Cathy Polinsky CTO of Stitchfix

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) I enjoy life and growth. My tribe is those like you who are constantly improving. The people who listen to this podcast are the people in life who want to do better and be better. If you are this type of person, I recommend you visit leaderbits.io, which is a company that I started that is dedicated to helping you grow as a technology leader. The best part is, if you want to improve, we will have your company pay for it for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) So just reach out and we'll take care of the rest. Leaderbits.io. Today we are talking to Cathy, the CTO of Stitch Fix, and we discuss solving problems by seeing the bigger picture, staying humble with a team-first mentality, and how delivering results in small situations leads to delivering in larger situations down the road. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Cathy at 00:01:06) That's perfect. Yeah, it's great to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) It's great to meet you. I was reading all about you today. Scavenger hunts.

(Cathy at 00:01:13) I do like scavenger hunts and escape rooms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Oh, you like the escape rooms too?

(Cathy at 00:01:19) Yes. Who doesn't?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Come on. Oh yeah. I mean, I haven't actually come into anyone that's like, "NASCAR, escape rooms." But I did one that was themed of The Office, you know, that show.

(Cathy at 00:01:33) Oh, that's nice. Where is that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) That is in Sarasota, Florida. They're one of the boutique ones that make all their own.

(Cathy at 00:01:43) That is awesome. That sounds great. There's some good ones here in San Francisco. I think it's called, oh gosh, Plaza Games over near the old Exploratorium building, and they make their own too. It's really fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) Yeah, I geeked out with them and started talking to them. They took me into their little shop area where they're soldering all the electronics. That's so cool. Yeah. And then my wife literally just took herself and our daughter home, and she's like, you just hang out there for a little bit. Come home when you're ready.

(Cathy at 00:02:14) Did you make it out?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) Yeah, after I analyzed their firmware on their Raspberry Pi.

(Cathy at 00:02:21) That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) Yeah. I'm so pumped up to be talking to you today. I'm a big fan of San Francisco and technology and leadership, and I'm a fan of you after reading about you and how you did your scavenger hunt. I love that.

(Cathy at 00:02:38) Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) So tell me a little bit about how you got involved with technology, like how you fell in love with technology and how you got to where you are today.

(Cathy at 00:02:47) Oh yeah, sure. So I was a child of the eighties, in elementary school then when personal computers were just coming to homes. But where I grew up, most people did not have a computer. And so my first experience with computers was in elementary school. My elementary school got a grant, I believe, to have a computer lab of Apple IIe's. And so I got to go to the computer lab once a week, computer class. And I had a lot of teachers who really got the computer bug, and they were really interested in it. They learned about it. So I started doing Logo programming with a little triangle turtle that you could make little shapes on the screen and learned how to do that for the first couple of years. And then moved to Basic programming, all while playing Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) Yes, on the big floppies.

(Cathy at 00:03:46) Exactly. So that got me interested in computers, although I had no idea what a profession would look like in the software space. There were no classes really in high school or middle school, but I did a computer science summer camp in high school at Carnegie Mellon. I grew up in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon was right around, the next town over for me. And just was really encouraged with a professor there who opened my eyes to algorithms and computer science and data structures. And so I thought that this was something that I'd like to study, but really didn't understand what it was until I had my first internship and really saw that this was a field that I would love to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) And so what was your first internship in?

(Cathy at 00:04:32) My first internship was at a company in Boston. It's now defunct. It was a couple of alums from my college, Swarthmore College, started a startup in the, gosh, early nineties that was called NetMarket, and it was the first website that did secure internet transactions over the web. So they did this with PGP encryption over HTTP and did a, I think it was a music transaction for a cassette. And then they got acquired by a company that really wanted to build out an internet presence. And so it was a membership service. They had a bunch of different websites out there. And I first did an internship doing system administration. And I actually really loved it. So UNIX system administration, I was managing their networks and their NetApp appliances and their databases and just closing a lot of tickets all summer. And then I came back the next summer to their office in San Mateo doing software development.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:47) That's amazing. They just kind of let you geek out on their systems.

