Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: [00:00:00] How do we capture the best practices of the apprenticeship that needs to happen in skilled trades, but use technology to be able to do that at scale faster with a younger generation?
Wyatt Smith: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Untapped with UpSmith. Uh, we are thrilled today to have a great partner and believer in our mission. Jessica Peltz-Zatulove joining us. Thank you, Jessica, for being here.
Alex Hudgens: Thank you for having me. Thrilled to be on the pod. Yay! Thanks for coming down the street.
Alex Hudgens: We’re in New York, live, which is very exciting. Two of us live here. One of us should move here.
Wyatt Smith: I’m a very proud Texan.
Alex Hudgens: I knew that was coming. I’ll
Wyatt Smith: [00:01:00] leave that. I’ll take you. Set
Alex Hudgens: him up for the layup. But
Wyatt Smith: happy to be here for today.
Alex Hudgens: Yay. Jessica, I would love for you to tell us who you are, get into the intro, but you’ve been telling us a fun story, uh, offline before we started recording.
Alex Hudgens: So I am so interested to hear kind of your background and how did you go from, spoiler alert, Minnesota to New York?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I’m the founding partner of Hannah Grey VC. We’re an early stage venture capital fund based here in New York. Proud supporter of Upsmith. I’ve been in New York for 21 years now, but before that I actually grew up in Minnesota. Which you only hear when I say I’m from Minnesota. There might be a, you know, sprinkled in, depending on how the conversation goes. I grew up with very, I would say middle class, middle class roots, both my parents worked full time to make ends meet, but we were always very, very centered as a family unit, always having dinner together on Friday nights, making sure we’re doing puzzles or board games or something. But, as a kid, I was, very competitive, I was an athlete playing, uh, multiple sports through school, but I would say very early on I really just gravitated towards the art of selling and negotiating, and managing people, which I think is something that we were talking about, but in hindsight, when you look at your childhood and growing up and how it shaped who you are today, you just realize that you’re, you’re wired like this from day zero. I remember everything from, setting up a camp with all the neighborhood kids and being the one that ran the camp when I was 12 years old, but that was also managing the finances and managing a lot of little people and I was the one that set up the garage sale and like outsold my brother and anybody else because this is just like I [00:03:00] very quickly Gravitated towards understanding the customer and what did the customer want?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: What did the customer need? How can I put myself in their shoes and then sell to them around that? So it’s what I love to do selling ads for fundraisers for schools So I think when you’re a business leader, it doesn’t just turn on after college. It’s really something about the way that you were, you were brought up and values that were instilled in you.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So I love that about my upbringing and I think a lot of that drive is what ultimately brought me to New York. I look back at my parents and my grandmother who I was very close with. My father was a sergeant in the National Guard. He climbed telephone poles.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So you know, I think that, those just values of discipline and integrity and [00:04:00] being reliable are a lot of things that have gravitated, and carried over with me as I’ve moved to New York. Similarly on my mom’s side, my grandmother, who’s a survivor, came here with no money in her pocket, and just made ends meet.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Grit, determination, resilience and perseverance. I feel like all that is kind of what drives somebody to come to New York. So, a lot I can dig into there, but I feel like a combination of just early professional experience. It was an interesting hindsight, and then I moved here after college, which I can share why I left the Midwest and then ultimately came to New York, because I think there’s a certain type of person that will leave the Midwest for the East Coast and take on the big city.
