.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, Launchpad, Walnut, yeah.
SAL DAHER: No, Launchpad also? No, no-
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I've been to Babson to pitch many times.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, yeah, Boston Harbor.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Boston Harbor, yeah.
SAL DAHER: And Walnut. And so it's an amazing place, but anyway, so please continue.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, so I originally went to Babson, obviously for its focus on entrepreneurship. But I think one of the challenges of coming out of Babson and immediately starting a company is that the majority of Babson students do go there to have an entrepreneurial mindset, but they aren't necessarily going to start a company until they're maybe later in their 20s or in their 30s, after they've had some corporate experience, which quite a few people suggested that I do, and perhaps it would've been helpful, but decided to take the leap.
“…and I went off and did this crazy path of not taking a salary, living off of ramen noodles.”
But I think one of the challenges for me was just that I was going out, and all of my peers joined corporations. These are all of my best friends, and I went off and did this crazy path of not taking a salary, living off of ramen noodles.
SAL DAHER: Still driving the 1996 Jaguar.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, yup.
SAL DAHER: Now without a muffler, yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right. So, I think that introduced a lot of challenges in my love life, in my friend life, in how I balance things of... You know, am I going out and partying on the weekend? How am I balancing that with trying to work in my startup all the time? Working just incredibly long hours where there's almost no boundaries. You know, a lot of the corporate life, although nine to five is grueling, at least it's nine to five. There are boundaries, right?
SAL DAHER: Right.
“I'm that annoying person at the gym that's always on the phone.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, I think that's been one of the things that I've been really trying to learn to cope with, and I've come up with really good strategies that work for me. One of the most important to me is exercise. I'm a big tennis player, big into yoga, big into just getting on the treadmill and blowing off steam. If you work with me closely, you probably know I'm almost always on the phone at the gym. I'll be on the elliptical for an hour and a half, and then I realize that I forgot I was working out, because I'm on phone calls with people. I'm that annoying person at the gym that's always on the phone. But it's been a good coping mechanism for me to make sure I blow off steam.
SAL DAHER: A suggestion for you, if you're open to it. Since you're a racket person... I know, it'll destroy your tennis game. Consider squash.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah?
SAL DAHER: Squash has the advantage, the ball's so hard to hit that when you're in a squash court, you can think about nothing else. So it's really great-
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Great, really blow off steam.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, it's for blowing off steam. I'm a squash player, and the advantage is that you can also play it late in life.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah? Oh, you can play your whole life.
SAL DAHER: It's different from tennis. Tennis, it takes longer for the ball to come back at you in tennis than it does in squash. [squash] It's a small court, and it's a crazy ball that doesn't bounce, so you got to get under it, you got to be right in the right spot, you got to be paying tremendous attention to the ball. And what that does is it sort of disconnects you from all the stuff that's... So it's kind of like a reset for the brain. So after 45 minutes in the squash court, you start looking at things in a different way. So, consider squash.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I love it. I love it. Well, we can go play squash sometime. I'd love that. That'd be awesome.
SAL DAHER: Oh, the tennis players they kill me.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: You're going to kick my butt, but...
SAL DAHER: Oh, no, no, no. Okay, well, let's get you into squash.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Maybe pickleball. Have you played pickleball?
SAL DAHER: No, I've not.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh, that's the new trend, it's...
SAL DAHER: Pickleball?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh yeah, so much fun.
SAL DAHER: Oh.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: It's the new thing.
Sharing Your Wisdom: Getting Funded by Launchpad & The BOSS Syndicate
SAL DAHER: I got to look into that. Okay, let's talk about sharing your wisdom. You've achieved a highly prized backing of Launchpad, of the BOSS Syndicate. These groups are sought after not just because they give you money, but because they really roll up their sleeves and help you get off the ground. I think you're doing really well for a startup to get backing from these guys. Would you care to tell us how that came about? Explain how you connected with them, to help other founders.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. I think anyone who knows me well knows that I usually take the back door to a lot of opportunities. So, one note I want to make about our investors is that 40% of them are women, and about 30% of them are first-time investors, which makes me very nervous, but also very excited.
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow, that's exciting, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, we've got a bunch of individual angels as well as that BOSS Syndicate.
SAL DAHER: One needs to explain to them that if you're an angel investor, you need to diversify tremendously.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes.
SAL DAHER: Any single angel investment is likely to fail, but if you have a portfolio of 15 or 20 of them, then you begin to see magic happens.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes, yes.
SAL DAHER: So, they have to go into it with that kind of understanding, with their eyes wide open.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right, yeah, don't put all your eggs in one basket.
SAL DAHER: But at the same time, it is just an incredibly fascinating thing to be involved with, because you can really help these young enterprises get off the ground with stuff that... You know, you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yup.
SAL DAHER: You know, people can help startups in so many ways: a little bit of money, connections with people, helping them. "Oh jeez, I don't understand this lease," and if you're in the real estate business, you can help somebody who's in a totally different area, but just because you know about leasing.
