Nancy Liu is with me here in person in Venice. Last time I saw you, Nancy, I was lost in the Clippers Stadium with Metta World Peace and his main thing was to try to find you. So, I got to wander all around, being like, Where's Nancy? Has anyone seen Nancy? We're looking for her.
Thank you for making sure that we all found each other, and guiding Meta to the right place.
The good thing was that everybody recognized him and was eager to help him. So that made it easier. But I kind of feel like your life is a little like that. Your crew has a lot of interesting folks.
They are really interesting. They're spectacular, and they have all accomplished some extraordinary things.
I want to get into like how you cultivate that if you cultivate it.
I do, I'm very intentional and incredibly picky with who I spend time with, how I spend time, because one of the things that I loved growing up is when somebody told me, I forget, maybe I was in middle school, high school, but it was one of those speakers, and they said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And in that moment, I was like, I need to change up my friends.
And I bet I'm sure some of my friends were like I need to change up I got to stop hanging out with Nancy, but that was something that I felt really resonated with me and so that's what I always wanted to be around the most brilliant people, but not just the most brilliant, but really good people and so because of that I feel like I really intentionally curate an awesome group of friends like I brag about my bachelorette crew like three of them are in the Asian Hall of Fame they are just spectacular, incredible people that have so much fun together.
They're so accomplished we all make time for one another. Like we really have this close bond because I think not only do we have a lot of respect for each other, but we really inspire one another.
It's interesting, I feel like, I mean, it's like a lot of things. I think inbound versus outbound friendships, companies, whatever. I feel like you're more deliberately outbound, do you ever get nervous? Or like hesitate when pursuing someone.
Oh, I get nervous every time I believe it or not, people are surprised to hear this, but I'm secretly an introvert, like I trained myself to be an extrovert. So every time I go out to a networking event or just a event where there's like a lot of people, like a party, before I enter the event, I mentally have to prepare myself. I'm like, okay, I'm going to go talk to people. I'm going to want to learn about them. I'm going to be excited to hear about what they do. and I'm going to try to contribute some value to them. Like literally I give myself this pep talk. Then I'm not afraid to kind of just ask them like, Hey, you want to go, you know, if they say, I really like hiking or something, which was like Metta's thing. He loved hiking and I love hiking. So I was like, let's go hiking. And then we just started hiking together.
Yeah, it's a great story. I feel like networking is so important, but no one teaches it to you where we don't spend a lot of time talking about. People's techniques. Um, do you have other advice
It's so much of practice. It's a combination of just being a good communicator.I think it's networking to like in a very positive way is you're just trying to see if you can add value to somebody, because when people network, I feel like oftentimes they're like looking for something like, ah, what can I get from that other person? And rather I think of it as the other way around, because if I want to, you know, get that person to spend time with me, I have to figure out what kind of value I can provide them. So in my networking conversations, I'm always focusing on how can I help them in some way?
It's a great point. And I could keep talking to you about the amazing network you've built, but let's talk a little bit about your investing.
Yeah, partner with X Factor Ventures. we've invested in over a hundred female founded companies. So for us, we are pre seed and seed investors, we write $150K checks into companies and all of us do this as a part time. there's 28 of us. everyone except for one of our co founders chip, we're all women. We've all started successful companies. We've had exits and we decided we wanted to come together and support other female founders.
Okay, so you've got X Factor, I was gonna say you're a multi time founder, currently founder CEO of BlazeTech.Or Blaze, you're an LP, you're a
public company, board member, TV, producer, all these things. And of course what we were just discussing your very deliberately built, amazing network.
I started a spreadsheet of people and tracking people when I was, I want to say in high school. so I have this one Google spreadsheet that is organized by year and by event. So every tab is a year and then every column is the event. And then there's the people that were at the event that I met. And I put a little note, like this person is a great, musician. I want to go and duet with them, which one of my best friends, this is how I met her. I met her at this event that was public company, executives, and she is an incredible flutist. And so I've had this going since 2000. Before college.
Wow. It's actually, so now that I'm a VC, like, we have a good CRM system, and it's so useful because I can track everyone and tag people and search and whatever. And it's a regret of mine that I didn't start it, doing it earlier. Just like, Oh, this person's a great AI expert. This person, a PR expert, all of that stuff. that would be an advice I would share with younger folks is start doing that.
You don't have to do the fancy CRM, that's next level.
No spreadsheet, air table, Google Sheets.
Yeah, Blaze Tech. Blaze tech. There you go. internal tools.
