• Israel is often called the "Startup Nation" due to the sheer number of entrepreneurs and tech companies in the country of 9 million people.
• While Arabs make up 21% of Israel's population, they currently only make up about 3% of the tech workforce.
• Itzik Frid, a longtime Israeli tech entrepreneur and the CEO of a startup incubator focused on Arab-led startups, thinks that the lack of Arab representation comes down to four factors, including geography.
• Most Arabs in Israel live far from Tel Aviv, Israel's tech hub. But he thinks that could be starting to change.
• This post is part of Business Insider's series on Better Capitalism.

Israel produces an impressive number of highly successful tech companies for a country with just 9 million people, from social navigation app Waze, which sold to Google in 2013 for $1.15 billion, to autonomous driving company Mobileye, which sold to Intel last year for a whopping $15.3 billion.

Israelis have long lovingly referred to the Middle Eastern country as the "Startup Nation," thanks to the sheer number of entrepreneurs building businesses there, particularly in cities like Tel Aviv.

But, there's one group in Israel that hasn't truly benefited from the red-hot tech industry: Arab-Israelis. While Arabs make up 21% of Israel's population, they currently make up 3% of the workforce in the tech industry. There are likely even fewer Arab entrepreneurs.

Itzik Frid, a longtime Israeli tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, is trying to change that. He is the CEO of Takwin Labs, a venture capital firm and startup incubator focusing on Arab-led startups.

"We don't invest in [Arab-led startups] because of philanthropy. There's nothing wrong with philanthropy," Frid told Business Insider. Investing is about business.

"We're not sitting here saying, 'Oh those poor Arabs, we screwed them for so many years, and we need to make it up to them,'" Frid said. "Yes, they were screwed, and they were discriminated against, but you cannot start a startup company from this. Nobody will care when you release a product to the market whether the one who programmed it was screwed, or his parents were screwed in 1948 or 1967."

There are many proposed explanations for why there aren't more Arab-Israelis in tech. Some suggest the insularity of the Israeli tech scene, which draws heavily from army units, puts Arabs at a disadvantage. By law, all Israelis must serve in the Israel Defense Forces, but few Arabs do. 

While Frid doesn't dispute that insularity may play a role, he thinks there are four major reasons for why there aren't more Arabs in Israeli tech.

1. Arab cultural and social attitudes around failure

Jewish and American cultures tend to have a high tolerance for failure due to familiarity with the entrepreneurial process. Generally speaking, Arabs don't, Frid said.

"With Arabs, it is often 'failure is not an option' in the sense that if you fail once, you will be stamped with that failure for the rest of your life," Frid said. "You cannot be an entrepreneur if you do not embrace failure. Because you will definitely fail at least once."

2. There are no major success stories of Arab entrepreneurs

While entrepreneurial American kids look up to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as cultural heroes and Jewish-Israelis aspire to build the next Waze or Mobileye, there haven't been any major Arab entrepreneurs in Israel yet.

Success stories, Frid said, have an amplifying effect, convincing other would-be entrepreneurs to take the leap. Creating those kinds of success stories is Frid's goal with Takwin Labs. All of the companies in Takwin's portfolio come from entrepreneurs with Ph.Ds in highly technical fields and involve deep tech like computer vision, autonomous driving, and nano-technology.

"If we want to create an ecosystem and successful infrastructure of the first [Arab entrepreneur] heroes that will pull everybody after them, we need to create success stories that will be huge on an objective level," Frid said. "Not a local level."

3. A lack of experience

 This goes back to that mandatory army service for Israeli Jews. Some army units, like the Unit 8200 intelligence team, have become renowned for providing recruits with high-level cybersecurity skills and producing alumni who have started many of Israel's top startups.

In addition to gaining a large social network and prestige from serving in units like 8200, Jewish-Israelis gain years of invaluable experience in both management or technical skills before ever entering university or the workforce.

4. Geography

It may sound strange, with a country the size of New Jersey, but Frid thinks that the biggest barrier to Arabs entering tech is geography.

Most Arabs live in the so-called "peripheries" of Israel. Nearly all of Israel's tech industry is centered around the city of Tel Aviv on the coast. Most Arabs live either in the north in the Galilee region or south in the Negev Desert. While many Jews grow up far from Tel Aviv, they tend to be more open to the idea relocating to the city if they have an interest in tech. Arabs, not so much, according to Frid.

"Even if an Arab guy finishes number one in his class at the Technion, he will probably still go back to living in his village. He will try to build a house, get married, and find a steady job near his village," said Frid.

Even those who secure jobs at the R&D centers of top companies like Google often end up commuting two hours every day back to their village in the Galilee to stay close to their families.

"That’s not the way to build a career," Frid said.

That may be starting to change. Frid has headquartered Takwin Labs in the northern city of Haifa to take advantage of its proximity to the Technion, Israel's M.I.T., and the Galilee region where most Arabs live.

Erel Margalit, a legendary Israeli venture capitalist and politician, has made developing the so-called "periphery" of Israel his chief initiative after resigning from the Israeli parliament. His plan involves developing seven "regions of excellence" focused on developing different industries in marginalized areas.

And Arab-Israeli Fadi Swidan has worked with tech entrepreneur and Unit 8200 graduate Ron Aviv to co-found Hybrid, an accelerator program that helps startups with mixed Arab and Jewish teams, in the Arab-majority city of Nazareth.

SEE ALSO: A legendary Israeli venture capitalist explains why anyone against cooperation with China is 'crazy'

DON'T MISS: The 25 coolest tech companies in Israel

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NOW WATCH: I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for a week like a Navy SEAL

• A startup called Ambrosia Medical that charges $8,000 to fill your veins with the blood of young people plans to launch its first clinic in New York City at the end of this year.
• Founded by Stanford graduate Jesse Karmazin, the company recently completed the first clinical trial designed to assess the benefits of young blood transfusions.
• Although his team has not yet published the results of the trial, Karmazin said the results were "really positive."

To startup founder and Stanford Medical graduate Jesse Karmazin, blood is the next big government-approved drug.

Karmazin recently launched Ambrosia Medical— a startup that fills the veins of older people with fresh blood from young donors — in the hopes that the procedure will help conquer aging by rejuvenating the body's organs. The company plans to open its first clinic in New York City by the end of this year, Karmazin told Business Insider.

In 2017, Ambrosia enrolled people in the first US clinical trial designed to find out what happens when the veins of adults are filled with blood from the young.

While the results of that study have not yet been made public, Karmazin told Business Insider the results were "really positive."

Because blood transfusions are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Ambrosia's approach has the green-light to continue as an off-label treatment. There appears to be significant interest: since putting up its website last week, the company has received roughly 100 inquiries about how to get the treatment, David Cavalier, Ambrosia's chief operating officer, told Business Insider. That led to the creation of the company's first waiting list, Cavalier said.

"So many people were reaching out to us that we wanted to make a simple way for them to be added to the list," Cavalier said.

With that in mind, Cavalier and Karmazin are currently scouting a number of potential clinic locations in New York City and organizing talks with potential investors. They hope to open the facility by the end of this year.

"New York would be the flagship location," Karmazin said.

The first clinical trial of its kind

Because blood tranfusions are already approved by federal regulators, Ambrosia does not need to demonstrate that its treatment carries significant benefits before offering it to customers.

So far, the company has already infused close to 150 patients ranging in age from 35 to 92 with the blood of young donors, Cavalier said. Of those, 81 were participants in their clinical trial.

The trial, which involved giving patients 1.5 liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25 over two days, was conducted with physician David Wright, who owns a private intravenous-therapy center in Monterey, California. Before and after the infusions, participants' blood was tested for a handful of biomarkers, or measurable biological substances and processes that are thought to provide a snapshot of health and disease.

People in the trial paid $8,000 to participate. The company hasn't settled on a commercial pricetag for the procedure, Karmazin said.

"The trial was an investigational study. We saw some interesting things and we do plan to publish that data. And we want to begin to open clinics where the treatment will be made available," Cavalier said.

Karmazin added that the trial showed the treatment to be very safe. 

"The safety profile was essentially perfect, or as good as plasma transfusions are," Karmazin said.

Young blood and anti-aging: Are there any benefits?

Karmazin is right about the safety of blood transfusions and their capacity to save lives. 

A simple blood transfusion, which involves hooking up an IV and pumping the plasma of a healthy person into the veins of someone who's undergone surgery or been in a car crash, for example, is one of the safest life-saving procedures available. Every year in the US, nurses perform about 14.6 million of them, which means about 40,000 blood transfusions happen on any given day.

But as far as young blood is concerned — and its alleged potential to fight aging — the science remains unclear.

"There's just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you're basically abusing people's trust and the public excitement around this," Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who led a 2014 study of young plasma in mice, recently told Science magazine.

Karmazin is still optimistic. He got the idea for his company as a medical student at Stanford and an intern at the National Institute on Aging, where he watched dozens of traditional blood transfusions performed safely.

"Some patients got young blood and others got older blood, and I was able to do some statistics on it, and the results looked really awesome," Karmazin told Business Insider last year. "And I thought, this is the kind of therapy that I'd want to be available to me."

So far, no one knows if young blood transfusions can be reliably linked to a single health benefit in people.

Karmazin said "many" of the roughly 150 people who've received the treatment have noted benefits that include renewed focus, better memory and sleep, and improved appearance and muscle tone.

But it's tough to quantify these benefits before the study findings are made public. There's also the possibility that simply traveling to a lab in Monterey and paying to enroll in the study could have made patients feel better.

Studies in mice don't necessarily translate to results in people

Karmazin was inspired to create his blood infusion treatment after seeing seeing several mouse studies that involve parabiosis, a 150-year-old surgical technique that connects the veins of two living animals. (The word comes from the Greek words para, or "beside," and bio, or "life.")

Irina Conboy, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley who pioneered one of these parabiosis studies in mice in 2005, found evidence that the exchange had done something positive for the health of the older mouse who received the blood of the younger mouse. But the animals weren't simply swapping blood — the older rodent was also reaping the benefits of the younger one's more vibrant internal organs and circulatory system.

In other words, the researchers couldn't say for sure whether it was the blood itself that was doing the apparent reviving or if the fact that the animals were linked in other ways was responsible for those perceived benefits.

In 2016, Conboy and her team ran another study to see what would happen if they merely exchanged the rodents' blood without connecting their bodies in any way. They found that while the muscle tissue in the older mice appeared to benefit slightly from the younger blood, they still couldn't say for sure that these modest benefits were coming from the young blood itself. After all, the experiment had also fundamentally changed the older mouse blood by diluting it.

"The effects of young blood on old tissue seems to be rejuvenating; however, there is no concrete evidence that young blood is what is causing the change in results. It may very well be the dilution of old blood," Ranveer Gathwala, a UC Berkeley stem-cell researcher in Conboy's lab who co-authored the 2016 paper, previously told Business Insider.