(Cathy at 00:05:51) Totally. Yes, yes. It was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:53) And so then now you've made it all the way up to CTO of Stitch Fix.

(Cathy at 00:05:58) Yes, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) That's exciting.

(Cathy at 00:06:00) Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) I'm curious what your perspective is. I have on the notes that you want to talk about your role as a female CTO. And we have reached out to a number of female CTOs, and we haven't been able to get a whole lot on the show until recently. And so now we've got you and then we have the CTO of Symantec. And so that's very exciting.

(Cathy at 00:06:20) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) And I'm curious what your thoughts are and what you've experienced. Right?

(Cathy at 00:06:25) Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have to say I am really proud to be a female CTO, but my hope and dreams is that there are a lot more of us out here in the future and that people look more at us being CTOs first, and female CTOs is just an afterthought, and that we're valued more for the results that we're able to drive for the businesses and the teams that we're running. But it is good to see more of an effort to get more diversity in the field, be it gender diversity or racial diversity, diversity of thought, because I think that that's just going to make our industry stronger in the long run.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:04) That is exactly what I was talking about before we came on the show. I was sitting on that couch right there, and I was talking about thought diversity and the fact that each one of our team members in our pod, we assign them a persona of one of our customers, because that's just where we are right now in our growth.

(Cathy at 00:07:20) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) And so, you know, Jake's always responsible for thinking like the unicorn leaders. Jackie's responsible for thinking like the jaguar leader. We have different leadership types, you know, individual contributors all the way up to C-level. And then we're always having them adjust the perspective that way. I can't think of all three at the same time.

(Cathy at 00:07:36) Right, right. I think it's so good, and, you know, you just think of the diverse customer bases and client bases that you have, and having that diversity, I think really helps you as a business, but it helps us as an industry as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:49) Yeah. And I'm also a big fan of Sheryl Sandberg. She said, you know, one day there's not going to be female leaders and male leaders. There's going to just be leaders.

(Cathy at 00:07:56) Exactly, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) And I'm like, oh, I love that.

(Cathy at 00:07:59) I love that too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) It's so great. Oh man, we're on the same page, you and I. I like you so much. Okay, so tell me a little bit about what your day looks like on average. Like, if you were to take a pie chart of your day, what would be the three biggest slices?

(Cathy at 00:08:14) Yeah, that's a good question. I think it really changes on what the top initiatives are going on in the company. I'd say there's a big portion of my day that is around team building, whether it's recruiting or helping develop people on the team, spending time in one-on-ones with my directs. And so I think you're nothing without your team, and that's the most important thing that you really need to be doing is recruiting and developing the people that you have. Then there's a big aspect that's around the strategic priorities, I would say, of really making sure that I understand what's going on with the business, what the biggest needs are, and translating that to technology or translating technology solutions into business opportunities. And so I do spend a lot of time with executives across the company understanding what the needs are, and then really helping the team to focus on strategic roadmaps and OKRs, objectives for them to focus the teams, focus their work. And as much as possible, I really want teams to be empowered, the teams to be autonomous, to be able to do the things that are going to have the biggest impact, but we all have to be aligned first before we can just go off and solve all those problems. And so I think a lot of it is really doing that translation. And then the last part is really the technology of making sure that we've got systems that are scalable, highly performant, that are reliable, and that really set us up for the long-term growth that we need to do. And I'd say depending on what's going on, I may lean one way or the other. If we have, actually, we've been pretty lucky that our systems are very scalable and reliable right now. But if we ever were in a situation where we're having a lot of production incidences, that's somewhere, obviously, that I'd be leaning more towards, versus last year I spent a lot of time scaling the team and the vast majority of my time on recruiting and hiring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:25) I'm curious. Were you an initial hire at Stitch Fix? How early or late did you join?

(Cathy at 00:10:30) I joined about two years ago. And so this was after the company already had hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and was really on the growth trajectory of becoming a public company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) Awesome. And then so they had a really good solid foundation to build upon then?