Internal tools, internal tools, external tools, web apps, mobile apps. We do it all.
so that's what you're the founder of now, but previously. Multi time founder, but like, I'd love to end plug story a little bit.
I started unplug. I would say the week of college graduation and it was a little bit accidental. I was introduced to my co founder David through another intern. I was an intern at Goldman Sachs. That was sort of the prestigious thing to do as a junior. And I did that for my summer. The benefit for that was I did it a eeally good job just as a intern, but I recognize that people also saw like I could just go and build things.
I became that person where lots of people made introductions and that was a huge benefit because I met then lots of people with ideas. And I had some pattern recognition of who actually follows through and who are just talkers. Most people are just talkers. And so in college, it was very helpful to have worked with lots of people. Some that worked out, some that did not work out. Such that when I got introduced to David, who had this idea for Implug, which became a very, very different idea than what we initially talked about.
I was like, okay, this is a person I wanted to work with. So we're sitting, this is the week of graduation, in my college sorority living room. And it's my first time meeting him. He had flown up from L.A. And he is talking about wanting to build better software for showing ads on screens. Which, again, is kind of different than what we ultimately became, but that was the original pitch.
I didn't care that much about the idea because in my experience, it was less about the idea. I could see a path to growing a company, to be super successful in kind of anything. And so I was like, all right, this person is really smart because he was a, uh, computer science dropout turned professional poker player and had made millions of dollars on online poker. When he was 18 years old, I was like, all right, this person is pretty sharp. And somehow he got connected into this network of mine. I talked with him 45 minutes later. I said, I'm in, I'll move to LA. Let's go start this company. So that was, we had two people now in the company. He gets on a flight back to LA and it's one of those Southwest flights where you get to pick where you sit.
He sits down. Another young guy just decides to sit next to him. This guy named Zach, they start talking to each other. And Zach is like, yeah, I'm a UCLA student. one of my apps just became one of the top 10 most downloaded education apps in the Mac App store. And David's like, that's awesome. I just found my co-founder CEO for this company. You want to join us? And in short, Zach was like, okay, yeah, I think I could drop out of UCLA and join you guys. That was our third co founder.
He goes back to his UCLA, apartment. He has a roommate. He tells his roommate this. His roommate's about to graduate, about to go be an engineer at Cisco Systems. And he tells his roommate, Met a guy on the plane. I think I'm going to drop out of UCLA. I think I'm going to join his company. And his roommate is like, That is insane. I want to join too. We got our fourth co founder.fourth code now. Wow.
And you guys lived together right?
we at one point had 13 people living and working out of the house.
It's so interesting. The thing I keep coming back to is sort of a, is the people side of things and your life story is such a people side of things and I know I'm fast forwarding because I know, end plug, you then started Blaze with. Some of the same people.
That's correct. I started Blaze within Tina and Bruno. Tina, who's my co CEO at Blaze Tech. She was the CEO of another company and we were going through the same startup accelerator together. And she then eventually became CTO for Implug.And now she's my co CEO at Blaze.,
So I'm sure unplug was not always up into the right. to the right.
No, it took years.
So how do you get along with someone then for that many years?
For people I work with, one of the things I really care about is that they're reasonable people.and so we. Didn't have all of the co founders till the very end. Uh, but for the folks that I worked with, like Bruno and Tina, Bruno, who's our current CTO, we work together now for over 12 years and it's just flown by. And I think what makes it work is this mutual respect and being incredibly, understanding of each other's competencies, weaknesses, strengths, and being able to play off each other, where we know what we're bringing to the table and we all know we have incredibly.
Like one of, our core values that was at the last organization. That's at blaze. It's excellence. We really care about excellence. And so when we interview people, we talk about our core values. And we look for people that have demonstrated excellence. And so I'm okay with people talking about failures and where things didn't work out. But I also really care about when have you won? I want to know that people know how to win. They know what success feels like.
Right. What was, I'm sorry, now I'm blanking on it. It wasn't Djokovic, it was, the big Dartmouth graduation speech where everyone said, oh, it just came naturally. And he's like, bullshit. It was me working my ass off all the time.
It's the tens of thousands of hours each of those athletes have poured in
Yeah. That's interesting. Um,Piano was your first excellence.
Yeah, it was, it was actually, it's funny. A lot of the things I tie back to what got me to be an entrepreneur here, a lot of it goes back to piano.