Nevertheless, Karmazin remains hopeful that the benefits he said he's witnessing are the result of young blood transfusions.

"I'm really happy with the results we're seeing," he said.

SEE ALSO: Tech elites are paying $7,000 to freeze stem cells from liposuctioned fat as a 'back up' for a longer life

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NOW WATCH: The 5 most extreme newborns in the animal kingdom

• A Silicon Valley blood-testing startup called Telomere Diagnostics sells a $99 kit that tells customers the average length of their telomeres.
• Telomeres are seen by some researchers as a holy grail of aging. Unlike other factors, such as your genetics or upbringing, telomere length appears to change in response to behaviors like diet and exercise.
  
• But two of Telomere Diagnostics' original founders, along with a NASA researcher who specializes in telomeres, raised doubts about the efficacy of the test.
• A former Telomere Diagnostics employee also alleged that the company's lab was "filthy" and said she didn't "believe in the science" behind the test.

Age is just a number, unless you're talking about your "cellular age."

Cellular age, according to a Silicon Valley company called Telomere Diagnostics, reveals more about your health than a birth date ever could.

Telomere Diagnostics sells a $99 at-home blood-testing kit that tells customers the average length of their telomeres, the tiny protective caps on our DNA believed to protect us from aging's steady wear and tear.

Then the company offers health advice based on the test results.

Telomeres are seen by some researchers as a holy grail of aging. That's because unlike other factors such as your genes or upbringing, telomere length appears to change in response to a variety of activities. Commit to regular exercise and your telomeres will grow, Telomere Diagnostics claims. Start binging on fast food and they'll shrink.

"It's like a fitness tracker for your DNA," Jason Shelton, the CEO of Telomere Diagnostics, told Business Insider. "It can change based on actions you take, and you can see the results immediately."

But two of Telomere Diagnostics' three original founders, along with a NASA researcher who specializes in telomeres, aren't so sure.

Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, in 2009, cofounded Telomere Diagnostics in 2010. The company still shows images of a Nobel Prize on its website, but Blackburn left the company more than five years ago because of concerns she had about its products.

Elissa Epel, another UCSF researcher who cofounded the company with Blackburn, left at the same time for the same reasons.

Both researchers told Business Insider that they questioned the efficacy of Telomere Diagnostics' test. And a former Telomere Diagnostics employee said she witnessed practices that raised doubts about the company's cleanliness, commitment to scientific accuracy, and handling of private health information.

The emerging science of telomeres

In 2009, Blackburn shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for her work demonstrating that our cells' chromosomes — the wishbone-shaped structures that contain our DNA — are capped with delicate structures, or telomeres, that help shield our genetic material from wear and tear.

It gave rise to a fervor of telomere research. Nearly 1,300 papers containing the word "telomeres" came out in 2017 — a nearly fourteenfold increase from 1991, when there were fewer than 100 such papers.

But the links between telomere length, health, and aging are not yet clear cut.

Shorter telomeres have been tied to higher rates of disease, faster tumor growth, and overall age-related degeneration. But longer telomeres have not been tied to the opposite outcomes; several recent studies have failed to find any link between long telomeres and positive health effects, and longer-than-normal telomeres have also been tied to an increased risk of cancer.

Many activities appear to have the power to grow or blunt telomeres, from exercise to smoking, but scientists have not yet been able to prove that this relationship is causal. That means that we still do not fully understand telomeres or their role in aging and disease. So trying to lengthen or shorten your telomeres as a health intervention is arguably premature and, at worst, harmful, some experts say.

And there is no recognized optimal telomere length for health. According to Blackburn, that makes the idea of telling someone their cellular age based on the length of their telomeres problematic — at least for now.

Still another hurdle is that measurements of telomere length vary depending on the method used to test them. Some testing procedures look at the length of all the telomeres in a given blood sample and give you the average — the method that Telomere Diagnostics uses — while other tests focus exclusively on the shortest telomeres in a sample.

But telomere science is a highly promising area for future studies, many researchers say. When looking across large populations, telomeres hold intriguing clues about how everything from diet to smoking affects our cells and their ability to self-repair and replenish.

"The research uses of telomere analyses, done with high quality controls and on sufficiently large and carefully done cohort studies, are scientifically valuable," Blackburn said. "It is just the value right now of commercial testing of individuals without clearly telling those tested the whole story that I find questionable."

A NASA scientist says astronaut Scott Kelly 'threw a wrench' into one hypothesis about telomeres

Because of their potential connection to aging, stress, and disease, telomeres are of particular interest to researchers at NASA.

As part of its NASA Twin Study, researchers are using Scott Kelly and his identical twin brother, Mark, to explore how the intense stress of spaceflight spurs changes inside the body. Scott lived in space for a year while his Mark stayed on Earth, and scientists examined Scott's genes after he returned.

They found evidence of a body trying to protect itself from strain. But his telomeres did not respond the way scientists had expected. Instead of shrinking, as telomeres are believed to do in response to stress or negativity, they grew longer.

Susan Bailey, a professor of radiation-cancer biology and one of the lead NASA researchers studying the Kelly twins, told Business Insider that the discovery "threw a wrench into the hypothesis" that healthy behaviors lengthen telomeres while unhealthy ones shorten them.

It was a reminder, she said, of how much we still don't know about the links between telomeres, health, and aging.

"There's a lot of good research that shows shorter telomeres are linked with heart disease, whereas longer ones are associated with an increased risk of things like cancer," Bailey added. "I think you have to balance those things. It's not just, 'Oh, I have longer telomeres, so I'm going to live longer and be healthier.' You may live longer, but you may get cancer, too."

From Nobel Prize to brazen startup

After she discovered telomeres, Blackburn believed that measuring them could give doctors and patients a way to spot signs of poor health early. So in 2010 she founded Telome Health along with Epel and another UCSF researcher, Jue Lin, who still serves on the company's scientific advisory board but told Business Insider she was "not very" involved with them. The startup aimed to help accelerate the pace of telomere research.

"Our vision was to enroll people in research [with a consent form], tell them their results in a responsible way, and learn more about the effects of testing," Epel said.

Blackburn served as a cofounder, board member, and chair of the company's scientific advisory committee.

Several of Blackburn's colleagues in the field expressed doubts about the usefulness of the blood test between 2010 and 2013, but she called the test's utility "a no-brainer" in 2013 interview with The New York Times.

A few months after that interview, Blackburn left Telome Health. The decision, she told Business Insider, was the result of an internal conflict. A board member wanted to team up with a supplement company called TA Sciences, which was making a plant-extract pill that it claimed could lengthen telomeres and fight aging and disease.

Blackburn said she had concerns that the supplement, known as TA-65, "carried a very scientifically plausible risk of being cancer-causing." The board out-voted Blackburn.

"This was sufficient for me ... to sever [my] relationship with the company," she said.

TA-65 is made with telomerase, an enzyme that appears to spur telomeres to elongate. But that growth may also seed the germination of cancer cells by making it easier for them to proliferate, according to research from several biologists, including Blackburn.

Jim Cich, the president of TA Sciences, told Business Insider that he believed Blackburn's doubts "revolved around a worry a few people had in the early days of telomere biology," adding that those concerns were "currently out of date with the thinking of most telomere biologists."

But a study published in the journal Genome Medicine in 2016 suggested that deactivating telomerase — as opposed to reactivating it, as TA-65 claims to do — could be a promising anticancer treatment.

Cich, however, said TA-65 was safe and effective.

"TA Sciences has spent several million dollars on product testing including double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials that demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of TA-65," he said.

Within a year of leaving the company, Blackburn had stepped down from all leadership roles and donated all of her equity to a nonprofit. Epel and Lin Blackburn's cofounders, also left at that time for the same reason.

"The company's direction was drifting away from the scientific basis underpinning its formation," Blackburn thought.

But the work continued. The company changed its name to Telomere Diagnostics and began selling its telomere testing kits, called TeloYears, for $99. Lin, the third cofounder, rejoined the company's scientific advisory board at this time.

When asked about the test's accuracy, Jason Shelton, Telomere Diagnostics' CEO, said that since he took on a leadership role at the company, in 2014, "We have remained strongly committed to advancing telomere science." To that end, the company published an article in a peer-reviewed journal last year that said the company's telomere-measuring techniques were scientifically valid.

Shelton said the company's relationship with TA Sciences "was terminated" when he took over in 2014.

Today, Telomere Diagnostics sells a different supplement that it says is based on scientific research that has found links between various vitamins — including vitamins D and E — and longer telomeres.

Telomere Diagnostics is now doing well financially, according to Alexandre Levert, a board member who represents a French shareholder in the company. Levert told Business Insider that 2017 was one of the "strongest years so far" in terms of revenue.

How Telomere Diagnostics determines cellular age

The process of getting your cellular age from the TeloYears test is somewhat similar to the one that genetics and ancestry-testing companies use. Customers get a box in the mail, which contains a kit for providing biological samples (TeloYears uses blood; other companies use saliva). Customers follow the instructions, then ship their blood sample back to the company for processing.

Once a doctor signs off on the order, customers receive a report in the mail that purports to tell them whether the age of their cells "in TeloYears" is older or younger than their actual age. This result is an indicator of "how well a person is aging," Shelton said.

"You can use your results to improve your overall health by finding … the motivation to take steps to slow down the clock on the aging process," the Telomere Diagnostics website reads.

Those steps, according to the company, involve more exercise, sleep, and healthier eating.

"Your TeloYears results can also be used, through repeat testing, to track how your choices are affecting your aging," the description says.

All those recommendations are "common sense," Lin, the third cofounder, told Business Insider. Despite this, she said the test would be helpful to many people who "don't have the motivation to improve or maintain their health."

"If knowing your telomere length is the thing that allows them to have that motivation, that could be a potential use," Lin said.

'I didn't believe in the science'

A former Telomere Diagnostics employee, who worked for the company as a supervisor on a contract basis in 2017, spoke with Business Insider anonymously about her experience out of fear of retribution.

Several events made her uneasy about the work she was doing, she said. On one occasion, the employee said, a Telomere Diagnostics customer complained that their TeloYears results were inaccurate. The customer said that because they regularly exercised and ate healthy, they must have a younger "cellular age" than the one the test yielded. According to the employee, Telomere Diagnostics responded by sending the customer a new kit, then returned results showing a new "cellular age" that was decades younger.

"The test is garbage," she said, adding, "I didn't believe in the science."

Shelton denied that the company had ever fudged the numbers on a report and said such behavior would be grounds for firing an employee.

The former employee also alleged that she observed several organizational errors in the lab that jeopardized patient privacy. She twice saw staff members accidentally mix up customers' test results, she said, which led them to mail one customer's health information to the wrong person. In one of those cases, a customer sent back a report that belonged to another patient, she alleged.