Alex Hudgens: one of those certain type of people. Yeah. Let’s double click it. How did you [00:05:00] decide, okay, I’ve got all of this, I can feel this in me, I’ve got this drive, I’ve got this grit. Resilience, business, acumen, even as a child. I kind of want the tooth fairy story. Can you give us the 32nd tooth
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: fairy story?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Sure. So, I was just home in Minnesota last week. actually my six year old just lost her first tooth. She was very excited about the tooth fairy. Had a lot of, actually pretty impressive questions about the logistics behind the tooth fairy, which I appreciate for critical thinking. But she wrote her note to the tooth fairy when I was home.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: My mom had actually saved my letters to the Tooth Fairy when I was that age. Then looking back, I was like, this is ridiculous. I’m negotiating with this imaginary Tooth Fairy, and thinking about creative solutions about how I could get more money out of every tooth. So it was everything from, I was really brave and just had these tooth pulled.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Can I have an extra two dollars? To the next letter being like, because this is my seventh tooth, I think I should get seven dollars. To just like, [00:06:00] shamelessly asking for it. And I think as A business leader looking back, something that I, I feel like you really mature as you grow is just taking the emotion out of asking for a raise, fighting for yourself and you just need to be very objective and fact driven about that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: 35 years ago, probably at this point, but it’s just interesting to see how some people are wired a certain way to just ask for it and go for it and think creatively to get what they need done for their business.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, deeply rooted.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah
Wyatt Smith: So you get to New York City you have all of this sort of background leading you to to come here What was the experience like in the transition?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I I went to school in Indiana University. I actually thought I was gonna move to Chicago that was my original master plan, I was in the business school at Indiana. I had a great internship [00:07:00] in Chicago, but before my senior year,I was in final round interviews with a global media agency at the time.I knew who I was going to live with and where I was going to live. I was like, of course I’m getting this job. And it was probably my first big failure. I got to final round interviews and I didn’t get the job.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And I was like, This is ridiculous, I was 21 years old, it was shortly after 9 11. I decided, I don’t need Chicago. I’m going to go to New York. And my parents were not thrilled about it. But I didn’t know anybody here, except for my brother, but he was studying a religious program, so very different social circles. But I made up my mind that I was coming here, and what I started to do that senior year of college is, again, keep in mind, to date myself, this is 2002, [00:08:00] so there was no LinkedIn, the internet was kind of just happening, so I started to obsessively read all the industry trades that I could get my hands on.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so I was studying media and marketing and advertising, and so I would read every industry trade I could get, and I would highlight the names of the people that were quoted in the articles, and I would start to map out what brands were moving between which media agencies and advertising agencies.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so if I would see, oh, FedEx just went from publicist to this group, they must be needing to hire staff. So I just figured out this calculated way to hack hiring at a young age. And so I would send my resume to the people that I saw quoted in these trade articles and reference the trade articles and be like, Hi, I’m a senior and you must be looking for some junior media buyers or media planners and I’m going to be moving to New York.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so I ended up getting [00:09:00] three different job offers at three different agencies here in New York and moved here after August after backpacking for a couple months, which was just incredible and I’d recommend it to anyone. I think that also, again, pre cell phone days, free social media, things like that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I mean, we had to get a calling card to call home. So I think just building independence and confidence and bravery and things like that that also helped prepare me for the life that is New York. I spent 10 years working at a big agency, working with a lot of fortune 500 brands, helping them with their media strategy and press and content and things like that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Then fell in love with startups. The New York startup ecosystem was very new around 2010, 2011. I was fortunate that I was working with Verizon at the time, we actually launched the Android device for Verizon. So it was like this really interesting moment in time where [00:10:00] The strategy was starting to move away from the switchers between AT& T and Verizon and more about getting people to upgrade their data plans.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So it’s more so, it was more so being creative about these new technology platforms and how they could help people improve their daily life and improve their business efficiencies and things like that. That got me interested in emerging technology and working with startups. I left to join a startup and we really started specializing in helping startups find their first customers and helping big businesses learn how to commercialize emerging technology and how to work with founders and how to understand how these new solutions and these new applications can really drive business and enterprise value.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So we scaled that business, ultimately went into corporate venture capital about ten years ago and then left to start my own firm with, with my incredible partner, Kate Beardsley, who is just a wonder woman.
Alex Hudgens: as [00:11:00] are you. You both are,
Alex Hudgens: a ride, yes. Let’s talk about founding a company.