Piano is kind of that first thing of this trial and error and practice. I'm glad from a young age, I recognize. This pretty strong correlation of effort, practice, commitment, and into results. Now that doesn't, always the case for having a company become successful. There's other things that play into it. but you can't get a company to be successful without that commitment, without the effort and the hard work and excellence. And so piano was, yeah, very much that first thing. It was the first thing I ever competed in. And Yeah, I've won some competitions and I lost a lot of competitions, and I'm glad to have that experience where I will play the same exact piece at two different competitions.
One, I'll win one. I won't even place. And it was also a reminder of sometimes. How you pitch things to one investor will be received very differently than another investor.
it's an interesting line of thought, which is, trying to figure out people's excellence and whether they felt that and gotten there through some efforts.I sometimes talk about distance traveled, which maybe is similar, but I kind of like excellence. I got off topic.
So you're looking for excellence. You do Nplug. Let's stay on Nplug a little bit before we get to Blaze. And just like some of that journey. And when did it go from not working to working?
Our first business model, it didn't work. And I had a lot of people that told me it was going to be really hard and it's not going to work. And sometimes you kind of just need to go execute and see it not working for yourself. So in the early days, we were very CapEx heavy. We were installing screens inside of our customer's location.
We were then installing wifi inside of these locations because this is 2012 and not all the retail locations had Wi Fi and so we were not only Creating the software that was going to power the screens and it was going to show interactive social media on the screens alongside the ad but then we were also installing screens, which the margins are terrible there then screens would break and That is not our competitive advantage at all that.
And then we had some customers that say, I've already got screens. I've already got wifi, but I really like your software and I don't want you showing ads on the screen before we were just monetizing by selling ads on the screen, which by the way, competing for ad dollars against the Bohemians, it's so difficult. I still think right now out of home is a very difficult space to compete for ad dollars.
We were not getting any of it from ad network No, we were not getting any of it from ad network at the time. There really wasn't a great network that would plug into digital out of home.
It was, we were, we got a sales team on the ground pounding the pavement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were trying to do everything and we were doing none of it well. But our competitive advantage is we made the software really awesome, really easy to use.
It was digital signage software that nobody had experienced before. Whereas traditional digital signage software is made for AV and IT teams. And when the AB team saw this, they were like, this is awesome. We don't need the hardware. And we're like, Oh, we can just software. And guess what? Our team loved selling products a lot more than selling ads. And so, you know, I like to say, yeah.
And then one day we were just only selling software, but it was. Transition there was a period so we started call it close to end of 2012 and then 2015 was when we made some big drastic moves into just cutting out any kind of leads that were oh We don't have any screens. Will you install for us? we said no you have to have screens there and then we'll work with you We worried that it was going to bbe this big dip where we weren't going to have enough leads, but it turns out when you define the customers better in your criteria, you're just more targeted and you can get in front of the right audience a lot better.
Another thing is we had, like many startups, lots of times where we thought we were going to run out of money. And this one time that we thought we were going to run out of money, we said, we've got to cut the head count. We have to cut the head count. And. In doing so, it made us a lot more efficient because instead of trying to solve problems by hiring more people, we solve problems by improving the process, adding in better technology.
but it was very painful. there were times when we weren't sure if we made the right move all, actually all the time, I would say throughout the entire journey, even right before we were selling the company, we weren't really sure, is this going to work out?Is this not, there's always uncertainty.
so when did that become, cause you sold to PE, right?
you sold to P. E., right? Sure. Okay.
And so when did that become, I assume it was profitable?
It was profitable
So, how did you, like, did you end up raising some venture money? When did you become attractive to PE? How did that play out?
Yeah, we wanted to be a venture company. But we never were, actually. was the sole fundraising person for, yeah, I was a CEO. I was the fundraiser. And so we raised a lot of angel money. we went through the Accelerator. The Accelerator did extraordinarily well. They got, I think, uh, almost 250X on their investment. Their 20, 000 initial check to us turned to be, I think, around 5 And when we wanted to go raise VC, we came up to all these different hurdles. And so that's what forced us to actually become cashflow positive in 2015. It was the art. Am I going to keep on taking an angel checks because I wasn't able to raise VC money? It was that or we needed to just become cashflow positive and so we became perfect for PE because we weren't growing fast enough for VC because VCs they want to see you doubling tripling all of that They don't care about profitability, but we were perfect for pe and we got pe companies always interested In us they would be say, you know, we're perfect because we are high growth enough for PE, you know, double digit growth every year.
we had very, very high margins. We were very efficient. the revenue per employee was very high and then it was mostly founder owned. The board was just myself and my co founders. And so they didn't have to negotiate really with the VC. And when the sale happened for the company, it happened very fast. the PE firm reached out to me on LinkedIn. Wow.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me that story. So they reach out to you, but you'd been getting some inbound
Lots of inbound interest, but the multiples for PE, they're not giving you, you know, the VC multiples.bThey're very conservative.