(Cathy at 00:10:50) Very good solid foundation. And that's really one of the reasons that I came was that this was a company that was a fantastic company, great customers, great growth, profitable, very amazing executive team, really great technology team. I did not have a system where I'm coming in and really having to fix a lot of problems that were already there. Just great bones to work with. And yet every single place that I looked, both within the technology as well as within the business, there's just so much opportunity, so much greenfield out to really make a difference. And so that's what's been really exciting for me is helping the team get to this next phase of growth and really make a huge difference to our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:39) That's amazing. Are you international yet?

(Cathy at 00:11:42) No. We are in just US, although we've been launching into new businesses. So when we started Stitch Fix, it was a women's-only business. Then the team launched our men's line. After that we went into our plus line, which is a really underserved market. We launched Extras, which is the ability to buy foundational items in a marketplace experience—socks, underwear, bras. Then last month we launched our kids line. So, which I have two kids myself, seven and eleven, and they are—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) Seven and eleven?

(Cathy at 00:12:14) Stitch Fix customers and love our product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:18) They better be.

(Cathy at 00:12:21) Oh, my daughter loves to walk around, and she has these really cute sparkly shoes with a big pompom on top and gets compliments all the time. And when people compliment her, she's like, "It's for my mommy's company."

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) Yeah. You don't want the parents gossiping that they saw Cathy's daughters in a department store.

(Cathy at 00:12:44) I think it's nice. You know, Stitch Fix really makes it easier for people to look and feel their best, but it's not the only place that people shop. I think people really are very interested in fashion and staying close to trends, more so than I am myself. I'm not as much of a fashion trend as some of the people here, but it's good to see just everybody's individual styles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) Well, you look super trendy to me.

(Cathy at 00:13:11) Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) You must work out. Work your best.

(Cathy at 00:13:14) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:17) I, literally, just so you know, just for full disclosure, I have a room over there where we film video and green screen, and I've got about, you know, three or four of these different dress shirts all pressed and hung up. And I'm hoodie and, like, relaxed Lucky-style shirt. And then before the show, I'm like Superman in there, changing in the booth.

(Cathy at 00:13:40) I mean, I think it's great. Well, we have a really cool new shirt that has two different fabrics that looks like a nice dress shirt, but has stretch in the back. So you don't need to change the competition. But yeah, let me tell you about Stitch Fix. So Stitch Fix is a personal styling company. What we're solving is this huge need in the industry where it is impossible to find things online in the apparel category. And you probably have done all of your shopping for non-apparel items online, probably like most of us hate going to the stores. But if you're also like most of us and have tried to buy clothes online, it's a pretty miserable experience. You can't look and feel and touch the fabric. You don't know how it's going to fit on you. Even if you look and see a five-star review, you don't know if that person has the same body type as you, the same interests as you, the same style as you. And so more often than not, people buy things online. The return process is such a hassle that they stash it in the back of their closet and then really have no faith in the experience. And so the next time, they just go to the store and buy what they like. Or you find the one thing online or in the store that you want, and then you just replenish it again and again as you need it. And so what Stitch Fix—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) My style.

(Cathy at 00:14:54) Yeah, exactly, exactly. So what Stitch Fix is doing is really flipping this model and helping people discover things they love right at their home. And what you do is you go to Stitch Fix. You fill out a detailed style profile with all of the details about things that interest you in the apparel space. Start with style. So what are types of clothes that you wear, whether it's a hoodie or a dress shirt, how formal, how casual are you, what colors do you like, what patterns do you like, what colors do you hate, and what fabrics would you never wear?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) Everybody's—it's Florida. It's really hot here, so I don't know.

(Cathy at 00:15:35) Exactly. Then we look at your size. So, do things—what are your sizes? Do things generally run too long, too short, too wide, too narrow, and get to know all about you. And we look at things across style, price, fit, and what we then do is match you with a stylist.

(Kathy at 00:15:58) And we run all of the data in your style profile. It kind of is almost like a dating profile, and do a matching algorithm against all of your characteristics, against all of the merchandise that we have in our inventory. We have merchandise from over a thousand vendors in stock, and we do this one-to-one matching to find things that are going to be perfect for you. We have a human stylist, though, that takes those recommendations and hand-curates a box of Fix, and we send it to your house. You don't even see what's inside until you get it on your doorstep.