Alex Hudgens: Hannah Grey in 2020. Am I right? Like you guys went after this? Yeah. During a pandemic. Yeah. How did it seem like a good idea? Yeah, tell me more.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: It’s surprising and it’s not surprising if, you know, Kate and I, we’ve had been friends for since 2014. We met at that moment in time because it was like, Hey, I know one other woman, woman in venture capital, you guys should connect and meet. Which, back then is just how it, how it was. So we became fast friends and are our relationship was always very professional and personal, similar life stages, things like that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: We started co investing together. We did two investments together, it really became a when, not an if. We were gonna start a business together and start building a firm together. So we actually bought the [00:12:00] domain name for Hannah Grey in 2017 when we both only had one daughter.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Hannah Grey is named after our oldest daughters, their middle names. We didn’t actually leave and launch it until 2020. So we were very intentional about the market timing, which I think all business owners need to thikn about. Why are you starting this business about this moment in time?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And for us, part of it was saving to have the financial capacity to start our own company, which I think is something that a lot of business owners just resonate with. And part of it is seeing the talent and some of these forcing functions and these technology innovations that are shows now is the right time to do this. We waited because we also wanted to make sure that the partnership was really solid, which anybody that is starting a business can empathize with. You need to know who you are getting in business with. These are long term commitments. They’re even more difficult to untangle than a marriage. And so for Kate and I, we really spent a lot of time together.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: We, our family spent time together to make sure [00:13:00] the foundation of our partnership was solid and we could not just get along personally and professionally, but our values in terms of how we wanted to build a business, how we wanted to support founders, our belief systems for the types of companies we wanted to back were very aligned.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So starting a business in 2020 after a lot of pre planning, we knew that this is what we’re going to do for the next 25 years of our life and. It helped us get much sharper in our product and much sharper in how we talk to our investors.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: A lot of business owners just need to have those at bats and need to get those reps in. And so as we were fundraising virtually, which was unheard of at the time in venture capital, usually you get to know your limited partners, you break bread with them, you do off sites with them, you spend a lot of time.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And, and this was. [00:14:00] Hello, I may have never met you on a Zoom before, but I’m going to build trust with you to give me millions of dollars. So there’s a lot of early training just around selling the art of persuasion, the art of articulating your vision, getting people to believe in you and want to come on that ride with you to build the future that you believe has exponential enterprise value and financial returns, but also is the right future to build.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. One thing that I was really struck by the first time we met and the second and the third, the amount of depth of thinking that you had done about the problem that our company was looking to tackle. Yeah.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: it was clear to me that you had a really strong point of view on this being a very important problem to solve. Yes. And I’d love it if you would share with people. What your process was like to come to that conclusion, how you think about the problem and Yeah. the skilled worker shortage more broadly as an opportunity to go [00:15:00] build against.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah, absolutely. So we first started thinking about this problem in spring 2021. It was, it was a couple of years before we met and made the investment. And so we have a platform that we call Cultural Vibrations that’s really tracking a lot of these tensions and these sediments that we see bubbling under the surface to really look to understand the behavior of consumers and students and workers and business owners to understand, what are their, what are their pain points?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: What are their problems? When we started to really track this crisis around higher education and this disenfranchisement, this how people are getting disenfranchised with the university system, not just because of the absolutely insane costs of universities, but also, because it’s not necessarily delivering the experience that it once was.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so that led us down a wormhole of creating a belief system around, well if this, and then obviously COVID was hitting too, we started to see [00:16:00] enrollment nut numbers really slip, in particular with young males really slip at some of these, prestigious universities. So that led us down a belief system of, if this isn’t the dream anymore, where people want to go, where are they going to go?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And where are these other bigger macro forcing functions? That led us to really discover this increasingly urgent problem around the skilled worker shortage. And so then we started to look at the numbers around the workers and how this is an aging population of manufacturing workers we realized all the worlds are colliding and coming together.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So we need to figure out how do we de stigmatize an industry that is so important as the backbone of this country. Because these are recession proof jobs, coupled with this really interesting insight around the Gen Z worker. We’re only now starting to understand the Gen Z worker, they’ve really only been in the workforce for a few years and they’ve been dealing with COVID, right?[00:17:00]
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: This is a, this is a workforce that probably saw their parents get laid off in 2008, 2009. They may have seen their parents get laid off during COVID. They may hav. not had a graduation or not had some of these life moments because of this traumatic moment in time that we just experienced as a country.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So there’s going to be other pathways and new stable, flexible career options that they’re going to want. So as we started to learn about and uncover it, we developed this deep belief system around how skilled work Is going to make Gen Z the tool belt generation, which now a couple of years later, after we wrote this, there was just a wall street journal article about how Gen Z is a tool belt generation.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so if you look at just some of the inherent sediment about what they’re looking for, they’re looking for that flexibility. They’re looking to have entrepreneurship. They’re looking for something that can be more recession proof and they can control their own. But then we see that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Manufacturing, there’s [00:18:00] over, Wyatt, you would know better than me, over a million jobs that, and it’s going to, what, triple by 2030? That’s right. That’s right. So it is this increasingly urgent problem that we have in this country, so we just believe there’s going to be a massive reframe around this as a viable career path and a sought after career path for this younger generation, coupled with the avalanche of technology solutions that are going to help facilitate and drive that change.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So that was really part of our underlying thesis and belief system that led us to incredible companies.