What sort of multiple?
I mean on the very conservative side you've had VCs that were paying like two three X Multiple and recurring revenue that just wasn't interesting and then some of the higher end one was like four to five X again Not interesting for us. Yes, exactly And then when this LinkedIn message, I remember receiving I was just like I'm just, working from home because this is, during COVID 2020, and I see this message I never heard of, the, PE firm, And I was like, okay, this is interesting.
Here's another, you know, pitch. I don't think I'm going to waste time on it. but they crafted it in such a way that they were like, just give me something. It was like, just give me 10 minutes. I'll make it worthwhile. I was like, okay, that I can do. I'll give you the 10 minutes. So I jump on the phone with them and they just basically said, what do you want for the company? And I gave them a number and I kid you not, I think it was like less than an hour later. He calls back and he says, we'll do it, which was signaled to me, which is great. But then it was also signal like, Oh, I set a number way too low.
I should have said way high, but you know what? It was a much higher multiple than any of the other ones we had gotten offers for, and we, then just proceeded, but in the entire process, we weren't really sure. Was it going to go through? I think M& A is such a delicate process and during COVID I had done I think it was four, M&A deals, two of them public companies. It's just a very, very delicate process. And so we took it as this may go through or this may not go through. We're not going to tell the team for as long as possible because we want them focused grow the company.
So you had done some M&A before?
It was all around the same time. Like, it was literally four M& A deals in the course of, like, two and a half
And this was through your public company boards?
Okay, we have to rewind then because, how did you end up on public company boards?
This was Also something that I wasn't expecting. I had always been interested in wanting to serve on a public company board. and I joined an organization called Beyond Board.
Wow, that's Sarah
Yes, Sarah Zapp, who was at the event, who is fantastic. And we kind of knew each other through different things. was friends with some of my close friends, but we never really spent time and it was actually running into her At AOC restaurant in Brentwood.
We ran into each other just in the lobby and we started talking and I share a little bit more of my background. She was like, I think you should join beyond board. I think you'd be a great member for our organization. ultimately, I think I became one of their first successes as an organization of placing somebody onto a public company board. and it was all very. And I would say credits back to just networking and knowing different people. and so,nI was just shy of my 30th birthday
Amazing. So, one, when I met you, I was like, oh, you popped for me? Like, just, I remember it quite well. Conversation. but I also, then when I read your background, I was like, did she come from a family office? Like, you that's unfair. But that was one of my thoughts was like, amazing story that it's like, Sarah's app and be on board. And you got on board when you were 29 through your own self made, excellence.
Hustle. I've always just hustle. You know, I came here into the U S as a immigrant, and my parents, just, I saw them hustle when my dad had a PhD and this was during 2000. had a tech background. No tech employers were really hiring at the time. You know what he did? He just said, I'm going to go be a car salesperson.
So he then in Colorado worked at John Elway's car dealership. And same with my mom who had already a master's degree when she came to the U. S. She was like, all right, I'm going to now pursue a second master's in computer science. She had her first master's in systems engineering. And she was like, okay, but, to make ends meet and for the schedule to work, I'm going to go work as a waitress, in the evening. And I admire them so much of just that. hustling and making things work think it helps a lot with a startup to just having the mentality of There's no job or responsibility that you're too good for
Well, I have that. And your family is from China?
Okay, we can edit this out, but I think a lot of people find me in tense to people ever Think that your pretty intense?
It's funny because I don't even think I'm intense but then I have definitely had people say, you are really intense. But, the intensity, I think is almost like, I don't even try to be intense. I actually think sometimes I try to like, Um, but it's, I think it's just enthusiasm for the things I do because there are times when I've, gone and advised a company and just really was not into it because if I don't feel like I'm adding value or I'm a good fit Or I'm learning in the process That's I think what I'm like that. All right, I'm gonna chill but I think because of all the things I do I get very excited about it. So I just go all out. even silly things where I pick up a hobby and I can't just have a normal hobby like I was decided I wanted to go, you know, try out pistol shooting. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go get certified as a marksman. And then it was like, I want to go learn how to play poker.