(Kathy at 00:16:33) You open it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:34) Oh, really?

(Kathy at 00:16:34) Yep. Yep. Which is a pretty unique experience. You open it up at home. You try things on.

(Kathy at 00:16:42) You pay for what you like. You send back the rest. We pay for shipping both ways. And so what's amazing is that we trust our algorithm so much that we send things and we pay for shipping to you knowing that we can do a good job finding things that you're going to enjoy. And so I think that's a pretty amazing experience for people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:03) So you painted a picture in my head just now. You're an excellent communicator, by the way. I love it. So in my head, what I saw was I saw myself walking up into the department store, and then I'm talking to the individual who's helping me. And they're like, "Hey, you know."

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) And then they go, "Oh, you know, you might like this." And they go back, and they find what's your size of it. And then they go bring me something, and then I go in the room, try it. I come back out. Do you like it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24) Yes or no? If you do, put it in this pile, you're going to buy it. If not, this pile, and then you pay, you know, when it's all done.

(Kathy at 00:17:28) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:29) You essentially just did that, but you're a giant store and you're over here in the central location, and then you just use the transportation, like shipping, as your transit. You didn't do anything different that actually happens in the human interaction, really.

(Kathy at 00:17:43) Personalization has been around for centuries of the storekeeper that is talking to you, getting to know you, getting to find things that you're going to love. But what we can do is we can do that at a much bigger scale with a much bigger set of inventory, really get to know you. And it's a process that gets better and better over time. So the more data that you share with us, the more you give us feedback about things that you like, things that you didn't like, then we can use that to give you an even better Fix next time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) And then when I go to the mall, I can just spend more time in the Tesla store looking real sharp because I don't have to do any shopping there. Exactly. Exactly. Every time I go in there, I secretly hope Musk is in the back doing something. Is Elon here?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:28) No. Not today? All right.

(Kathy at 00:18:30) He's pretty pretty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:32) Yeah. He is. He makes appearances on my show. I always ask people about, we'll get to that part of the show later. But so have you ever gone the whole route of full stack engineering yourself?

(Kathy at 00:18:47) So yeah, I started as a full stack engineer. Yep. So I started as an engineer at Amazon in the late nineties. I was there while we were launching stores every couple of months from home and garden to toys to kitchen. And then I was there during the dot-com bust and got to see how hard it was.

(Kathy at 00:19:07) I think Amazon did a pretty good job, but it definitely had a lot of growing pains during that time. And I wanted to see something smaller, so I went to a small startup in San Mateo doing B2B analytics software, full stack engineer. And, you know, I really love development, but a few years after that, I switched to Yahoo where I changed from being an engineer to an engineering manager, and I like that even more. So it's been a nice transition and just found something that I'm really passionate about that I could have a high impact on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:41) So I asked that because there's an engineer of yours that had previously come on our show. Oh. His name is Mike Calhoun.

(Kathy at 00:19:50) Oh, that's great. Great. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) He was a CTO at Life.io. And then he ended up over at Stitch Fix.

(Kathy at 00:19:56) That's fantastic. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) He was a really cool guy too. And then I talked to him, and then about, I don't know, a month after he came on the show, I saw his profile update to engineering lead or something at Stitch Fix. I was like, oh, that's really, really cool, man.

(Kathy at 00:20:10) That's awesome. Yeah. It's great to have him, and it's been really great to be able to recruit so many top talent over the last year. It's as we've been growing, we've been having more name recognition in the industry, and that's been making it a lot easier to recruit top talent like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:28) Yeah. It reminded me of it because you were talking about your pie slices. Yes. I was like, yes, they are spending some good time on great people because they found Mike.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:37) And I hung out with Mike, and he's really great at what he does. So what's the culture like at Stitch Fix?

(Kathy at 00:20:45) It is an amazing culture here. I'd say the thing that's different about Stitch Fix than any other tech company that I've worked at is that it is the highest EQ engineering team that I've worked with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) Cool.