Shelton said those two errors did occur, but said "both were promptly rectified.”

Finally, the employee alleged that Telomere Diagnostics' lab was once infested by mice. She said she raised the issue "over and over again" in meetings with management, but "people wouldn't listen." She quit.

"That lab is the filthiest, most screwed-up lab I've ever seen in my life," she said, adding, "I'm honestly stunned that they're still in existence."

The former employee also worked in the lab of Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos, which was plagued by scandal and announced plans to formally dissolve in September.

Shelton did not deny the allegation about a mouse infestation but said "any traces of pests would be addressed according to accepted pest-control procedures."

Levert, the Telomere Diagnostics board member, agreed with Shelton, telling Business Insider that during his "regular" visits to the company's lab he never saw any evidence supporting the former employee's claims.

"We're putting all of our efforts into a really high-quality lab where we're upgrading regularly," Levert said. "Any inspections we've had have been very positive."

2 founders raise questions over accuracy

Some researchers who specialize in telomeres — including Blackburn and Epel — said the science wasn't yet advanced enough for any company to offer health advice based on measurements of telomere length.

"Telomere length is another risk factor, just like cholesterol," Epel told Business Insider. "But the current tests for it are probably not accurate for widespread use, or for single use for individuals."

Bailey, the NASA scientist, said a few crucial steps were necessary before such tests could be considered trustworthy.

"At the most basic level, one of the first things we need to do is standardize how telomere length is being measured and make sure we're measuring what we think we're measuring in the first place," Bailey said.

But Shelton, Telomere Diagnostics' CEO, said telomeres' malleability is precisely what makes them useful.

"If you do an ancestry test, there's no amount of push-ups you can do that can change what percent Irish you are," Shelton said. "But your telomere length is one of those unique parts of DNA that's been shown in clinical studies to change based on a variety of lifestyle modifications."

Shelton encouraged customers to take the test several times so that they could track how their telomere length shifts based on, say, eating healthier or working out more regularly.

"We can help inspire people to improve their overall lifestyle and engage on their own personal journey through what is perhaps the oldest and most important problem shared by all mankind," he said. "How do you put more years in your life, and how do you put more life in your years?"

But of course the more times a person takes the TeloYears test, the more money Shelton's company makes.

SEE ALSO: Tech elites are paying $7,000 to freeze stem cells from liposuctioned fat as a 'back up' for a longer life

DON'T MISS: 40 AND UNDER: The Silicon Valley biotech stars who are backing startups aiming to cure disease, prolong life, and fix the food system

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 3 compelling reasons why we haven't found aliens yet

• The day before she appeared on "Shark Tank," Doddle & Co cofounder Nicki Radzely froze up and forgot her name during the final rehearsal.
• Radzely, who was pitching the Pop Pacifier, had to appear on the show alone because her cofounder, Janna Badger, had just given birth.
• Despite all the commotion, Radzely earned multiple offers, ultimately accepting $250,000 from Kevin O'Leary.

Nicki Radzely and Janna Badger, the founders of Doddle & Co, were supposed to appear on "Shark Tank" together.

But a few days before the episode was scheduled to film, Badger, who was living in Seoul, South Korea, gave birth to her third child. Radzely would have to dive into the tank alone.

Doddle & Co makes baby products. including pacifiers and teethers; on the "Shark Tank" episode, Radzely was pitching the Pop Pacifier, which is designed to stay clean because the nipple pops back in every time it falls. At the time, the company was just four months old.

The day before the episode was filmed, there was a final rehearsal with the show's producers. "I went out on the rehearsal stage feeling really confident, that I'd done this before to some degree and that I was going to hit the ball out of the park," Radzely told Business Insider.

But when the producers drew back the curtain, Radzely said, there was no audience, no stage. All she could see was "a sea of desks and laptops and everyone completely silent, staring back at me."

Undeterred, Radzely looked at the producers and said, "Hi. My name is…"

"I completely froze and forgot my name," Radzely recalled. The producers gave her a second chance, reassuring her that she'd be fine. "I was like, ‘OK, you got this. You know what you're doing.'"

Once again, she walked through the curtain and said, "Hi. My name is…" This time, the producers took pity on her, telling her simply to practice before the next day.

Radzely went back to her hotel room in a state of panic and spent the next 12 hours rehearsing.

Standing on the "Shark Tank" stage, Radzely was perfectly poised and delivered her pitch seamlessly. She received multiple offers, including a joint offer from Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, and Lori Greiner. Ultimately, Radzely opted to accept Kevin O'Leary's offer: $250,000 for 10% of the company.

Today, Doddle & Co has reached nearly $1 million in sales.

"The show was tremendous for the brand," Radzely said, largely because it put their name out into the world.

In that sense, she said, "we got a good deal."

SEE ALSO: 'Shark Tank' founders who were called 'sock cockroaches' on national TV prepared answers to about 300 questions before they even appeared on the show — and they landed a $200,000 deal

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NOW WATCH: I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for a week like a Navy SEAL

• Business Insider has obtained confidential startup salary information collected by Andreessen Horowitz, a top Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.
• The data sheds light on exactly how much people are getting paid in leadership roles in American's fiercely competitive technology-startup industry.
• It includes base salaries, bonuses, and equity offers for more than 30 different roles, from CEO to SVP of Sales, and at different stages of company funding, from Series A to Series D+.
• You can explore the data in the interactive charts below.

If you're joining a late-stage tech startup as a new vice president of sales, how much equity should you ask for?

What's a generous salary offer for a new chief technology officer at a young enterprise business?

How much is your boss really making?

In Silicon Valley's ultracompetitive job market, compensation information is a closely guarded secret. Workers take to platforms like company review site Glassdoor and anonymous social network Blind to figure out their market value, even as startups (and the venture capital firms that back and guide them) gather and hoard compensation data in efforts to remain competitive.

Business Insider has obtained the results of extensive salary-compensation surveys conducted by buzzy technology venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which provides a revealing window into exactly how much top executives at up-and-coming startups are getting paid.

Andreessen Horowitz — often referred to as a16z — annually surveys more than two-dozen executive search firms about more than 4,000 job offers that are made to executives across roughly 30 different roles. The positions range from chief executive officer (CEO) to senior vice president of technology to general counsel, at both consumer and enterprise startups across America, and at multiple stages of funding, reflecting the size of the companies in question. (When startups take outside funding from investors, it's typically referred to in "Series." Excluding early seed funding or angel-investment, Series A is the first major round of outside of funding, Series B is the second, and so on.)

As such, the a16z data is illuminating, providing clarity into the median compensation (in both cash and equity) of tech executives. The median salary offer for a Series C consumer CEO is $325,000, and they should expect a 50% bonus and a 6% equity grant. A senior director of engineering at a Series A startup might take home $200,000 in cash, and just 0.58% equity in their business. A vice-president of sales at a late-stage, Series D (or later) enterprise company is raking in $242,500 in base salary, but their total cash take-home is around $450,000. And so on.

Business Insider is republishing much of the data to provide insight — and inject a little transparency — into the hiring process in Silicon Valley and the American technology industry.

A spokesperson for a16z declined to comment.

As startups grow, salaries soar — but equity offers dwindle

First, here's the data for median total cash compensation and equity grants, and how it changes as a company grows and takes on more funding. Use the toggles on the interactive chart to switch between funding Series and salaries/equity. The data for both enterprise and consumer startups is presented where available (for some roles they are combined into one).

Tech startup salaries and equity offers by position

More than just a snapshot of the wallets of Silicon Valley's c-suite, the data gives an insightful look at the priorities of tech startups as they fight to grow in a fiercely competitive market.

For example, in later stage businesses, the amount of cash offered to enterprise CEOs is only marginally more than CTOs, with SVPs of Sales also extremely highly paid. As startups grow, the salaries on offer for new executives balloon — but the amount of equity on offer tends to shrink. And sales people live and die by their bonuses, some of which are around 100% of salary, while technical salaries are much more dependable.

The variance in base salaries, explored

Not all salaries are created equal, of course.

Even at similarly sized companies, there may be significant variance in the base salary, bonus, and equity offered to different candidates, based both on experience and a startup's resources.

In this second infographic, you can explore the median base salaries for different roles and funding stages, as well as the 25th and 75th percentile data. It also displays 25th and 75th percentile data for equity offers.

Base salaries and equity offers

Equity offers are at least as important as cash salaries for promising startups, and the promise of a major IPO payday down the road can be a big part of what draws talent away from big firms towards new business.

In smaller businesses, too, there can actually be incentive not to draw an overly large salary, if doing so nets a short-term payday but hinders the company's ability to hire and operate in the longer term.

And then there are other factors to take into consideration, like culture, work-life balance, the nature of the work — and of course the potential of the business itself. A 7% stake in a startup is garbage if that business is destined to fail in nine months.

The data is illuminating — but it has limits

It's also important to note where the data is limited.

This data was collected in 2017, and refers to offers made up to 2016 — so offers made for similar roles today are likely to be higher because of inflation and increased demand for talent in the technology industry.

There are more responses for some roles than others, meaning less popular ones — like a VP of International at a Series A company — may be less representative samples. Similarly, some roles — like a CISO (chief information security officer) — are atypical for early-stage startups, meaning those that have them are likely unusual and specialized.

Similarly, the data doesn't break down the particulars of a role. A marketer in charge of brand marketing and one in charge of digital marketing will have very different responsibilities, and likely different compensation packages, despite identical job titles.

This data also does not reflect startup founders' potential salaries and shares of equity. It refers only to the offers made to outside hires, and especially at early stages, roles like CEO and CTO are often occupied by (co)founders, who typically own significantly larger shares of the company they created. It also doesn't provide insight into compensation at startups that have not taken outside funding.

And the data does not break out on what terms hires are offered equity — for example, whether it is theirs immediately as an outright grant, subject to conditions, or will vest over a period of years.

'Knowledge is power'

There's a long-running taboo around discussing salaries — one that has traditionally given companies the upper hand in negotiations and made it hard for workers to ascertain exactly how much they're worth.

"While more and more employers across industries are embracing salary transparency, pay remains a difficult and sometimes anxiety-inducing subject for many job seekers to discuss with a potential employer," Glassdoor spokesperson Sarah Stoddard said in an email.

"This might sound like a cliché, but knowledge is power and that absolutely rings true when it comes to ensuring you earn fair compensation for the work you do ... you should always understand the current market value of your skills and the contributions you make to the company you work for."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1-650-636-6268 using a nonwork phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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If you're joining a late-stage tech startup as a new vice president of sales, how much equity should you ask for?

What's a generous salary offer for a new chief technology officer at a young enterprise business?

How much is your boss really making?