“…we have really been trying to bring on investors who bring tremendous advice and network and value to the table on top of just capital.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I'm glad you made that point, because I think it's been a big focus for us as well, is that we have really been trying to bring on investors who bring tremendous advice and network and value to the table on top of just capital.
SAL DAHER: Right.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: So, when we originally went to the Catalyst event for Launchpad-
SAL DAHER: Oh, so that's how you got [crosstalk 00:38:12], okay, yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: That's how we got connected, yeah.
SAL DAHER: The Catalyst, for those who don't know, is this sort of place... Because Launchpad invests in later-stage companies than Walnut does. They're both angel investors, but Launchpad is a little more formal, they invest a little later. Walnut tends to invest earlier. But Launchpad has a Catalyst program where they bring in people, and they can sort of pitch, and frequently, they get involved. And believe me, when Launchpad gets involved with a company, they make sure you have a board, that this is serious stuff. So, please continue.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Actually, the original way that I got connected to Catalyst, and this might be useful for other founders who are just now thinking about starting their fundraising journey, was I hired an intern, and I gave him a list of investors that I wanted to go after. And these were prestigious angel investors in Boston that I hacked up from some list someone posted somewhere, or just asked other founders and said, "Who should I be talking to?" But then I also just said, "These are all the venture capital firms that we're eventually going to want to go after." And what I did is I got this intern access to my LinkedIn account, and I said, "Let's start reaching out to all of the founders in these investors' portfolio companies, and let's start asking them for advice."
“Last summer, I spent the entire summer building up my founder network.”
Last summer, I spent the entire summer building up my founder network.
SAL DAHER: Awesome.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: This was founders like Greg Segall, the founder of Alyce, who's actually one of my formal advisors for the company now.
SAL DAHER: Ah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: But a whole bunch of very just passionate and accomplished entrepreneurs across New York and Boston. Majority of them I tried to find where they were at least a year ahead of me, but maybe not too far ahead, where they had just been in my shoes very recently and could speak to that path, and I used that to get connected to their investors.
SAL DAHER: Methodical brain-picking.
“…when you go in to get advice from an entrepreneur, they will open up their network to you.”
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Exactly. Exactly, and usually when you go in to get advice from an entrepreneur, they will open up their network to you. They will totally be like, "How can I help?"
SAL DAHER: That's the thing about entrepreneurs. They are people who are doing tremendously difficult stuff. They get a lot of help, and they also tend to be very helpful people.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. I'm trying to start doing that as well. I don't think I'm at the point where I have a ton of advice to give yet, but I'm already starting to try to give back in those ways as well. And that's how we originally got connected to Catalyst. And then our approach for getting Launchpad involved, and BOSS Syndicate and some of these other investors, was literally being as relationship driven as possible. I tend to be one of those people that I present well in a room, and I can be a good public speaker, but I'm likely not going to be the entrepreneur that gets invested in based off of a pitch. I'm going to be the entrepreneur that gets invested in by sitting down and having coffee.
SAL DAHER: Yes.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I love to build one-on-one relationships with people, and that has really been my approach. Every single time that I went to an event like that, I would follow up with every single individual person and say, "Let's get coffee. Let's go talk one-on-one." And that was really how we ended up landing those opportunities, was by getting 14 champions within Launchpad.
SAL DAHER: That is so tremendous. I want to put bright neon highlight under what you're saying here. I've talked to people about fundraising, and there's so many people who just take a mass email approach to fundraising.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: No, no.
SAL DAHER: It could not be more wrong. You have to build connections.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: People have to trust you; they have to believe in you. [crosstalk 00:41:31].
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, getting champions is huge, especially with pitching a lot of the angel groups.
SAL DAHER: Yeah.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: If you go in cold and you don't have champions... I've done it both ways. It is just so much more effective to have people who are willing to stand up on the table for you. We had Matt Marra, one of the Launchpad guys, he was an early guy at Uber, was very much a champion for us. Peter Clay was, you know, 30-year marketing guy at Gillette. They were willing to really fight for us and get other people to follow them. So, having champions that will convince others to follow your journey is really the most impactful thing.
SAL DAHER: This is wisdom beyond your years, really. Because the immediate reaction is kind of like, "Oh, I got a list. Spam them all." And it's just, that's not how it works. Really, I applaud your effort and your success at this.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Thank you.
SAL DAHER: So, Ashland, as we wind up this podcast, I want to open up the mic for you to address things that are important to you. Feel free to talk about anything that you want to talk about.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. So, I'd love to do a quick plug for some open opportunity at Because. We are looking for our lead engineer, ideally looking for someone with experience in early-stage startups, software as a service, platform-based companies. We're really looking for someone with full stack development experience, with an emphasis on the back end, and any overlap in the marketing or cause worlds would be awesome. But we're really just looking for someone who's scrappy, self-starter, and looking to get in at the ground level. So, if you know any talent or you are a potential fit for this role, you can reach out to me at ashland@becauseintelligence.com.
