Soft Skills meet Market Vision: VarageSale Co-founder Tami Zuckerman Building a Community Around Commerce

VarageSale Co-founder Tami Zuckerman (right) chats with Startup Grind Toronto co-host Sharn Kandola. Image Amanda Hunter.

For a taste of how things are changing for female founders - May is, after all, Female Founder Month - meet Tami Zuckerman. Her business VarageSale is making waves and attracting a ton of Silicon Valley capital from its leading investors -- without having to move to Silicon Valley.

But the focus here isn't the normally headline-grabbing statistics and sales numbers. It's about the skills Zuckerman applied - the connections she nurtured, the conversations she has guided, and the way she builds culture in her company - that she's uniquely suited to speak to.

It's these skills that helped this female founder with no business background breaks into the CompSci boys club and raises $34 million from Sequoia and Lightspeed Ventures. And when the inevitable set backs happen, and layoffs needed to happen, soft skills became just as important.

Soft Skills are People Skills: Teams, Investors, Board Members

To build and manage a high-growth company you have to build and manage a team wild wildly different skills, experience and goals, and help them unravel the mystery that is market fit. Many, many projects come unglued here.

The fact that Zuckerman was a kindergarten teacher gets a lot of attention. There is an ignorant perception that teaching is a slacker's job. You know: lead singsongs and finger painting sessions all day and take a 2-month paid vacation in summer, right?

But ask Zuckerman, and she'll say her experience as a primary school teacher is key to what she’s accomplished. More importantly, she has taught across multiple grades, adapting herself and her content to the demands of her classroom.

To teach various grades, Zuckerman had to assess the learning styles of 20 to 30 rambunctious children and come up with lesson plans that meet the needs of each - and the class as a whole. What works for kindergarten won’t work in Grade 1, nor will Grade 1 lesson plans work in Grade 2.

That’s because the brains of primary-school children are very plastic. As a result, the way children process information intellectually and emotionally changes all the time. In fact, the learning process itself guarantees this change will happen. So the plan you start with is not the plan you finish with.

Sounds just like a startup.

Zuckerman believes that her teaching experience really equipped her to manage the rumpus room that is start up engineers, marketers, venture capitalists, and sales people.

Market Insights from Customer Behaviors

But all the focus on her teaching experience misses Zuckerman's razor-sharp market insight. She knew that Craigslist, Kijiji and other online marketplaces failed females… and she knew why. She translated that insight into a better solution.

If you roll your eyes at the triviality of shopping sites, consider that the main reason newspapers are in dire straights today: online marketplaces have stolen the classified ad revenue of newspapers. That, along with display ads, financed the reporting staff.

But there's another reason a shopping site oriented to women gets a lot of investor attention: household spending. Of the trillions of dollars of cash flowing through the world's households, most of it remains controlled by women. All the online selling services that cater to men were vulnerable to disruption by a site that caters to women.

That’s how Zuckerman convinced her developer husband Carl to code up the alpha version of VarageSale - and join her in founding the company.

Community Commerce: Nurturing Repeat Buyers

Women have taken to VarageSale in huge numbers - and unlike Craigslist and Kijiji users, VarageSale users return often. Most mobile and internet sites promise their investors that they will generate repeat visitors, but very few do.

It was the combination of the massive potential, the traction, the high level of return visitors and Zuckerman’s ability to build a team that riveted the attention of VCs. That’s why Sequoia and Lightspeed invested that $34 million - the results, not promises.

Zuckerman also seems to have convinced male shoppers. At the Startup Grind Toronto meetup almost all the question from men started with a sheepish, shy, “I-hope-it’s-OK” admission that they bought and sold on VarageSale.