In Silicon Valley's ultra-competitive job market, compensation information is a closely guarded secret. 

Business Insider has obtained the results of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's annual survey of Silicon Valley startup compensation. The data, which has never been publicly reported before, provides a revealing window into exactly how much top executives at up-and-coming startups are getting paid, spanning roughly 30 different roles from CEO to general counsel to head of sales.

Subscribe here to read our exclusive story: Leaked Andreessen Horowitz data reveal how much Silicon Valley startups pay for talent »

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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•  John Chambers stepped down as CEO of Cisco in 2015, and left the board at the end of 2017.
• At age 69, he says he's embarked on a new career as an investor and advisor, with the goal of helping startups that will create jobs across the US. 
• And he just published a new book of business advice, too.
• He says he's having "the time of my life" in this new career.

"I'm not retired,  but I am on to my next chapters," John Chambers told Business Insider in the hours before his new book launched.

He's not kidding. First, there's the book: Titled "Connecting the Dots," it's part memoir and part business advice book. And then there's the 16–and—counting startups he's advising and/or has invested in, some of which are still in stealth mode — not to mention that he's personally mentoring some of the execs at those companies. 

Chambers is best known for his 24-year tenure as CEO of Cisco, a job he vacated in mid-2015, ultimately retiring from the chairman role, too, at the end of 2017. 

But, he says, he's working almost as hard now on his own investment company, together with his son out of his home office. The one big advantage over his Cisco days, he says: more time for fun.

"I'm just having the time of my life," he says. "My fly fishing is better. My golf game is improving, and I get to spend more time with my wife — who was my high school sweetheart — than before."

And, truth be told, sometimes he combines the work with the fun. "I took 22 people out fishing in Alaska for a week and half of them were my CEO startups, and half of them were my established leaders that were very good friends."

Dreaming big and surviving catastrophes

The book is full of tips on everything from setting big goals and beating competitors, to surviving failures. Chambers is both extremely proud of the book, but also says that he's somewhat uncomfortable in talking about some of it.

He's proud of the achivement of writing the book because he's dyslexic and "hates" to write, he tells Business Insider. The condition  damaged his ego as a child so much so that he didn't publicly fess up to having it until he had been running Cisco for years.

Although he wrote the book with help from author Diane Brady, "I worked on every word on that book," he says. "It took us 15 months and I thought I could do it in 90 days."

At the age of 69, he now sees dyslexia as one of his super-powers, forcing him to process information differently and allowing him to see patterns; a trait all business leaders must develop, he writes in the book.

Yet, he's a little uncomfortable, because in addition to giving business advice, Brady pushed him to recount more personal stories about himself in the book, he said. Those stories range from his childhood upbringing, through to his most painful mistakes leading Cisco.

For instance, the biggest mistake happened eleven years into his tenure, when the dot-com bubble burst and threatened to take Cisco with it, he recounts in the book.

Cisco had been struggling to meet demand for its Internet networking equipment. When the dot-com world crashed, "a quarter of our customers simply vanished. Raw material that we'd fought — and I mean fought — to get just months earlier was piling up in Cisco warehouses alongside gear designed for now-defunct customers and parts that might at best be salvaged for metal," he writes.

Cisco had to write-off $2.5 billion in inventory that year, one of the largest inventory write-downs in history, and investors and pundits began calling for his head on a platter.

He didn't get fired, but he vowed to never let that happen again. So Cisco created, and later became known for, a super tight supplier management system that ordered raw materials as needed, rather than stockpiling them in the way that got the company into trouble. 

The book gives other tips as well, like his advice on how to feel lucky: "People who believe that they're lucky tend to be optimists, outline bold goals, prepare for the opportunities and challenges and know exactly what they want to achieve. As a result, they tend to be lucky again and again," he writes.  

Perhaps one of the best anecdotes in the book is about his first day at Cisco when the company literally put him in a telephone closet for his office, and his coworkers were hostile — you can read the full excerpt below.

16 startups and counting

As for the daily work, Chambers is mentoring and coaching, advising and investing in startups. 

He's looking to help companies that can "grow rapidly and create jobs, not just for Silicon Valley, but in every state in the US," he tells us.

He's investing in everything from drone startups to "solving world hunger with crickets," as he puts it. He's referring to Aspire Food Groups, which uses the jumping bugs in foods like cricket granola, cricket flour and whole roasted crickets.

His goal with his investments, as well as his book, is to "get a replicable playbook," he says, to help companies grow as fast as possible.

But there's one big difference between being a coach/advisor and being the CEO, he says.

"I no longer have to do anything I don’t want to do," he laughs. "It’s like having grandkids. I get them excited. We have fun together and when they go to bed at night, I give them back to their management."

Office in the closet

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 3 of "Connecting the Dots" by John Chambers that shows that great success can come from even the most humble beginnings.

I was so excited when I showed up at the Cisco office in Menlo Park on my first day in 1991. I came in and they didn’t have anywhere for me to sit, so they put me literally in a telephone closet. All I could hear was this constant click click click of switching telephones in the background. When I stepped out of my closet, the place felt like chaos. Boxes were stacked up in the hall. People were racing around, looking busy, but it was hard to tell what they did.

I walked away from my first meeting that day with a distinct sense that several people on the senior team really didn’t like each other, or maybe they just didn’t like me.

As I walked back into my closet with the sound of clicking in the background, I wanted to pick up the phone and call [my wife] Elaine to say I’d made a terrible mistake.

Then a customer complaint came in and I went to share it with the folks in customer service. I went downstairs looking for our customer service department and was directed to where a few people were sitting near an inflatable penguin.

We both looked surprised at finding each other—me and the customer service team, not me and the penguin! It was then that I realized how much value I could add at this company. I had come to a place that knew its product but was dramatically underestimating its potential.

The Cisco that I joined in 1991 looked very different from the one I left in 2015. We had moved from an initial focus on routing to switching to Voice over IP to video, data centers, the cloud, collaboration, the Internet of Things, security, and country digitization, among other areas.

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• The SEC may make it easier for small investors to bet on unicorns. 
• Venture capitalists may have made billions investing in such companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, but that doesn't mean the average person will. 
• The change would reduce restrictions on accredited investors — meaning those with a net worth of at least $1 million or who can show income of over $200,000 for three years.
• But startups aren't stable investments, they can lack transparency, and historically, small investors haven't done as well.

The SEC may soon make it easier for small investors to bet on so-called unicorns, billion-dollar start-ups like Uber, Lyft, AirBnB. But while big-time venture capitalists may have made millions betting on these companies, that doesn't mean you will.

Last month, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton stated that the agency would research reducing restrictions on those defined as “accredited investors.”

Accredited investors refers to those folks with at least a net worth of $1 million or who can show income of over $200,000 for three straight years. With that status, they can place their wealth into areas of the financial world that Main Street investors can't, including private equity and venture capital opportunities, like in startups.

Since the announcement, a debate has unfolded between financial advisers and economists over the benefits of such a move.

This potential opportunity to dive into the venture capital world, however, isn't as clear-cut of a golden ticket as you might think.

Startups aren't stable investments

You don't have to look far to find a can't-miss startup that ended up in the trash heap. Just this month, biotechnology startup Theranos closed down, after once having a valuation that surpassed $9 billion. It turned out the machines it used to test blood samples didn't work.

While this is a dramatic example of startups ending up in disrepair, other darlings have closed for various reasons. Last year saw the demise of Jawbone, a wearable device manufacturer that once had a valuation of $3 billion.

Even if the company doesn't actually fail, there's a chance it never surpasses that valuation you're buying into. According to a study released last year, companies with at least $1 billion valuation were overvalued by an average of 49%. Nearly 1-in-10 of those companies were overvalued by 100%.

They lack transparency

One reason those betting on startups end up holding the short-end of the investing stick is due to the amount of information available for the firm. Since they're not public, the company doesn't have to provide as much information about the financials or results.

Due to this lack of information, it creates a lot of unknowns. It's one reason why brokers that have investor disputes on their record sell more private placements than brokers without such disputes.

Yet, even when you find good firms, you're not necessarily going to hit it big. Venture capital funds started in the 2000s have underperformed the S&P 500, while those that began in the 1990s – during the Internet boom – outperformed.”

History is not on your side

Even in the glory days of the Internet boom, many small investors got tripped up trying to buy in to latest hot start ups. Some bankers paid fines for “spinning” IPOs, or initial public offerings.

In exchange for underwriting commissions, bankers doled out under-priced shares to executives who could buy them at a profit and quickly resell them, when pent-up demand temporarily inflated the price.

Small investors were often the ones left holding the bag.

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• "Shark Tank" alumni, including the founders of Bombas and Coffee Meets Bagel, say their experience on the show was valuable even beyond getting an offer.
• For example, it forced the entrepreneurs to think about their business more carefully as they prepared for their appearance.
• Those founders who received offers say it confirmed that they had a compelling business idea.

Few if any "Shark Tank" alums will say they didn't care about the prospect of making a deal with one of the investors.

But many entrepreneurs have told Business Insider that their experience in the tank was valuable not solely for financial reasons.

Consider Randy Goldberg, cofounder of sock company Bombas. He and cofounder David Heath appeared on "Shark Tank" in 2014, ultimately landing a $200,000 deal with Daymond John.

Goldberg said the mere act of preparing for their appearance on "Shark Tank" was useful. The cofounders compiled a spreadsheet with nearly 300 questions that the Sharks had asked other entrepreneurs, and rehearsed their answers to these questions over and over again.

"It makes you take a look and examine things and have answers to questions that you might be ignoring," Goldberg said of the rehearsal process. "It brings things out in the open."

Jack Mann, founder of earplugs company Vibes, hired a coach to prepare for his appearance on "Shark Tank," and learned a technique to help him remember his pitch. Mann said he still uses the technique — which involves associating a keyword in each paragraph of your speech with a different image — today, when he gives presentations.

Multiple other entrepreneurs who received offers from Sharks said it confirmed for them that their business idea was compelling.

Dawoon Kang, cofounder and co-CEO of dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, appeared on "Shark Tank" in 2015 and declined Mark Cuban's offer of $30 million for the entire company. Kang said she and her cofounders have no regrets about turning Cuban down — even though other people called them greedy.

Still, Kang told Business Insider, "To get Mark Cuban to benchmark us at $30 million really was a huge testament and validation of all the work that was done to build this company."

Mark Lim, cofounder of Lollaland, went on "Shark Tank" in 2012 and won $100,000 from Cuban and Robert Herjavec. Lim told Business Insider that getting "validation" was a key benefit from the experience — especially since the business was still in its infancy at the time.

The exposure that comes with appearing on "Shark Tank"— which has a national audience of about 10 million, according to the New York Post— is perhaps the most meaningful benefit.