(Kathy at 00:20:57) So I've worked at Amazon, Yahoo, Salesforce, Oracle. I've done tiny startups. And what really differentiates engineers here is they are very strong communicators, and they're not just interested in developing technology for technology's sake, but really for solving problems and having impact. And so we do this as part of our screening process. We have a product-centric interview where people collaborate with a non-technical person on a business problem.

(Kathy at 00:21:30) And so the sense is how inquisitive are they, how do they ask questions and understand things that are going on outside of the technology industry, and then how can they relate technology to that problem to really solve needs. And so that is something that really comes through when people are working here, that they work very well together. They're strong collaborators, and they really are thinking about what's the simplest solution here that I can do to solve this problem? How can I have a fast implementation on something and make that be the V1 so that we can then build on it and continue to have the impact that we want?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) So you're doing what really works well. Yes. Because I would always, it's in the books. It's like you read the books of the great people that come out and they share their hard-earned knowledge. And then you go talk and every company is like, "Yeah, we should move towards that."

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) And then you dig a little bit deeper and 1% of the company is actually doing it.

(Kathy at 00:22:34) No. It's good. And I'd say that there's a lot of things the team has done from the early days to really set them up for success. So one is rather than having a monolith code base, we had what we call micro applications. Not created at the services level, but started as a Ruby on Rails shop with a lot of small apps that could be independently deployed.

(Kathy at 00:22:55) So test-driven development, continuous integration, continuous deployment, each team can then ship on their own schedule. And that has allowed a lot of agility into the system and speed and time to market. So I think that having these engineers who are really interested in solving business problems and getting things out quickly is partnered with the architecture that enables them to do that, and it just is this amazing flywheel that can build on top of each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:24) I remember the first time, I have been writing in Ruby on Rails specifically for about seven years. Now I remember the first time I separated my admin from my application. I was like, look at the freedom. Let's do this again.

(Kathy at 00:23:38) And I'm like,

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:39) everything, now it's just like what you do. Yes. Right?

(Kathy at 00:23:42) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) When you're engaging with your crew, right, the people around you or the people at your organization, what stands out to you as something that, I guess the best way I could form this question is an action that someone would perform that in your mind you would say, "Oh, I'm going to kind of tag them in my mind as I'm going to focus on them for leadership"? Right? I should really write this question better.

(Kathy at 00:24:07) No. I understand what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) Yeah.

(Kathy at 00:24:09) That's a really good question. I don't know if it's just one thing, but I do think that there are a number of things that help people show up like a leader. Some of it is how they can find patterns and realize that they're not just solving one problem, but that they're seeing the bigger picture. So how can they kind of take a step back from the small thing that they're doing and see, "Hey, there's a bigger opportunity here or there's a bigger problem here," and really think about solving the bigger problem instead of the small thing at hand. I look at people who, you know, are egoless, that really are somewhat humble in how they are looking at the team and thinking about the team instead of just themselves of, "Hey."

(Kathy at 00:25:03) This is someone who is understanding that the overall results is more important than the individual. And I think that's really important, certainly from a people manager standpoint, of someone who can really help shepherd a team and understand that the team can get more done than a single person and really embrace that. And yeah. And I think results really matter. So the sense of seeing people be able to deliver in small situations really helps deliver in larger situations.

(Kathy at 00:25:38) But I think leaders come in a lot of different packages. It's not just an engineering manager who's a leader. We also look for leaders in individual contributor roles. And what I really feel strongly about is a strong technical organization has promotions and compensation that show how they value the technical individual contributors as much, if not more, than the engineering leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) Yeah. Well, you're talking about recruiting

(Kathy at 00:26:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) earlier, and I started as an IC. Right? Like I started as an individual contributor, and then I found out that I had some leadership tendencies, and then I worked on my communication a little bit. And I just, you know, and the important thing I would say would be there like, time passed. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:24) Like I didn't like, "I'm a leader," you know. Like I had some interest in it and I explored and I improved and I learned and I grew and then over time. Um, but yeah, that, by the way, those three items off the top of your head, those were amazing. They were so good. Like every one of them.