Because Intelligence Is Hiring
We're also soon going to be looking for an account executive, looking for someone who is really a hunter, not a farmer. Not quite at the point where we need a farmer yet. Someone who's going to really help move beyond just our customer advisory board opportunities and start to knock on more doors and do a lot of LinkedIn prospecting, email prospecting, generate new opportunity in the enterprise space, and ideally someone who has experience with a full enterprise sales cycle, navigating multiple buyers and champions, and the complexity that goes along with going after some of these larger companies.
SAL DAHER: Awesome. Get on this trolley, because it's going places.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yes.
SAL DAHER: Tremendous. What would you say to someone who's thinking of starting a company? What advice would you give that person?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah. When I first went to my multi-time entrepreneur dad and said, "I want to start a company," he's like, "You want to start a company? Here, read this," and he handed me The Lean Startup. There's multiple different authors and different versions of the lean startup, but the concepts are the same. The concept is around the lean startup canvas, which is essentially a one-page business plan that's actually helpful to revisit every couple of months throughout your business, because things are changing so often.
But I would probably say, read that book, and start to think about the problems that your customers are having, and actually talking to them about them. I think that's one of the things that's most often overlooked when it comes to starting a company. I have friends come to me every once in a while saying, "Oh, I have this really cool idea for this app that does this thing," and I'm like, "That's great, and that sounds like a cool solution, but what's the problem that you're solving?" Right? I think that's a common misconception with the dreaming of entrepreneurship, is it's just this idea for this solution, rather than really identifying a problem. And The Lean Startup takes you through that in detail, of what is your hypothesis, what is it that's wrong with the world today? Who is it who's having this problem? Are they an economic buyer? And what is it exactly that would solve that problem, and how do you validate that entire journey?
SAL DAHER: There has been just amazing progress done in learning how to start companies. The Lean Startup is part of that, and there are other books as well. You cannot talk to enough people. One of the things that I fight against a lot... As a matter of fact, I have a video, if you look for it online, it's called The Google Problem. It's an interview that I did with the Wistia guys. And people are always afraid to talk about their ideas, because Google's going to steal it.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Oh, right.
SAL DAHER: You should be so lucky that Google's going to get interested in your idea, right? It means that you have scale.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: It's so much more than an idea, yeah.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, yeah, think so much, and then your idea never gets developed because you're keeping it under a bushel, right? And they said that their approach is... Wistia's a very successful company in the video space, it's a video platform. And they say if they're not embarrassed by their products, they're not doing things right. They bring out products that are just really-
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Push the limits so much, yeah.
SAL DAHER: Push the limits so much that they're embarrassed, people complain, and so forth, I mean, in a smaller scale. And then they polish them, and they do them really well.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: I've never heard it put like that, but that's such an interesting-
SAL DAHER: Yeah. If they're not being embarrassed with their product, they're not doing it right. They're not taking enough risks. That's the risk for a company like that, is that they stop taking risks. They become sort of fat, dumb, and happy, you know?
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right.
SAL DAHER: They have a SaaS business; it's very tempting to become fat, dumb, and happy in a SaaS business. You've got this guaranteed stream of money coming in, and pretty soon, somebody eats your lunch.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Right. Right, because you're not always innovating and trying to be ahead.
SAL DAHER: It's a culture of constant innovation by just sort of not being afraid to fall flat on your face. I think that's great advice.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, I think that's actually something that we've been thinking a lot about, this kind of fear of straying from what's normal. This applies specifically to what we're working on with... You know, you think about a brand like Patagonia that we were talking about at the start. They are so fearless when it comes to what their brand stands for. I think especially in the business that we're in, it's important that we build a brand that is fearless, to say, "Hey, this is what's next in marketing. If you continue doing traditional influencer marketing and traditional advertising, you're not going to make it into what's next."
SAL DAHER: Yes.
"Be fearless in what you stand for and talk about your beliefs…"
ASHLAND STANSBURY: We're going forward with this... We're calling our movement Belief Marketing, which is an evolved term from cause marketing. But we get a lot of investor questions around, "Are you going to cut off part of your market segment because you don't want to sell to a tobacco company?" Or some type of ethical question around the type of companies you sell to. And this is honestly something we've been really trying to figure out our answer to, because the type of message that we're preaching to our customers is "Be fearless in what you stand for and talk about your beliefs," and I think we have a responsibility to do that as well. So we're in those early stages now as a team, as we're building our culture and what we believe in, to say, "What are our policies? What is it that we stand for, and how are we going to make sure we uphold that in the long term?"
SAL DAHER: Yes, very good. Ashland Stansbury, thanks a lot for making time for this interview.
ASHLAND STANSBURY: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Sal. It's been awesome.
SAL DAHER: It's tremendous. I'd like to invite our listeners who enjoyed this really wonderful and inspiring podcast to review it in iTunes. This is Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.