Nikki Radzely, cofounder of baby-product company Doddle & Co, won $250,000 from Kevin O'Leary. "Going on the show was tremendous for the brand," she said, largely because it brought "awareness to parents that were looking for a better solution to soothe their baby."

Mann felt similarly, though he ultimately turned down O'Leary's offer of $100,000. The two things of most value, he said, were the investors' "acumen and experience," as well as "the obvious exposure that comes from the show."

SEE ALSO: 'Shark Tank' founders who were called 'sock cockroaches' on national TV prepared answers to about 300 questions before they even appeared on the show — and they landed a $200,000 deal

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Health technology startups are seeing a lot of green, as investors are pouring in to get a piece of the industry's hottest young companies. 

Digital health startups this year have already raised $6.8 billion in funding, 20% more than the total raised in 2017, according to the seed fund Rock Health.

Investors are overwhelmingly in support of bringing healthcare services to the home, with companies offering on-demand healthcare services as their main draw receiving the most funding. This category includes in-home care, prescription delivery, and telehealth companies. The takeaway? Consumers still want in-person interactions with physicians and nurses and also want healthcare to be more accessible and convenient. 

While around 63% of the overall funding coming from independent venture funds, corporate entities such as big pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies are also becoming significant investors. One example of this is GSK's $300 million investment in genetic data company 23andMe. 

Tech companies are also staking a claim in the space as highlighted by Amazon's continued push into healthcare.  

Here are the digital health companies that have raised the most funding this year. 

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Peloton Interactive raised $550 million. It created an at-home bike that allows users to live-stream fitness classes. It also launched an at-home treadmill this year.

The company was rejected over 5,000 times by investors but is now worth $4 billion. According to Peloton CEO John Foley, Peloton wants to reinvent the way people work out altogether. Business Insider's Mary Hanbury also tried out the fitness bike for herself, read about her experience here. 

23andMe, which makes consumer genetic tests, raised $300 million.

23andMe was co-founded in 2006 by CEO Anne Wojcicki (the sister of YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki) and Linda Avey, who left the company in 2009. After some back and forth with the FDA, the company in April 2017 was officially authorized to market its direct-to-consumer tests for 10 different medical diseases and conditions, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. 

In July, drug giant GlaxoSmithKline signed a $300 million deal with the company. Business Insider's Lydia Ramsey tried out the company's $199 tests here. 

American Well, which connects patients with doctors in real-time over video, raised $291 million.

American Well is one of the best funded companies in the digital health space. It competes with similar companies like Teladoc and Doctor on Demand for investor attention. It's part of a wave of telemedicine that big companies like Apple have even dabbled in. 

• Three former Google executives founded Beeswax, an ad-tech startup that helps companies bid for ads in real time.
• The company sets up whiteboards in practically every room of its New York office, including the kitchen.
• Whiteboards have been a part of the company since it was founded in 2015, and they followed the executives as they moved from office to office.

For the three founders of Beeswax, the journey from working at Google to leading their own startup has one common thread: whiteboards.

The company, which pioneered a new way for marketers to bid for ads, is the brainchild of three former Google ad executives: its CEO, Ari Paparo, who more recently was an executive for Bazaarvoice and AppNexus; its chief technical officer, Ram Rengaswamy; and its chief product officer, Shamim Samadi.

When Paparo first told Samadi about his idea for the company, Samadi said he went back to Google to try to convince Rengaswamy.

"I immediately pulled Ram from his desk when I got back and whiteboarded it, talked him through it," he told Business Insider.

When the trio founded Beeswax in 2015, a whiteboard was the first thing they purchased as a company, Rengaswamy said.

It followed them as they moved from their first office — which was actually just a single table inside another company's space — to a series of WeWork offices as their New York City-based ad-tech company grew.

"The funny thing was, as we moved from place to place, it was always like, Ram and I walking down the street with a big whiteboard," Paparo said.

Now, Beeswax has its own office that can barely contain its rapidly expanding workforce. Whiteboards are popping up in unexpected locations.

"I think that's one part of our culture, a lot of whiteboards," Samadi said. "We like to spec everything out, write it down. Even our kitchen has a whiteboard at this point, so it's everywhere."

Apart from office supplies, there are other signs of Beeswax's impressive growth. The company, which makes software that helps companies bid for ads online in real time, has 75 clients, including Foursquare, Overstock, and Legendary Pictures. Their revenue from 2017 is estimated to be about $25 million.

The executives say they employ about 55 people, with plans to move to a new office and expand to 67 employees by the end of the year and to grow to 100 by the end of next year.

That's a far cry from that first space they had back in 2015. For the first few weeks of the company's existence, the founders worked inside the office of Chartbeat, a content-analytics company, after a friend of theirs at the company let them use the space free.

"It was a very loud office," Rengaswamy told Business Insider. "We were in the middle of the salespeople, I think, and they were on the phone all the time. It was great."

From there, the company bounced from one WeWork space to another — "there was a brief period of time where we couldn't afford windows" at one of the five they rented, Rengaswamy said — until finally landing at their latest space last year.

The presence of whiteboards in practically every room reflects the startup's commitment to problem-solving, creativity, and collaboration.

"I haven't stopped working, making decisions, being open, being a learner," Samadi said. "We realize that those are the values that we think are necessary for someone to be successful here."

SEE ALSO: Startup founders who landed a deal with Mark Cuban on 'Shark Tank' used a 100-year-old piece of business advice to build their company from the ground up

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• "Impostor syndrome" is the phenomenon in which people don't think they deserve their success and fear being exposed as frauds.
• Johnny Reinsch, CEO of fintech startup Qwil, said he's had impostor syndrome since he cofounded his company in 2015.
• Reinsch said he hopes his impostor syndrome never goes away because it motivates him to learn more and perform better.

One thing many successful people have in common is the feeling that they don't deserve their success.

That they're a fraud. That they've fooled everyone into believing they are competent, but they'll someday be exposed as phonies.

That feeling is called "imposter syndrome," and the CEO of one fintech startup says he's had it for three years and counting.

"When you're first getting going, I think everybody suffers from imposter syndrome," Johnny Reinsch, the cofounder and CEO of Qwil, told Business Insider.

Reinsch founded Qwil in 2015 as way to facilitate payment between freelance workers and their clients. Reinsch came up with the idea when he was working as an independent contractor and nearly defaulted on his mortgage because his clients weren't paying him on time.

His vision was a company that would stand between freelancers and clients, paying the clients whenever they want to access their cash and assuming the risk of the clients when they don't pay up right away.

But when Reinsch pitched Qwil to investors, he said he was turned down more than 100 times.

"You're going to hear 'no' and be told 'no' more if your idea is good, because it's new and radical, then if it's something that sounds comfortable," he told Business Insider.

"It's tough to go in with your heart and soul behind something, and you know you see something that other people don't, but you're meeting the smartest people in the investment community and they're saying 'I don't quite see what you see.'"

The initial negative responses made Reinsch question whether he was CEO material. He went through "a lot of tough, tough weeks and nights and self doubt," he said.

The tide is slowly starting to turn for Qwil. In April, the company announced it had raised $5 million in Series A funding. Reinsch said Qwil has 15 employees and has plans for more growth.

But Reinsch said he still gets the feeling that he's not the right person for the job, and although it might sound counter-intuitive, he said he hopes his impostor syndrome never leaves.

"Frankly, I don't want it to go away, because it helps me to operate better," he said. "It puts me in a mindset of always being in that beginners mindset and wanting to learn more so that I really am that right person."

"Because when it comes to the point where I'm not, I need to step aside, because what we're doing is bigger than my own ego at that point."

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• On an episode of "Shark Tank," Jack Mann, the founder of earplug company Vibes, turned down a $100,000 offer from Kevin O'Leary.
• Today, Mann doesn't regret the decision at all. As of 2017, Vibes had reached $2 million in sales.
• Even if Mann didn't walk away with cash, he said he still gained valuable experience pitching his business.

Vibes was only three months old when its founder Jack Mann appeared on "Shark Tank"— but Mann managed to win a $100,000 offer anyway.

Vibes makes reusable earplugs designed to preserve sound quality. Kevin O'Leary (a.k.a. "Mr. Wonderful") was intrigued, and he offered Mann $100,000 for 35% of the company, with a royalty of $2 for every pair of earplugs sold until O'Leary got his money back.

Mann turned O'Leary down.

"I know that Kevin often goes to royalty deals," Mann said on camera after he walked off stage. "I already knew going in there that that wasn't something I was willing to take. The business is too small, and we can't be pulling money out of it at this time."

Today, Mann told Business Insider, he has "zero regrets" about his decision. "We've been able to grow and bootstrap without the need for outside financing," he said. "I'm happy with where we are today, where we've grown, and where we're going to continue to grow."

As of 2017, Vibes had grown from an initial $33,000 investment to $2 million in sales.

Even if Mann didn't walk out with cash, he still got solid practice pitching his business.

Mann hired a coach to prepare for his appearance on "Shark Tank," and learned a technique to help him remember his pitch. Mann said he still uses the technique — which involves associating a keyword in each paragraph of your speech with a different image — today, when he gives presentations.

What's more, Mann said the viewer feedback he received after the show aired helped him expand the business into new markets.

Initially, he was focused on using the product at concerts — but he learned that people were excited to use it at fitness classes and sporting events, and even on motorcycle rides. The most surprising use case he learned about was for individuals with sensory disorders and autism.

The entire "Shark Tank" experience was like a "pressure cooker," Mann said. "It makes you think in a different way about your business when you have to present it in front of not only multimillion dollar investors, but also in front of a national audience. … It's like going through a crash course in defending your business."

SEE ALSO: An entrepreneur who went on 'Shark Tank' to pitch his 3-month-old startup in front of a national audience relied on an unusual memory technique to avoid panicking and forgetting his script

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NOW WATCH: I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for a week like a Navy SEAL

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

Though a popular business strategy for new startups today is to sell direct-to-consumer through their own websites, the practice often serves as a springboard for other retail opportunities, not an outright boycott. Direct-to-consumer selling hasn't replaced brick-and-mortar stores; rather, it has helped redefine how to create brand experiences and nurture loyal customer followings. 

In a similar fashion, many online startups eventually find their way into popular retail stores that you've been shopping at for years, whether for a limited run or a long-term residency — Leesa mattresses and The Bouqs Co. flowers at West Elm, or MVMT watches and Lively lingerie at Nordstrom, for example. It's just another way for these startups to get their products in front of more eyes, plus it's undeniably convenient to shop all your favorites at one site and enjoy free shipping and return perks. 

Target is also home to many direct-to-consumer startups you might recognize. It's a diverse bunch of brands: personal care, bedding, food, pets, and more. If I'm remembering my tendency to meander the aisles of Target correctly, it's the perfect place to discover new and interesting brands, so it's no wonder the following 12 online companies have decided to sell through the company.