(Kathy at 00:26:42) You had a good point there because I sometimes get questions from people in college asking, "Tell me about your life as a CTO, and I want to see if this is a career that I'm interested in, and tell me about your path to get there." And it is a pretty long path to get to a CTO when you are just starting out and haven't even decided whether you like to program at all. And so I think it is important to understand what your passions are, and is software development something that you're interested in, and what are the things that people are doing a couple of years out, you know, maybe two to five years out instead of, you know, I don't know, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty years out. Because if you don't like that job in the beginning, you're not going to be able to progress into a role where you can manage other people or you can be a director or even a CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:36) Yeah. It kind of reminded me, like if you want to be a CMO, you better enjoy copywriting. Right? You better enjoy the basic work that you do as an individual contributor in whatever C-level. You just don't go right to the top.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) Right? Your advice is so good. You've got a book coming out or something? I hope so.

(Kathy at 00:27:56) I'm focusing on it. Who has time to write

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:58) a book? Hey. You and actually, a number of the great leaders in technology that I've been speaking to have said the same thing. They've got so much to share, so much great advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) And I'm like, when's the book coming? Do you speak publicly though ever at any conferences?

(Kathy at 00:28:13) I do. I try to balance the time that I spend with my team. Also trying to focus some time on speaking externally so that I can make sure that my team gets the recognition and that we've got the brand awareness out there of the amazing technical work that we're doing here inside the company. So it's something that I do value. It's also just something I try to balance with the rest of my pie

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) Right. With the pie. My time. You could do a little slice in there for recruiting. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42) Because you speaking, when people get to see who you are, I mean, you're the leader. You're the CTO for technology. So when they think of that company, they think I'm going to come work on Kathy's team. And so, you ever speak with Girls Who Code?

(Kathy at 00:28:56) I have not done much with Girls Who Code. I think that's a great organization, but I love seeing more groups around those focus areas that are focusing on diversity and getting people. Yeah. We also have a pretty good connection with Code2040, which is trying to get more diversity for underrepresented groups in technology, specifically black and Latinx programmers.

(Kathy at 00:29:24) And they focus on college students and helping them get their internships and first jobs out of school and supporting them through that transition. And so we've had a partnership the last few years with them, have brought in interns to the program, and these are amazing interns, just high quality. And I love that this is a program that really helps support them. They meet weekly with a mentor to talk about not just the technology, but also what it's like to work in the workplace, especially if you come from a more disadvantaged background where you don't have any parent or a relative that can give you tips about what it's like to work in the workplace. Having a support system like that can be really helpful.

(Kathy at 00:30:07) I could have used it myself. I mean, my mom was a teacher. My dad was in government. Neither of them knew what business was like, let alone the tech field. And so I think having groups like that can really help people's entry into the field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:23) I love that point. You made such a strong point there because when people often think of disadvantage, they'll think of strictly like a monetary scale. Right? And it's not, to your point of, right, your parents were in different areas, so you didn't get that enter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:39) And for me, my father was an engineer, so he taught me, you know, soldering, programming, basic coding. Right? But there was no business component there. Right. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) So I got that from, I was a geek pulled into a deal. I met some investors in the deal, and I kind of saw they know everything about this world called money. And I know everything about this world called programming, and we know nothing about the flip. So I started learning about money, and they started learning about, and then we brought each other mutual value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) And so then I got my education. But if it wasn't for my dad giving me that, if he just said, you know, go outside and play. Right? Right. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Or if he just had a job where it was just a normal job and I was just on my own just to loop through school. Right, and iterate out into a college. So because I had that one little advantage, and we were not wealthy by any means. Like we are, I grew up very poor, but he did that one thing. He's like, this is technology, and he introduced me to it very young.

(Kathy at 00:31:36) That's great. And I think that that's the thing is how can we reduce the barriers for other people, give them that little extra help and support to bring them up. And I think it just is going to help our field altogether to make it a more diverse industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) Oh, I love it. What's getting you out of bed in the morning? What are you really pumped up about at Stitch Fix? What's coming?

