Wanelo: The First Million Users

While the other is generally related to how big one's feet are.

I would gather the submission intend to point out that this 'news event' was 'rare' and therefore worth submitting (rare because of the success, being a single founder, and being a woman in a field where (I presume) women are significantly less numerous). Anyway, looks like there were issues with the submission for some reason since it has been edited.

In 2007-2008, I actively searched for a technical cofounder, but I couldn’t find one. I did have a false start of working with two great engineers, who in the end weren't interested in taking this on full time.

In parallel, I started consulting as a UX designer to make money. I eventually took on more projects that led me to hire a small team of designers to support all the client work. The income generated from these projects made it possible for me bootstrap Wanelo on my own and hire an engineer in India and a couple people under him to start building Wanelo. This was a direct contracting situation (he got paid and there was no equity involved) which went on for a couple of years.

We built a bunch of features that nobody cared to use until, finally, at the end of 2010, we launched a version (mentioned in the presentation) which people started using for the first time. At that point, I closed down my agency, which ended my source of income. I then asked the main engineer (Sarvjeet) if he would come on board as a CTO/cofounder (since I could no longer pay him or anyone else) and he said yes. This didn’t last for long. After a few months, it became clear very quickly that we were not a good fit for a cofounder relationship. We mutually agreed to end his involvement with the company (there was a 3 months transition period for which he got paid), and I went on solo to raise funding and build a new team, which took over the technical platform. Two months later, we fully rebuilt the website on an entirely new stack, leaving all the old code behind.

To elaborate on the “no team” comment, that comes directly from investors who refused to consider me and a remote engineer in India as a real team. This was the main challenge in raising money. Investors would literally call me a solo female non technical founder because it was just me with no engineering background and some remote contractors, and it took 40 rejections from investors to close my seed round.

- Me and Deena are known to each other for many years - I did the initial coding without being the co-founder and executed it as a services business - I built the product with Java(Struts2, Hibernate, MySQL) and worked on it single handedly for few years. - Lately, when we started getting some traction, we decided to persue it together full time, by taking equity and to work as a co-founder and CTO of the company - We got the first terms sheet when I was the co-founder of the company. Someone has given the link to TMT investments, which is correct. - Due to some difference on how to grow the company (particularly some investors were against me being in India), we decided to separate. The entire discussion was initiated by me and I am the one responsible for split. - Deena is a wonderful entrepreneur and I have very high regards for her. And I am proud of what Wanelo has become. Entire credit goes to her. - Constantin is an awesome Engineer and the current team of Wanelo is killer. They have done a phenomenal job and much better than I could have done it. - I am currently working as a general partner with The Morpheus, kind of YC of India. - I still hold a fraction of percent in the company.

Hope that clarifies everything. Please stop making un-necessary comments against her and stop digging the past.