Bark

Shop Bark dog treats and toys at Target here

Bark, the company behind dog treat and toy subscription BarkBox, sells adorable individual pet products through Target. If you're not sure whether you want to commit to the subscription, you can get a preview here. Check back often for seasonal themed toys and creative treat flavors like Hawaii Luau Roast Pork and Chicago Hot Dog. Profits from its Snacks That Give Back collection support local animal rescues. 

Casper

Shop Casper mattresses and bedding products at Target here

You've heard all about Casper's comfortable memory foam mattress, and you can now easily throw it into your cart alongside your other Target purchases. The breathable percale weave Cool Sheets and soft, supportive pillow are also popular choices from the online sleep startup. 

Native

Shop Native natural deodorant at Target here

Native is an aluminum- and paraben-free natural deodorant that's safer for your body and comes in a variety of nice scents. Unlike other deodorants, it doesn't leave sticky residue and for some users, it lasts even longer than traditional deodorant. 

• Silicon Valley has long had a diversity problem.
• Women, African-Americans, and Latinos are underrepresented in the tech industry and tend to be paid less than their white male counterparts.
• But the diversity problem is even worse than that; a new study found that the gender disparity in equity — or stock ownership — held by tech workers and founders is even worse than the pay gap.
• In Silicon Valley, stock holdings can be much more important and valuable than salaries.
• The disparity is important, because Silicon Valley's ecosystem centers around startup founders who cash in their shares when their companies go public or are acquired.

It's no surprise that the tech industry has a diversity problem.

But it turns out that the problem is much bigger than people in Silicon Valley and beyond may have realized.

It's well known that women, blacks, and Latinos are underrepresented in tech companies, particularly in the upper ranks. It's also well known that they tend to get paid less in salary for the same jobs than their white male counterparts. But the tech industry has a far larger divide that's been mostly kept secret until now, having to do with the ownership of companies.

Much of the payoff that tech workers get from working in the industry comes in the form of ownership stakes in their companies, whether in the form of founders' shares or stock options or restricted stock. It turns out that distribution of those shares is even more titled in favor of men than pay or representation within companies, a recent study from Carta found. And the underlying value of the shares is even more weighted in favor of men.

"It was even worse than we expected," said Chloe Sladden, a member of the #Angels investing group, whose February blog post inspired Carta's study.

Women hold just 9% of the wealth linked to shares in tech startups

Carta offers an online service that helps companies manage their employee-owned shares and options. For its study, it looked at the private, venture-backed companies in its database. It didn't have direct information on employees' gender, but inferred it from their names, excluding those that were ambiguous. By definition, all the people included in the study held some sort of ownership stake in their companies; employees that don't have options or shares in their companies aren't in Carta's database.

Women comprised 33% of the people in the study; in other words, they made up about a third of all employee shareholders. But their shares were worth just 9% of the total value held by all employee owners in the study. Of the $42.6 billion held by the startup founders or workers included in Carta's study, just $4 billion was held by women.

Much of that imbalance is due to the paucity of venture-backed female founders and the value of the firms they lead. Women represent just 13% of all the founders in Carta's database. And their share of the total value of founder-held shares is only 6%.

"There's just a disproportionately low amount of capital going to back women," said Jana Messerschmidt, another member of the #Angels group.

Women do better as employees than as founders, but they still are getting a raw deal when it comes to equity stakes in their companies. Some 35% of non-founder employees in Carta's database are women. But their shares are worth just 20% of the total value held by such employees.

Put another way, women tech workers hold about 47 cents worth of equity for every dollar held by their male counterparts.

Startups don't tend to bring on women until later

Women lag behind men in part because they tend to be a small minority of the early employees at tech companies. At firms with 20 or fewer equity-holding employees, just 29% are women, on average. Even at companies with 101 to 400 equity employees, women make up just 35% to 36% of those workers. It's not until firms get to more than 400 workers that their portion of employee-owners who are women goes north of 40%.

By comparison, women comprise some 47% of workers in the total private US workforce.

Their low representation at early-stage startups is important. Early workers tend to get more valuable share grants than later workers, in part because they get in on the ground floor, when the company is usually worth very little.

Additionally, a disproportionate portion of the early hires at startups are engineers or developers, workers who are typically seen as vital to the startups' success and often paid accordingly. Women tend to be dramatically underrepresented in such positions.

Startups generally wait until later in their development to fill out the departments where women are more prominent, such as marketing, human resources, and sales — and they tend to award them with fewer and less valuable shares.

"The amount of equity that's given to employees decays over time," said Henry Ward, Carta's CEO.

The study had some notable shortcomings. Carta's database doesn't actually include equity holders' gender. The company inferred gender from the holders' names, excluding those from its study that were ambiguous. So the equity disparity could be somewhat bigger or smaller than what Carta found.

Additionally, the database doesn't include any data about holders' race or ethnicity. So, Carta wasn't able to look at the equity differences among different groups. Those too are likely to be significant. African-Americans and Latinos have long been grossly underrepresented in the tech industry. And a recent study indicates that members of those groups tend to be in lower-paying positions on average than their white counterparts and, even accounting for that, tend to be paid less than whites in comparable positions.

This is more than just a problem for the 1%

To be sure, compared with other inequality problems the US faces, disparity in equity compensation and holdings may seem rather trivial. Many workers — particular those in lower-skilled jobs — don't get health care benefits or sick days, much less stock options.

Tech workers, meanwhile, are generally well compensated overall, regardless of how many options they get. And when you're talking about founders, you're often talking about people in the top 1% of income earners.

But the disparity does matter, at least in terms of its downstream consequences. Much of Silicon Valley's ecosystem is built around the equity held by successful startup founders. Those founders often take their payouts when their firms are acquired or go public and use them to create other firms or to fund other entrepreneurs through so-called angel investments.

Many also join venture capital firms, where they help determine which of the next generation of startups get funding, or sit on tech company boards, where they help shape the composition of executive teams. They also often use their startup payouts to set up foundations that give out money to their preferred charities.

Silicon Valley is a clubby place. Founders tend to hire people who look like them, went to college with them, or run in the same social circles. VCs tend to invest in companies with founders that either look like them or look like founders who succeeded in the past. In both cases, the people who get funding or top positions tend to be male and white or, to some extent, Asian.

And that's become something of a cycle. White male VCs fund startups run by white men who, when they cash out, become VCs who fund the next generation of white male entrepreneurs.

So the disparity in equity in Silicon Valley doesn't just affect who's seeing the big bucks when a company goes public, it also affects who gets funded the next time around, who gets hired, what products and services are developed, and what communities see investments.

"In Silicon Valley, money from a successful exit is about more than just wealth," said Sladden. "It's the power to shape and choose the products and institutions that shape Silicon Valley the for next generation."

SEE ALSO: Silicon Valley's MeToo moment is changing the venture capital industry — but many wonder if it will last

SEE ALSO: This Stanford grad went from living in motels to working in VC — here's his unusual path and how he wants to help others like him

SEE ALSO: This female founder went from teaching middle schoolers to mentoring tech entrepreneurs — here's her unusual path and how she plans to help others succeed in Silicon Valley

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Apple's entire iPhone XS event in 8 minutes

• Many people wonder how to start a business successfully. According to Brian Scordato, the founder of Tacklebox Accelerator, the first thing to do is keep your day job.
• Tacklebox is a six-week program geared toward founders with full-time jobs. Scordato helps those founders bring their business concepts to fruition, slowly and steadily.
• Tacklebox doesn't take equity; instead it charges founders $2,500.
• Scordato and Tacklebox alums and mentors say even if you go through the program and realize you don't want to pursue your business idea any longer, that's still a positive outcome.
• Tacklebox has a broad definition of success, and Scordato thinks it's OK that not every company will be a billion-dollar business.

The first thing to know as a founder in Tacklebox Accelerator is that you will not "move fast and break things."

That mantra, once touted by Facebook and other tech companies, is antithetical to the Tacklebox approach to entrepreneurship. At the first of each session's six workshops, Tacklebox founder Brian Scordato says as much to the founders seated before him.

Instead, Tacklebox is about making slow and steady progress. Case in point: Scordato advises the founders not to quit their day job until they're (almost) certain their business is viable.

Launched in 2015, Tacklebox is a six-week program during which Scordato guides about eight founders, many of whom still have full-time jobs, in bringing their business ideas to fruition. Tacklebox isn't an accelerator in the traditional sense: Founders don't give up equity in their companies; instead, they pay $2,500 to attend what can seem like "startup school."

The goal, Scordato said, is to show founders that successful entrepreneurship is, above all, "practice-able and teachable and learnable."

Entrepreneurs who keep their day jobs may be more successful in the long run

Admittedly, the slow-and-steady strategy isn't the sexiest. A story about an entrepreneur who up and quit her day job to pursue her startup dreams is generally much more compelling than an entrepreneur who waited it out until the time was just right.

But Scordato makes a persuasive case for caution. "You're always proving that this is worth your time," he told me.

"A lot of our founders have really, really good jobs and they've busted their asses to create a little bit of savings," he said. "Most of our founders don't come in and say, 'I hate my job; I want to leave.' It's more like, 'I really, really like my job. It's helped me gain this certain insight and I want to start a company based on that. But I want to make sure that it's worth leaving this awesome job for it.'"

What's more, he said, having a full-time job means you necessarily have limited time to work on your business. So you have to prioritize, and do only the tasks that are most important. "It's interesting how it works when you force yourself into the confines to really focus on the 80/20 stuff," Scordato said, referring to the idea that 20% of your efforts often produce 80% of your results.

Scordato's observations are backed by some research and anecdotal evidence.

In his 2016 book, "Originals," Wharton professor Adam Grant wrote that, contrary to popular belief, the most successful entrepreneurs don't quit their day job to start a company. One University of Wisconsin study found that entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs were 33% less likely to fail than those who don't.

Grant cites the example of Bill Gates, who was testing his idea for Microsoft on the side before he took a leave of absence from Harvard to go all in.

Similarly, Kathryn Minshew, cofounder and CEO of The Muse, didn't quit her job at McKinsey until she was confident in the strength of her business. And the founders of jewelry company Aurate told Business Insider that starting a business on the side, while they were employed at Marc Jacobs and Goldman Sachs, made them better entrepreneurs.

"Some people think about founders and think about startups as 23-year-olds starting something, and it's actually a good idea for them to do it even if it fails. It's a cool life experience," Scordato said. "That's for the most part not my founders. My founders have enormous opportunity cost for starting these things."

Scordato also looks specifically for founders who have developed domain expertise over the course of their career. "You should have been subconsciously preparing to build this company for a long time, in a way such that your skill sets and knowledge bases have already distanced you from any competition," he said.