Wyatt Smith: It jumped across the zoom screen, uh, building, building trust you, you’ve thought deeply about the problem and also there’s lots of people listening who are contemplating or right now hiring Gen Z workers.
Wyatt Smith: And so they have young people in their companies and they’re, they’re wanting to have a good experience for them, but there are challenges. So I’m curious what you’ve learned about managing Gen Z workers that you would say are good lessons. Yeah.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah. It is, it is, it [00:19:00] is difficult. So for anybody that is listening and working for it, they’re brought up a different way.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: These are digitally native builders, so they, they communicate differently, they have a different set of values. I shouldn’t say they have a different set of values, that’s not fair, but they’re more purpose driven workers, so I think the more that you are able to give them autonomy, give them flexibility.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: They need a lot of validation. They need a lot of intrinsic motivation. We live in this strange dopamine culture. Everything around us, if you think about it, is just driven by these dopamine hits. Whether it’s the content that we consume, whether it’s the need for feedback. And so, I think as an employer that, that might have this workforce, or be looking to recruit this workforce, or maybe has kids of your own with that, it’s really understanding that there’s a lot that’s going on that they’ve had to deal with growing up, from a political standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, from a student debt standpoint.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: [00:20:00] And so it’s just, this is a generation that has dealt with a lot of trauma, but in a very condensed, accelerated way. And so we’re seeing a lot of people develop these programs for Gen Z workers that are radical transparency and candidness and reinforcement, as a way to retain them, keep them motivated, and then also making them feel like they’re the master of their own domain, which I think is really important, but, remote work is, uh, I think really changed the face, which is less applicable for skilled trades, but there’s nuances of that apprenticeship and that serendipitous training that has been lost a little bit that is starting to be brought back.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: There’s one, there’s one insight that we had, that was this fascinating blog post that I read recently that kind of sums up this nostalgia culture that we also see. Um, and it’s this feeling of [00:21:00] anemoia, which I don’t, have you guys heard this term? I’m not. Say more. Teach us. So, it’s essentially this, it’s nostalgia and longing for a time that you haven’t experienced.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so you’re actually starting to see a resurgence in, you know, Polaroids and flip phones, and it’s this longing for a simpler time. And so if we think about that in the context of skilled work, there are ways that we as a generation grew up, and it was just, it was normal. Like you said, why and how did you, how did you grow up?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Like, the people you’re surrounded by, and it’s just, It’s not all tech jobs and white collared work that that is normal and is the path that you need to go with the university. And so we do believe that part of this anemoia is getting back to these just very back to basics of the foundational times of a stable living that that is Recession proof that is always going to be a need that may or [00:22:00] may not get automated But it’ll if it there are automations to make you better as a worker and to make your business more efficient Um, so I think that there’s just this like overarching sediment of what we’re seeing right now that is also making workers gravitate, especially the younger workers gravitate more towards skilled trades.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, the anemoia. I love that. It’s a
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: great
Alex Hudgens: term. I’ve recognized their faculty decisions and I’m like, I lived in the year 2001 and was not a baby and what are y’all doing with the butterfly eclipse? But that
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I will hat tip our Chief Brand Officer, Michael Miraflor, that brought that to us.. A lot about that nostalgia sentiment and I think there is something that it’s, it is our grandfathers, it is our fathers that have built really wonderful lives, um, and stable homes for our families and so I think there is going to be a pendulum swing back to that.
Wyatt Smith: I think that’s right. I had a experience this week, we were working on a lot of things like we do and things were not moving as fast as we were hoping that they would and so [00:23:00] I thought to myself like I really need to accomplish something today. And we had ordered a chair for our house and it came from Wayfair, so you have to assemble the chair.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: And I have a two year old and so I went to him and said, Hey, good news, we’re gonna build a chair. And he was so pumped. Yeah! He like ran and got his tool set, he put on his hard hat.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Awesome.