And I was like, all right, let me go play in the world series of poker. I ended up cashing in it again. This was a month after I learned poker And I think for me, my natural instinct for anything is like, I just want to see how far I can take something.
Wait, that's crazy! Impressive to me. Wait, so you, I mean, I get an intense, but like, don't, you have to beat the whole level levels, multiple levels of, people to get to the, world series.
You can just sign up for the World Series of Poker. I remember I had some practice games with friends at home. I did horribly. but I learned cash games are very different than tournament style it's a different strategy. I was spending so much time trying to memorize odds for certain hands against other hands. And I realized when you're in that tournament, it goes out the door. And I thought there was going to be more like hobbyists like myself. No, no, no. At the world's biggest poker,
It's professionals.
It's, it's pretty much almost all professionals. And so when I told people at my, the first table that I was at, that I had just learned poker a few weeks before, everybody was like, ah, that's her story.That's her strategy. She's like pretending to play this, like whatever newbie game. But it's so much of it was actually social games and psychological games at the table. and yeah, ended up, in terms of winnings, I think it was in the top 5 percent at the 2017 World Series of Poker.
That's crazy!
And my goal was just to last a few rounds.
But you said you need to be decent but also a mental aspect
rule going in. It was really, really low. Such a mental game. I don't think I've been in a mentalSuch a mental game. I don't think I've been that much on adrenaline for that many consecutive hours ever in my life.
And I feel like from coming from you, that's saying a
a lot. Yeah, yeah. And it was, one of the craziest experiences I've ever had so much fun I don't think I'll be able to replicate it again so that I ended my poker career on the high note And that's it
my god.
And I had no idea. Now I want to ask all about that. But I'm going to just ask about Blaze because I know we're going to run out of time at some point.
Tell me more about Blaze and, what your sweet spot there is for what you're building.
For Blaze, we help organizations build web applications, internal tools, 10 times faster than if they're using code. We started the company because this was a problem we faced at our last company at End Plug. We had lots of engineers, and yet, there was still plenty of internal tools, apps that our team could use.
Needed that we knew were going to improve the operations and productivity of our team. But we just put on the back burner because engineers don't like to build internal tools. It's not fun. They want to build the core product. And so we said, if we can build a platform to help people that are not coders, but they are tech savvy.
Like if you can describe the application you want to build, then our platform can make it a reality. That's what we want to do. Now we looked at the space. There's, you know, lots of the no code loco space. It's. It's a very big industry. It's one of the fastest growing industries. And what we saw were that in the no code space, all the no code apps were really limiting.
It was like no code for forms, no code for CRMs. You can't really build truly custom applications. And then on the low code side, the problem is you still needed developers So what we wanted to build was enabling you to build very complex, very custom, highly secure applications. In a no code environment. And so our clients, lots of healthcare companies that need to have HIPAA compliant applications. We're asking an engineer who hasn't built a HIPAA compliant app to go build HIPAA compliant is really hard. that itself can take years to go and create. And so for us, it was just having all of these different enterprise security out of the box, because that was our expertise.
That makes a ton of sense. And it's not like HIPAA compliance is not what every other no-code company seems to be pitching.
every other no code company is doing.
Our customers are building core applications.
service. Um, and. because this is LA Venture, I mostly talk to VCs. Can you give me the quick version of you as an investor? Because you do LP checks as well as XFactor.
Yes.
I'll just, I'm gonna, like, lightning round.
Yes. Okay, LP and lots of traditional venture funds, hedge funds, everything ranging from, obviously LP and X Factor Ventures, LP and Mac Venture Capital, Everywhere Ventures, if you're familiar with them, and then some hedge funds and some PE. direct,
an LP? Rather than do direct investing
I'd also do direct investing. I like to, Have things be pretty diversified. and so just doing a very traditional kind of model where I've got allocation in public markets, fixed income, and then you have your alternatives in real estate.
Okay, and then for X Factor, who should come your way?
Companies that are going to be billion dollar plus companies and Ding, ding, ding. That's what I thought
yeah. Yeah. So one, they are traditional venture startups. second, they need to have at least one female founder with meaningful equity, which we mean at least 10 percent in the company. and then other than that, we're industry agnostic, pre seed and seed stage.
Great. I always like to ask how would your friends describe you?
friends describe me as energetic, supportive, hardworking.
You come across that way. I love it. wow. Well, Nancy, you are like in the center of a lot of L. A. tech. Great. I wish you lots of continued success with Blaze.of all of what you've built here..
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