Indeed, an MIT study found the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. The study authors found that work experience explains much of the age advantage. They write in the Harvard Business Review,"Relative to founders with no relevant experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85% more likely to launch a highly successful startup."

If a founder goes through Tacklebox and decides not to pursue their business idea, that's still considered a success

The most recent cohort of Tacklebox businesses included a dating app, a startup to make travel more comfortable, and a career-management platform.

I sat in on two of the workshops and listened to a recording of a third. At the first workshop, Scordato told the founders that sometimes, people get to the end of the program and realize they don't want to launch their startup. "That's OK, too," he said.

I was skeptical: Who spends six weeks and $2,500, only to realize that, oops, their business idea stinks? But the Tacklebox alums I spoke to said they'd rather spend some time and money to realize their business idea isn't workable than quit their jobs and blow a huge amount of cash, only to reach the same conclusion a year down the line.

Shawn Cheng, a partner at the venture production studio ConsenSys Labs, has been a mentor to Scordato and to Tacklebox founders; he told me that the biggest value of the program is learning "how to learn," or learning "how to walk away."

Most startup accelerators take an "all or nothing" approach, Cheng said, in that you either build a company or waste everyone's time; Tacklebox is geared toward founders thinking that "they have an idea and they want to be testing it, and they want to be talking to more people about it, but they're not quite sure how they should validate it in order to put everything else in their lives on hold to pursue it."

Sam Alston, the founder of Big Lives, which identifies up-and-coming fashion designers, was in the eighth cohort of Tacklebox, in 2017. She credits the program with giving her the confidence to leave her job, as a client development director at Louis Vuitton.

Alston said she frequently recommends Tacklebox to aspiring entrepreneurs, noting that Scordato is transparent about the fact that "the skills that you gain should allow you to then test any business idea"— not just the one you're currently working on. "It's really selling a framework rather than consulting on a specific business."

Scordato also told me that a handful of founders have gone through Tacklebox with one business idea, realized they didn't like it, and waited another year or so before going through Tacklebox again with a better one.

It's a program Scordato might have benefited from earlier in his career. In the past 11 years, he's launched three startups, aside from Tacklebox: a recruiting platform for college basketball, a dating app, and a social-networking app. None of them are still in operation.

Scordato's real talent seems to be spotting other entrepreneurs with potential, and giving them the guidance and mentorship they need to develop their nascent businesses. He also brings in a series of outside experts, including successful founders and investors like Cheng. Each cohort of founders gets a chance to pitch their businesses to a group of investors, less to convince them to sign on and more to get feedback about how well they articulate their business' mission and goals.

Unicorns aren't the only startups welcome at Tacklebox

Tacklebox has fed a few startups into Y Combinator, such as The Lobby, which gives job candidates a chance to chat with employees at top finance firms. While its founder Deepak Chhugani was in Tacklebox, he and Scordato devised a plan to get him into Y Combinator. Tacklebox also introduced Chuugani to Angela Lee, founder of the venture capital firm 37Angels and chief innovation officer at Columbia Business School, who wound up investing in The Lobby later on.

Chuugani is glad he went through Tacklebox before Y Combinator. He told me that, in Y Combinator, after three months, if you don't think your idea is viable, it's a much more high-stakes situation. "You're forced to find any idea that might work," he said, "because now you've raised money from the accelerator." He added, "YC changed my life," but "you should be a little bit prepared to know what you're getting yourself into if you're going to raise money."

Despite Chhugani's success, Scordato said that the majority of Tacklebox startups aren't suited to Y Combinator. The Lobby "has the potential to be a very high-growth, very huge exit sort of company," but it's an exception.

Some founders go onto more niche accelerators, like New York Fashion Tech Lab — but for about half of Tacklebox startups, Scordato said, "maybe they need a little bit of money to build the initial tech platform, or they need to hire someone to do that, but it's not going to be a big challenge. They can start operating and become profitable quickly."

Lee, the 37Angels founder, said Scordato and Tacklebox are more open-minded about success than most other startup accelerators. That is to say, getting into the uber-selective Y Combinator isn't the only measure of success.

Lee mentioned the concept of "lifestyle startups," a term that's emerged in the last decade to describe a business that doesn't need venture capital and won't necessarily be worth $1 billion, ever. Lee said the term is often perceived negatively; but lifestyle startups, she said, are welcomed at Tacklebox. A lifestyle startup can still bring in $10 million a year, she said — and "since when did making $10 million a year become a failure?"

"We LOVE those," Scordato wrote in an email, referring to lifestyle startups. "What we really stress is that companies that could be great lifestyle businesses and probably won't be unicorns shouldn't try to become unicorns. They should build sound, revenue-generating businesses that can build great products at a high margin for a (relatively) small group of customers."

In an irony that's not lost on its founder, Tacklebox itself is one such startup. "I love that Tacklebox is practicing what it's preaching," Cheng said. He mentioned that Tacklebox has already gone through several iterations, holding workshops on weekends, mornings, and evenings, and offering higher and lower price points.

"It's got to be scary for Brian," Cheng added, "but I commend him for that and for not being afraid of trying new things and experimenting."

SEE ALSO: 'Entrepreneurship porn' lures young people with a pretty picture of startup life, but it glosses over the most dangerous parts

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NOW WATCH: I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for a week like a Navy SEAL

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• When you're making sauces, gravies, and other thick foods, using a saucier is preferable to a saucepan because it lets you stir, whisk, and reduce ingredients more efficiently. 
• Kitchen cookware startup Made In's saucier ($99) is even more rounded in shape than a typical saucier and is perfect for serious home cooks looking to improve their sauce-making. 
• Though the saucier used to be more of a professional kitchen mainstay, Made In's well-designed, durable, and accessibly priced saucier deserves a space in your own kitchen. 

In every home cook's kitchen you're likely to find a saucepan, the small round cooking pot with tall sides that's used for making sauces and gravies or warming up liquids.

You're less likely to find a saucier, a similar type of pot that has a rounded bottom and slightly flared top. If you don't frequently make sauces, risottos, custards, and other types of foods that require frequent stirring or whisking, a saucier will just be another extraneous piece of cookware taking up space in your cabinet.

However, if you are a sauce enthusiast and are frustrated with the flaws of a traditional saucepan, you should consider investing in a saucier. 

I recently tested Made In's saucier, the shape and design of which made me question why I've put up with making sauces in a traditional saucepan for so long.

Made In is a made-in-America, direct-to-consumer kitchen company that first wowed me with its nonstick frying pan, and it makes a variety of other quality cookware essentials.

Its three-quart saucier, in particular, was designed based off customers' feedback, and because Made In can control all of its production processes, it was able to make a more "curated" saucier that specifically addresses these customer needs. 

Made In's saucier is more rounded in shape than a traditional saucier, making it even easier to stir ingredients around. It's also more flared in shape at the top to encourage better evaporation when you're reducing sauces and gravies. 

I made a variety of sauces, including a chunky tomato sauce filled with vegetables and a creamy alfredo sauce, in the saucier and the processes were so much smoother thanks to the design of the pot.

Because it doesn't have hard edges like a saucepan, ingredients didn't get stuck in tricky-to-reach places and I could stir everything in smooth, continuous motions. The handle is sturdy and made me feel supported as I turned the pot and also stayed cool throughout the cooking process. 

Reducing sauces and gravies makes more sense in a saucier instead of a saucepan with tall sides because there's more surface area to let the liquid reduce and condense faster. As a busy person who likes cooking but has many other tasks to get through during the night, I liked that the saucier made cooking more efficient. 

As with the nonstick frying pan, what especially impressed me was the value I was getting from this well-made cookware.

The saucier has a five-ply stainless steel and aluminum construction (the extra layers make it more durable), is induction compatible, and is dishwasher- and oven-safe. A three-quart All-Clad saucier has nearly all the same specifications — it's actually only three-ply — and is sold for double the price. With a lid, Made In's saucer is $99, while All-Clad's is $195 on Amazon and other major retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond. 

Savings like this combined with a product that was carefully designed for the actual cooking task in mind only further convinced me that Made In is a kitchen company you should be watching. 

Shop the Made In Saucier (with a lid) for $99 or without a lid ($85) here.

SEE ALSO: 7 high-protein pastas that are healthier for you and still taste great

DON'T MISS: These super-sharp chef's knives got their start on Kickstarter — and they're perfect for home cooks

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• Software engineer Daren Makuck left a high-paying job at Google and took a 50% pay cut to work at a startup called Qwil.
• An interaction he had with Qwil CEO Johnny Reinsch convinced him it was the right career move.
• Makuck even refused to increase his salary when the time came, to Reinsch's surprise.

For Daren Makuck, leaving a high-paying job at Google to work at a fledgling startup was an easy choice.

The hard part was deciding whether to stay.

But an interaction he had with his new CEO not only convinced him to stay at the lower-paying job, but taught him an important lesson about employee satisfaction, too.

Makuck, a software engineer, left Google a year after his previous company, a marketing startup called Toro, was acquired by the tech giant. Wanting to work at a smaller company again, he contemplated leaving after he was approached to work at a new startup called Qwil.

Even though he'd be taking a 50% pay cut to join Qwil, the temptation to leave Google was strong, Makuck remembers. But he was still concerned he wouldn't be a good fit for Qwil, a fintech company that facilitates payment between freelance workers and the companies they work for. Makuck told Qwil CEO Johnny Reinsch that he had his eye on a return to the video game industry, where he had worked previously.

"I had told him I would feel bad if I joined and ended up wanting to leave after a year," Makuck told Business Insider.

How Reinsch responded immediately changed his perspective.

"He replied, 'If we can't keep you happy enough to stay for more than a year, that's on us,'" Makuck said. "This was the first time I had ever felt like a company — not just the people in it — would share the responsibility of my employment, and it's something I didn't even realize I needed."

This past April, as Makuck approached his two-year anniversary at Qwil, the startup announced it had raised $5 million in Series A funding. That meant Reinsch could afford to bump up his employees' salaries.

Yet when Reinsch offered Makuck a raise, the engineer turned him down.

"Given from what I had seen of the company and the way they ran it I was convinced that we would be successful, and I wanted to do everything I could to help us achieve that," Makuck said.

But Reinsch wouldn't take no for an answer, insisting he take the extra pay. For Makuck, it affirmed his decision to stay at Qwil two years earlier.

"Johnny's response to my offer showed me that he would stay true to his word — that continued employment was a thing we were both responsible for," Makuck said.

"It may seem like a small thing to do, but it's things like that that make me want to go the extra mile as an employee."

Meanwhile, for Reinsch, the experience reinforced that the satisfaction his employees got at work was just as important as their paycheck.

"The truth is, how much money you get every month is one thing. How much satisfaction you get every month is another," he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

"And sharing those values with the people you recruit is the best feeling in the world."