(Kathy at 00:31:56) Oh my. There's so much. I mean, we just finished our fiscal year and are moving into our next fiscal, FY '19 is what we call it, fiscal year nineteen. And so it's really exciting as we're kicking off this year very strong and thinking about all the things that we want to launch this year. I'd say what I'm super excited by is that we scaled the team last year, more than doubling the engineering team.

(Kathy at 00:32:23) And that gave me a little nervous, I have to say, because I was putting a lot on the team last year. I was asking everybody to spend a good portion of their time hiring, recruiting, and doing that while doing their day-to-day job. Then on top of that, they had to spend a lot of time onboarding the new team members, and we had some new hires that were being mentored by people who had only been here for two months. And so that is not the best onboarding experience, I have to say. But I do appreciate people came with a lot of flexibility and patience and, even if it wasn't the ultimate best experience, that they really believed in what we were trying to do.

(Kathy at 00:33:06) And what I love now is seeing those people that have been here now six, nine months really being able to make an impact. I feel like we got so much done in the last six months, and we have so many great plans just even for this quarter that seeing everybody now fully ramping up is just making me very excited to get out of bed and see demos that people are doing and plans of what people are working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) I love being able to review things that were built.

(Kathy at 00:33:37) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) I'm like, because I have so much admiration and appreciation for the effort that goes into it. Yeah. Having been one of the people building something that was being presented. And I'm just like, this is beautiful. And it allows me to transfer my energy to them, and they really enjoy it because they feel rewarded in their hard work. A business thing caught my eye, a little nerd here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) You said that your fiscal year just ended, so you guys have a stop in summer.

(Kathy at 00:34:02) We do. So our fiscal year goes from August 1 through the end of January or end of July. Sorry. August to July. And so that's a little different than other companies that I've been in, and it kind of, you have to wrap your head around it. But I think it allows us to not focus on the calendar year and the craziness that happens in retail in December, but really focus on having reliable quarters that we can plan against.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) Yeah. I was just reading a book called Predictable Revenue. Oh. And from Salesforce. Were you at Salesforce ever?

(Kathy at 00:34:34) I was at Salesforce for seven years. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:36) So you, the, I think it was Aaron Ross. Is that, I hope I'm not butchering the name. Is that the guy who wrote Predictable Revenue?

(Kathy at 00:34:42) I haven't read that book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) Oh, oh my goodness. I actually took engineering advice out of that book. It's written for sales teams and sales team structure.

(Kathy at 00:34:51) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:52) Nothing to do with engineering. But the way that they were discussing the way that they structure their pods and their different pod styles and those natures was reminding me of the Spotify tribes and some other stuff. Mhmm. And so I took their pod structure for their sales team and applied it to my engineering team.

(Kathy at 00:35:08) Fascinating. Yeah. I didn't read the book, but I learned so much about business and recurring revenue and just the power of the SaaS model that they were able to create. And so I just, I got my own business education working at Salesforce and really appreciated every moment of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) Well, in that book, they had mentioned that they put their fiscal year like the end of January or February because of the salespeople closing deals over break.

(Kathy at 00:35:34) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:34) Right? So all I'm thinking now, like, oh, look how these companies are leveraging this concept. And so then when you said this in summer, I'm starting to think to myself, I want to know, I did a project with Boar's Head like a decade ago, you know, the meat company or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:48) And they got so geeky with me about the flavor trends and how people buy flavors and how they rearrange. There's so much to it. Right? And so I was thinking, I want to know about what you've learned from your data about how people buy clothes. When are people buying?

(Kathy at 00:36:02) So we have a little bit of a different model than most traditional retailers. Mhmm. You know, when I was at Amazon, the peak was in December. We actually stopped doing development before Black Friday and couldn't check in any code that wasn't mission critical until after the new year. And the peak of traffic was all in that month, and then starting January, they'd start building up the infrastructure to be able to support the next peak that was going to happen the following December.

(Kathy at 00:36:32) So it was all about Christmas holidays. Stitch Fix is a little different because Stitch Fix is more about buying for yourself instead of buying for others. And so with Christmas holiday, a lot of people are buying for others, and so we don't have the crazy peaks at the holidays. Ours trend more towards the seasons that people are interested. I'm interested in more fashion for spring and for fall.