Wyatt Smith: And I grew up on a farm in Alabama where we built stuff all the time. It was like a really core part of an expectation for my dad on the farm.
Wyatt Smith: And I told our two year old, like, you know, he was enthusiastic more so than he was helpful, but it was, uh, it was great. And like, there is something that is so fulfilling around building something with your hands
Alex Hudgens: and
Wyatt Smith: to build a career on that is a really special thing.
Alex Hudgens: I think it’s the, what’s the quote, people who work with their minds rest with their hands as well.
Alex Hudgens: I’m like, people come to our apartment in New York City. I’m so proud to show the things that I DIYed, that I built, my dad also in the trades, and I wonder with Gen Z, [00:24:00] if it’s less work with their minds, that they don’t, but like, stress with their minds, they want to work with their hands. Yeah. That’d be interesting to see if that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Absolutely. I mean, and again, this generation, especially from COVID, like they’ve seen their parents sit at a screen a long time and in front of a computer. So there, there is just something that I think is. A more natural calling that is calling back and it feels like it’s getting rediscovered in a nostalgic way.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: That is very on trend right now with what we’re seeing. Just a lot of the underlying sentiment of this type of generation and this type of worker. Because again, I think the oldest Gen Zero is maybe 26 right now? 27 maybe? So we’re, so in terms of workforce, there is, They’ve been in the workforce less than a decade.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, it’s early innings.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Very
Wyatt Smith: early. It’s early innings.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: So our, our, our company super focused on serving people in the trades and we have a lot of, uh, fun success stories around that. As someone who looks at lots of technology companies and has a bit of a perspective, I thought it was really [00:25:00] interesting when you were alluding to the different ways that you motivate.
Wyatt Smith: reward and recognize people.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: Could you speak a bit to the opportunities you see with technology to help companies build structure around the employee experience?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah, I mean I think that what’s really important to recognize is that these are digitally native builders and so there’s a different level of expectations around how they interact with technology and how technology is going to benefit them and their job and their compensation that is tied to that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: There’s a huge opportunity to Live behind the scenes, but in a way that that is just intuitive to them and that they expect it again going back to that dopamine culture So when you are getting a positive reinforcement, it’s gonna make you want to do it more. I think that it’s also just interesting to think about the knowledge transfer and the apprenticeship – and I don’t want to say automating it in a way, but it’s how do we How do we capture the best practices of the apprenticeship that needs to happen in skilled trades, but use [00:26:00] technology to be able to do that at scale faster with a younger generation?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So I think it’s going to be a little bit of this intertwined. There’s going to be a lot of interesting machine learning that can be done. There’s going to be a lot of different gamification that can be done on that front also. So I would think about it as what does the worker want, and what are they going to respond to and how can we build around that in a way that is going to drive business results.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: That’s going to take experimentation, because I think people are motivated by different things, but it’s giving them the tools and the infrastructure that allows you to build towards that, that is creating the, the behavior and the craft and the skill that is ultimately the business objectives that the company
Wyatt Smith: needs.