SEE ALSO: A startup CEO who was turned down 100 times before raising $5 million says he suffers from 'impostor syndrome' — and he hopes it never goes away

DON'T MISS: When CEO Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he started defusing its toxic culture by handing each of his execs a 15-year-old book by a psychologist

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• Filippo Loreti is a Kickstarter-alumn that has set multiple world records for its crowdfunding.
• The company makes luxury watches that would normally sell for $1,000+ and offers them at an accessible price (from $219) by operating direct-to-consumer.
• Filippo Loreti takes design inspiration from three of Italy's iconic cities: Venice, Rome, and Milan.
• The women on our team tested the $249 Rome collection, defined by its Piazza del Campidoglio-inspired watchface, and loved the price, elegance, versatility, and thoughtful design. 
• We've also reviewed the brand's men's offerings.

Luxury watches often come with the sort of price tag that prohibits most of us from owning one — an inaccessibility that has, in the past, been a central part of what made something luxurious a luxury.

But thanks to new companies approaching the industry with more robust business models, things are changing, and luxury is becoming increasingly affordable. 

Now, if you find the right online company, you can own a watch that should theoretically cost 10 to 40 times what it takes to produce for much less. 

And if you're looking for that, you should know about Filippo Loreti.

Filippo Loreti is a watch company that was founded by 20-something Lithuanian brothers Danielius and Matas Jakutis in 2015. Aside from its watches, it’s best-known for its record-breaking 2015 Kickstarter in which the company outstripped its $20,000 goal by raising close to a million dollars in a month’s time. The company’s mission was and is simple: make $1,000+ luxury watches affordable and relatively accessible.

In short, the Jakutis brothers wanted to democratize the luxury timepiece industry.

By creating the company online and reducing how many external pieces they have to include (middlemen and retailers) the company is able to keep its costs low and pass those savings on to its customers. As a result, you pay from $219 for a minimalist watch to $609 for an artisanal automatic, all well under what luxury watches typically go for.

Filippo Loreti’s 2015 Kickstarter campaign made it the most crowdfunded watch company in history, and, in 2016, the company broke its own record by raising over 5.5 million in 30 days from more than 18,000 backers. In total, the company has launched three record-breaking crowdfunding campaigns, raised more than $10,000,000 tot and is one of Kickstarter’s 20 most successful initiatives across all categories.

Aside from affordable luxury, Filippo Loreti likely draws customers for its ongoing spirit of crowdsourcing. The company maintains the “old ways” that set great watches apart from the rest, but its watches are co-developed with the brand’s community — resulting in a luxury watch that still feels aspirational, but with the sort of thoughtful design that brings it decisively into the ‘now’.

Initially, the company’s messaging — like most watch brands — was catered towards men. However, one facet of the elegance and elastic utilitarianism of watches is that they aren’t necessarily gendered. While Filippo Loreti’s site offers two sections — men’s watches and women’s watches— the differences are minimal, and the prices identical.

Anyone of any gender could comfortably wear the designs.

The watches are inspired by three iconic Italian cities — Venice, Rome, and Milan — as well as, less overtly, the long history of Italian luxury and finesse in general — emulating the same meticulous and vocational craftsmanship of industry landmarks like Ferrari, Fendi, Versace, Prada, Armani, and Dolce & Gabbana.

For the last few weeks, the women on our team have been wearing watches from the $249 Rome collection to see how they stack up. As a whole, the line is minimalist, versatile, and elegant. Of the four options, the major distinctions are in color of leather and metal: Matte Black, Rose Gold, Gold, or Silver. 

Filippo Loreti’s interpretation of Rome takes its main inspiration from the famous Piazza del Campidoglio, a “masterwork of urban planning” with a mesmerizing, elliptical design by Michelangelo as its centerpiece. The series’ dials are executed in a reminiscent style, using a “guilloche” pattern most notably used by high-end watchmakers. The collection falls in line with the iconic Italian architectural monuments best defined by their sloping lines and carefully crafted details. At the back of the watch face, you’ll find a 3D embossed recreation of the Piazza del Campidoglio — an unusually beautiful addition that adds artisan value without interfering with its simplicity.

You can swap out leather bands if you value versatility, and you can shop for an automatic ($585 - $609) or quartz ($249) form the series. Though, in a rare distinction for the brand, the Rome automatic watches are only found in the men’s section.

Financially, it makes sense to get a luxury watch here rather than pay a 4,000% markup  — at least until that markup is justified by the sort of iconic name that warrants a lopsided price. Plus, the company offers free shipping worldwide, 90-day returns, and a 10-year international warranty.

But, all in all, the watches are really nice — even regardless of price point. Part of the draw to Italian staples like Fendi, Ferrari, and Versace is the knowledge that these items were, in some way, costly either in price, effort, or ingenuity to produce. Filippo Loreti watches are affordable, but they still feel luxurious and aspirational in the sense that they feel distinctly thoughtful and labored-over. The Rome collection is simple enough to be timeless and versatile, but still ultimately feels customized.

Shop the Filippo Loreti Rome Quartz Watches, $249 

Shop the Filippo Loreti Rome Automatic Watches, $585 - $609

Below are the watches we tried and what we thought:

Connie Chen, Insider Picks reporter:

I’ve always had a strong preference for gold or light-colored watches, but Filippo Loreti’s Rome Matte Black watch might be the first to make me jump ship. Though it’s all black, the various textures — the geometric etchings surrounded by a smooth ring of marble, the soft yet sturdy leather — play against each other so the watch is still visually interesting. The reverse engraving is beautifully detailed, and even though no one else can see it, it’s a reminder of the brand’s elegance, sophistication, and craftsmanship.

Mara Leighton, Insider Picks reporter:

I've gotten to check out a lot of watches through my time at Insider Picks, and Filippo Loreti is one of my favorites.  The quality of the materials and the considered but understated design make them look and feel luxurious without being over the top. The matte black is sleek and the proportions spot on — not so thin that it appears purely ornamental or the watch face unnaturally large like many women’s watches, but also not bulky enough to appear overtly masculine. The contrasting texture and intricate pattering are interesting to look at, and I love the personalization of the 3D embossed Piazza on the back. My favorite aspect, though — aside from price — is that I always think of Michelangelo’s geometric centerpiece when I look down at my wrist. It’s an oddly nice source for a recurring mix of both humility and inspiration — and I like knowing my watch has a bit more of “deep dive” story to it.

Remi Rosmarin, Insider Picks intern: 

I rarely wear watches. I have a small wrist, so I find that most watches either dangle uncomfortably or just look absurdly large on my arm. Those issues, plus the high price tags on most watches I actually do like, have deterred me from watch shopping all together. I assumed this watch would be another failure.

After trying the Rome Gold, I was actually pleasantly surprised. The brown leather band and gold face give the watch a classic, timeless look that matches well with my everyday jewelry. At 40 mm, the face of the watch is still pretty large, but I did not find it obtrusive as I typed and did work. I think this can be credited to the settings on the band, which allowed me to make sure the watch was really secure. The design is simple, but the textured pattern on the face definitely adds some intrigue. This watch may not go in my everyday rotation right away, but I definitely will re-wear it. If you’re in the market for a watch, I think Filippo Loreti, with its high quality but reasonably priced options, is worth checking out.

Sally Kaplan, Insider Picks editor:

I am no watch connoisseur, but my partner has a collection of minimalist timepieces that I occasionally steal to wear myself. This time, it seems, I'll have to guard my own watch from her thieving hands.

I got the Rome Silver watch to test out, and I've been amply pleased with it so far. The minimalist silhouette of the watch is what I found myself initially drawn to, but the immense detail is what keeps me wanting to revisit it every day. I'm particularly excited to wear it on my trip to Rome in March of next year, where I absolutely plan compare the etching of the Piazza del Campidoglio to the real thing. 

It's worth noting that the watch face is on the larger size for my wrist, which isn't something I mind, but may be a consideration for anyone with tiny wrists or daintier taste. 

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• Harj Taggar is a former partner at Y Combinator, the tech accelerator that launched a number of successful startups including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart. He's currently the cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte.
• Taggar said he and his YC partners placed a high value on learning what applicants did in their spare time.
• The YC application still includes the prompt: "Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together."
• The YC partners looked specifically for people who had created projects or explored new ideas beyond the requirements of work or school.
  

When he joined Y Combinator as a venture partner in 2010, Harj Taggar was the first full-time employee at the startup accelerator. He and his partners were constantly refining their selection process.

As they watched accepted entrepreneurs build their businesses, the partners came to one glaring realization: The most successful founders didn't always look so good on paper.

Taggar, who is currently the cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte, told Business Insider: "Often, we'd fund people that had been promoted and risen up the ranks at really top quality companies like Google. But they'd work at a startup and they couldn't handle the ambiguity. It wasn't a good fit for them."

On the other hand, Taggar said, they'd see people "who had an unusual background, an eclectic mix of things that they'd done, and actually turn out to be really great at [entrepreneurship]."

He and his partners became obsessed with figuring out the best ways to identify top talent, without relying on resumes.

At some point, they realized that one of the best predictors of a founder's success was what the founders did in their spare time.

"What projects did they work on, and in particular when did they work on projects out of personal interest, because they thought that they would learn something or they were just curious about something?" Taggar said. In other words, he was less interested in projects they did because it was required for school or for work.

The Y Combinator partners started looking more closely at founders' responses to a prompt that's still on the application today: "Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together."

Y Combinator looks for curiosity and the willingness to test new ideas

In the last decade, Y Combinator has launched a number of successful startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart.

Some startups that have applied to Y Combinator have publicly posted their initial applications, so you can see how they responded to that particular prompt.

When The Muse cofounders applied, in 2011, they mentioned a "10-year strategic review for Sesame Workshop (aka Sesame Street)'s South African production, Takalani Sesame." Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, applied in 2007 and mentioned an online SAT prep company he'd previously launched.

And when the cofounders of Buffer applied, in 2011, they wrote simply, "There are no shared projects before Buffer." Interestingly, they were rejected — although they've now raised $3.9 million.

Taggar recalled the application submitted by Brian Armstrong, cofounder of Coinbase. At the time, Taggar said, "it wasn't clear that [Bitcoin] was going to be anything particularly popular. But [Armstrong] had already spent a bunch of time building tools for it and making it easier to buy Bitcoin." Taggar said it was evident that Armstrong was simply interested in this "cool new thing."

Armstrong's interest in building cryptocurrency tools on the side is a prime example of what Y Combinator is looking for, Taggar said. "We found that a predictor of would we want to fund someone is: Is this someone that's got a curiosity about the world and likes getting ideas off the ground to see what happens?"

SEE ALSO: Companies like IKEA and Accenture are following in Google's footsteps to stay ahead of the curve

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