(Kathy at 00:36:55) There may be some things around special occasions around the holidays, but it's not this massive spike that you would imagine. But I would say I'm learning a lot about fashion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:06) Right.

(Kathy at 00:37:06) My first week at Stitch Fix, I went into an operational review meeting, and it was a cross functional group with different leaders across the business, within marketing, within our strategy team, within our merchandising team, engineering technology. And we went through all the business metrics. How many new customers did we have? How many fixes did we ship? How many returns did we have?

(Kathy at 00:37:30) What's our overall revenue and profit margins? So just anything you would expect from an operational review meeting. And then halfway through the meeting, they rolled in these racks of clothing and said, "We're going to do a deep dive on second layers day." And second layer is, what's that? Second layer.

(Kathy at 00:37:50) So second layer is what we refer to as...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) My pants. I got my underwear, and then I went to...

(Kathy at 00:37:54) No. No. No. Jackets. So things you put on top.

(Kathy at 00:37:58) So a blazer, a vest, a hoodie, a jean jacket, you know, anything that you're putting on as your second layer on top of it. We don't sell a lot of hats. Those would be in our accessories. So that's accessories.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:12) Accessories. Yes.

(Kathy at 00:38:12) So it's a new learning every day. And they talked about, okay, here's the trends we're seeing for the 30 age group. Here's the good sellers. It's unseasonably warm fall, and so the thin puffer vests are doing really well. And then they flipped it around and said, "Hey, these are things that aren't selling well because of the special trim, or these colors are not trending this fall." And so just the language that was being used and the thought process that's going into the merchandise was eye opening to me and has been really exciting to get to learn a whole new space that I never had experience with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) Oh, man. I love it. Now, so, first question is, because you got me pumped up about Stitch Fix. Right? I was surprised. My wife should be like, "You're looking sharp." I'm like, Stitch Fix.

(Kathy at 00:38:57) You should give it a try.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) Do you have an app? Like, is it an app?

(Kathy at 00:39:01) Yeah. Yeah. So we're a mobile first company. So we have mobile web for everything as well as an iOS app. We have a very simple Android app, and it's mostly a wrapper around the mobile web experience, though we're continuing to look at trends to see how many of our customers are using Android versus iOS versus other devices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:19) Yeah. Of course. Like, we're doing based on your development time based on you. We build for our customers, not because we think things are really cool.

(Kathy at 00:39:25) Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because when I started, the app was mostly a sign up flow with all of the survey questions and then a checkout flow. And what we've been really starting to invest in is more features that drive engagement. And one of those features we did recently was called Style Shuffle. Allows you to thumbs up or thumbs down specific styles.

(Kathy at 00:39:45) So you can say, "Hey, I like that. I don't like that. I wouldn't wear that. I wouldn't wear that." We've had more than 40% of our active customers playing this, and they just love to share data.

(Kathy at 00:39:56) And I've heard people on the street telling me how much they enjoy doing it. And so it's nice. It's a way that we can engage with customers, get to hear them more about things they love. But what's also amazing is that the clients that are using this app are getting better fixes, and we can test that with real data and see that fixes that we're sending out after they start using the app are better and stronger for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:23) You should do a little marketing thing with Tinder. Be like, increase your TR, your Tinder response rate. Right? With Stitch Fix. Right?

(Kathy at 00:40:33) Look and feel your best.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:36) There you go. Well, we did it. You and I, we made a podcast, my friend.

(Kathy at 00:40:41) That's fantastic. I really enjoyed the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) Yes. So so much love to you and your team, and then I'll actually be out there. If you're around, I'll say hello, and that'd be great.

(Kathy at 00:40:50) We'll show you around the office. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) It'd be really cool. Because I really like it. I think you're an awesome person.

(Kathy at 00:40:56) Thank you. I really enjoyed this time. This is a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:58) You have a fantastic day.

(Kathy at 00:41:00) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) Take care. Bye.

(Kathy at 00:41:01) Bye.