Wyatt Smith: Yep. No, that’s really insightful. And I’m sure that a lot of people listening to this have contemplated an AI strategy for their teams. But the folks that we talk to sometimes feel a little skeptical about the application. And so I’d love to learn from you about what you’ve seen as [00:27:00] applications that make a lot of sense, given the current state of large language models and where AI technology is.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah, we talk to brands that say, what do we do about the AI? And just like people said, what do we do about the internet? You know, and that’s okay, we’re still in very early innings there, but for a lot of companies, it’s also first thinking about what problem do you want to solve? What data do you have? What do you want it to do? Where is your business breaking down that you feel like you can be more efficient? Because again, we are still in the early innings, so it’s not necessarily for everybody. It’s thinking about what is right for your business, some tangible applications for AI.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: It can be everything from better hiring and better screening, to better filter out candidates, reading through different resumes or finding candidates, things like that. Obviously there’s a lot of incredible things you can do with AR for training, that’s a really interesting application, [00:28:00] not AI, but just something in like the broader lens for that.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Um, we’re seeing things around autonomous agents for industrials and manufacturing, a new framework called machine teaching. That is more for a supply chain and manufacturing. So again, it’s about that knowledge transfer. So to me, it’s what data do you have? And it, it doesn’t just have to be tangible data – it can be human capital data. So how do we think about using AI for that knowledge transfer of some of your workers? Um, in a way that can be. Repeatable, scalable, and ultimately drive business value and can help free up some of your talent to maybe be doing more strategic things if there are tasks or knowledge insights that can be automated away.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I would think about, what is your talent? What is your intellectual capital that you have? What is unique and proprietary to you? And then your why? Why do you want to do this? What do you hope that it accomplished? And starting to ask those questions before you just try to blue ocean and figure out [00:29:00] what your strategy is for.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
Wyatt Smith: The insight around being very specific on the problem you’re trying to solve resonates. It really resonates because then you can have a really clear measurement on how you’re doing, which then builds momentum towards a bigger application from there.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: It’s very bespoke to the business. There’s going to be some universal challenges. Of course it can be solved, but you as a business owner know your business better than anybody else. And so be really intentional about your, about that. Why do I feel like I need to solve this today? Is it because I hear about it and I read about it in the news or it’s because this is a problem that I’ve been grappling with or I see myself being able to drive margins up by 20 percent if I’m able to do this.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And so be really intentional about what you want to do and where you want to take your business, not just for the short term for two years, but where do you need your business to go in the next 10 years? Because that’s where we’re in right now. Because keep in mind, a [00:30:00] lot of these, we’re finally moving from the infrastructure layer to the application layer with AI.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: That’s why you can’t have a short term AI strategy. You can test and you can learn, and that’s important, but you need to think about the foresight of what do I need to do to future proof my business so that I can make sure it has longevity for the next 10 plus years.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: And especially as we think about some skilled trade work that might be generational businesses, Then it is, I need to not be thinking about what do I need to do for AI today, it’s I have to think about why do I need to start implementing, collecting this data, streamlining it, starting to train these models or these algorithms, whatever it might be, so that I’m future proofing my business and that it’s staying competitive in the next 5, 10, 15 years.
Alex Hudgens: Oh, we could go so many ways [00:31:00] right now, but I would be remiss if we did not touch upon Your personal work with the female founders. I would love to talk. I want to get your accolade correct. You’ve been named by Forbes as a woman leader in corporate VC to know. Thank you. That’s fancy. All the letters are capitalized And your resume speaks a lot to you know Women receiving funding and female founders and I’d love to know how you think about that in the context of everything else that we Just said
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: yeah I have a lot, I have a lot of thoughts on it.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I mean, the stats are dreary. Less than 2 percent of venture capital goes to female founders. Our portfolio at Hannah Grey, we back all founders. I think about 60 percent of our companies are women or minority led businesses. I actually spend more time, with women in venture capital, so I’m not a stranger to, being the only woman in the room, it’s a very male [00:32:00] dominated industry, which I empathize with, that in skilled trades and construction, and I would love to see more women getting into the skilled trades because it is such an incredible opportunity.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I co founded Women in VC, in 2015, which we’ve grown into the world’s largest community for women investors. Um, there’s now over 6, 000 women across over 200 cities, over 75 countries, it’s, grown completely organically, but. It’s more so inspired by You know, you can’t be what you can’t see and so often, and I think there’s probably a lot of parallels with women in skilled trades, is community is so important because you’re often the only woman in your city or in the region or in your state, and so having that community for shared professional resources, supporting those types of work environments, it’s only gonna help recruit more women, [00:33:00.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Only about 5. 6 percent of all venture capital firms are founded by women, are women led. So there’s not that many of us. We track about a thousand of them globally. That’s not everybody, obviously, but even if we only capture half of that, there’s, it’s insane that there’s a profession of, you know, Probably less than 5, 000 women that are founding GPs, to be clear.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Plenty more women investors, but founding GPs in venture capital. It’s important because until you really change the face of people controlling the capital, that’s going to trickle down to what types of markets they believe are going to deliver exponential returns and what type of customers they believe products need to be built for.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So very passionate about that, but I hope that there can just be this similar wave around recruiting more women into skilled trades. Cause I think that theres a lot of it is messaging, it’s education, it’s [00:34:00] recruitment, it’s community. I think that’s part of the way we’re going to be able to solve the skilled worker crisis in the coming decade.
Alex Hudgens: Amen. Yeah. I was like, yeah, boys can do it. We met some, I think about the welders in Alabama. Right. Awesome. Awesome. I met some incredible women. who are welders working on naval ships. It was so badass. They let me do it for two seconds, and I was like, I feel so strong and empowered, but they’re doing this all day long.
Alex Hudgens: It’s hard, but they were just like.
Wyatt Smith: Well, they have incredible attention to detail. A
Alex Hudgens: hundred percent.
Wyatt Smith: And their ability to follow, like, very prescribed workflows, extremely high.
Alex Hudgens: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: They have a lot of emotional intelligence that was playing out, I think, in that job setting, too. So, they were pretty good.
Wyatt Smith: Aspirational
Alex Hudgens: people. Fire. Totally.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah.
Alex Hudgens: Very hot things. It was, I just, I think about that all the time. So, agreed. Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: Totally.
Alex Hudgens: Never gonna be enough.
Wyatt Smith: We should do a lightning round.
Alex Hudgens: [00:35:00] Yeah. I have to get them out, because otherwise I get sidetracked and it turns into very much not rapid fire, and we’re having a lot of gasping.
Alex Hudgens: I will try to be very concise with my It’s not you. It’s right. Okay. Well, let’s start with a book rec, because I love a book rec. What is a book that you would recommend to our audience which Ranges from
Wyatt Smith: the frame of this one is something that like led you to change your behavior So you read this book and then your
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: behavior
Wyatt Smith: was different afterwards.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I just finished the Essentialist And blank on the author’s name.
Wyatt Smith: McCune.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yes. I thought that was an excellent book because it really just forces you to think about do you need to do everything? Do you need to say yes to everything and saying no more often and really honing in on what is essential that is going to move the needle?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Um, so that was excellent because you are always pulled in every direction as a business owner [00:36:00] and really staying focused and disciplined on what needs to be done to drive business value. I thought that was a great read.
Wyatt Smith: Jessica does a very good job of getting lots of things done, so I, I appreciate
Alex Hudgens: it.
Alex Hudgens: Definitely check that out from you. Uh, a podcast, besides Untapped with Epsmith, that you’d recommend giving a listen?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Oh man, um, what has been on my podcast list lately?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I listen to a lot of venture podcasts. Would it, would it be like, less interesting? The Carta podcast is pretty good. The Strictly BC podcasts, uh, they have great things too.
Alex Hudgens: non listened one. Our audience wants to know what you listen to. You did not have to say Enter Expert.
Alex Hudgens: I’d say that, so. Card Podcast. But obviously, Shameless Flag of the Untapped podcast is excellent.
Wyatt Smith: Better now that you’re on it.
Alex Hudgens: That’s right. We appreciate that. Uh, any tools, [00:37:00] especially underrated ones, that you Enjoy using in your life? Like how are you keeping all of the
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: things,
Wyatt Smith: productivity tools is way you there?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Obviously chat GPT but I feel like that’s a no brainer, but I’ve been using perplexity.ai more
Alex Hudgens: Okay. Let’s go second time in 24 hours the perplexity has come up.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I’ll, it kind of depends what I need. Like I’ll still use chat GBTA lot for task oriented things, but for information. search gatherings, I’ll use Perplexity more. I find it to be faster, more reliable, and just more, a tighter package. Highly recommend it.
Wyatt Smith: That’s great.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: I was using it this morning, so we’re in the wild.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: Well, well, Demetri and Emily, if you’re listening, we’re, we’re high up in Perplexity. Two friends of mine from previous jobs are now at the company, so it’s, they’re doing great work.
Alex Hudgens: Yeah. I love that. I am getting on board. Now that there’s even more recommendations, truly, in the last 24 hours.
Wyatt Smith: Alex is all [00:38:00] about social proof. She’s killing it.
Alex Hudgens: It’s magic. We trust the AI until someone else tells me to do so, so there you go. You gotta be careful for the hallucinations. See? See? I’m like, is she even joking?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: But this is also, but this is also why I think perplexity is great, because it’ll, it’ll better annotate.
Wyatt Smith: You can follow up.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: Go to the source. Yeah. That’s it.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: This is one of my favorites. That, that, actually as we talk about AI, I think that trust factor and finding subtle ways to build trust into the user experience is gonna be also another just part of this AI adoption curve.
Alex Hudgens: My background is in journalism, and I’m like, where, what is your source? ChatGPT? Yeah. Where’d you get this? Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s real. One of my favorite rapid fire questions is, is there something that you would tell your 16 year old self knowing What you know now?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: I think one of my favorite pieces of business advice [00:39:00] is just like, if you don’t go for it, someone less qualified will. So it’s just apply for that job that you don’t think you should get or start that company that maybe you’re nervous to start. It’s just, everybody starts somewhere, and you have to be. fearless and ruthless and confident and brave to be a business owner, and weather everything that comes with it. And so, but there are plenty of people that are probably far less competent than you that are doing it or trying to do it. So just get started.
Wyatt Smith: Pick
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: one.
Wyatt Smith: Um,
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: What’s yours? I’m curious what about 16 year old Wyatt.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. Like you growing up in a in a small town or a rural part of the country for myself in Alabama I think that there was an element of like having confidence in yourself that comes with [00:40:00] Pushing and then in shooting for things that make you a little bit uncomfortable And so there was this feeling I would get of anxiety at times and that’s money I was doing the right thing because I was right on the edge of, um, what I thought I could, could accomplish.
Wyatt Smith: And then if you do that enough times and you’re able to get a good outcome, it starts to compound. And so when we’re thinking about how we can serve people better at our company, a lot of it is about like really taking risks and having a bias to action to say, we’re going to put ourselves in a position that like, we might not have the full answer, but we’re going to work super hard to solve this problem for you because we care deeply about you, our customer, and this problem.
Wyatt Smith: And that’s important to build into a culture. And if you can do it, man, it is powerful. And so that’s, that’s a reflection I have on my teenage and adolescent years that we try to cast forward now.
Alex Hudgens: Yeah. Well, that’s good.
Wyatt Smith: How about you, Ox? Advice to
Alex Hudgens: this young
Wyatt Smith: woman in St. Louis?
Alex Hudgens: It, I mean, it’s what [00:41:00] y’all have both said.
Alex Hudgens: It’s just go for it. Yeah, I think the through line of my life has been go for what you want. Even in the face of fear.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: You’re not gonna regret doing it, but you might regret not doing it. So it’s like, yes.
Alex Hudgens: I’m very motivated by 80 year old Alex. Probably more than what current me would tell 16 year old me.
Alex Hudgens: She’s pretty ballsy. She wanted to move to New York. I said, okay, let’s do it.
Wyatt Smith: That’s good.
Alex Hudgens: One more. We have time for one more. Which one’s your favorite?
Wyatt Smith: Well, the big one is, like, how can our listeners help projects that you have going on right now? And what are things that would be a request for help that we could help on?
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Oh, wow. that’s a great question. I’ll have to, I’ll have to think of it. I mean, we are always curious to know the customer’s perspective. We just love having conversations [00:42:00] with interesting people. I would just say, like, We, we like knowing like what people are working on, what’s keeping people up at night, like what are their pain points, how are they thinking about building their businesses, um, so I would say it’s, it’s less of an ask of, you know, we’re always looking to back incredible companies that are going to be generational and deliver exponential returns, of course, but For us, because we do like to do such deep work on the customer and the category, it’s always, it’s always just like, tell us about what you need and tell us about how you’re living and tell us about what you’re concerned about for your business and your family and your daily life.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: So I would say just having interesting, intellectually stimulating conversations, I think are always key. useful for us, uh, in our, in sharpening our lens.
Wyatt Smith: Well, this has been one on our side. We’re grateful for you joining us. Thank you for being a part of this.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Thank you for having me and just all the incredible work you’re doing to elevate this mission and this problem and all the great work you’re doing to solve it.
Wyatt Smith: There’s a lot more work ahead.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Love it.
Wyatt Smith: A lot [00:43:00] more to come. Thanks, Jessica.
Jessica Peltz-Zatulove: Thanks Wyatt.
