William Leonard
Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m William Leonard, your host and investor here at Valor Ventures, a leading seed-stage VC firm in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, I’m really excited to sit down with Kristina Williams, founder and CEO of Unpacking, Kristina, thank you for joining me today.
Kristina Williams
Hello, I’m very excited to be here and dig in. I know we got a lot to talk about.
William Leonard
We do. I love the energy. So, Kristina, I know your story. I know your background. But can we start off by just giving our listeners the Kristina story? Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What do you like to do? How did you kind of come to the idea of Unpacking?
Kristina Williams
I really think that my whole trajectory into cross-cultural education, like diversity and inclusion spaces, came from the fact that I had the opportunity to live amongst so many different cultures and upbringing. I went to three different high schools in three different states amongst three different types of communities. I’ve had amazing explorations in my life journey, where I’ve lived across the United States, from Hawaii to Denver to Los Angeles and Oakland, but also throw in some Nashville in there as well, and some Phoenix. I’ve been able to see a lot of America. I’ve also been able to see a lot of the world. I studied abroad in Spain and taught English there while I was learning Spanish. I also had opportunities to work on a Disney Cruise Ship sailing around Mexico and the Caribbean. I’ve always been drawn to the culture and the celebration of history. This space just naturally speaks to my heart. I came into this particular business in response to the George Floyd and Breanna Taylor murders. Of course, I’m on Arbury, where I was just witnessing all the public statements said by corporations around standing in solidarity with Black Lives Matter but then seeing their internal employees saying there is this contradiction going on. And then in addition to that, there was so much information on disparate websites, all over the internet, and everyone’s throwing things and posting things. It was overwhelming. Knowing my own experiences with racism and sexism, both in the workplace and in my schooling, I decided to apply my two master’s degrees in teaching and design thinking to do something about it. Unpacking was birthed as a way for me to create a one-stop-shop for the DEI community.
William Leonard
Gotcha. What an interesting journey into entrepreneurship there. You kind of spoke as to Unpacking being a one-stop shop into the DEI, definitely delve in a little bit further as to what you’re doing. Who’s your end customer? How are you solving this issue in the modern-day?
Kristina Williams
Absolutely. Thank you for this question. I love our features. I could talk about them all day long. Unpacking has two different entry points. You can either join the Unpacking universe as an individual, or you can be a part of an organization that invites you into the Unpacking Universe by way of training. And so essentially how our experience works is we have a suite of services ranging from diversity and inclusion training, which we understand as social impact modules, our learning experiences break down what we traditionally know as DEI training or unconscious bias training. We identified six core areas that specifically focus on topics that are typically kind of bunched together and expected to all be digested under one umbrella and we broke that umbrella up. At Unpacking, if you’re joining one of our training, you have a whole suite to choose from ranging from anti-racism to LGBTQ rights, gender rights, disability rights, sustainability, and product inclusion. It’s plug-and-play. You choose which topics are most of interest to you. You can complete different pieces of training to scale your learning at the frequency that makes the best sense for you and your team. That’s one product that is within our ecosystem, the training. Now, because your membership is an annual membership at Unpacking, that means you also get access to our Firesides, which are like master classes with social impact leaders. We have a hotline where people can call in to receive advice on organizational culture or incident reports, where you also have opportunities to join Roundtables, which are like meetups for across industry professionals to engage on shared interest topics. We’ve got many workshops where we’ll focus on certain topics one at a time, and it’s not necessarily a whole training you go through. We have a really robust ecosystem that all folds into our data analytics, and demonstrates trends that we see across departments across industries across demographics, as well.
William Leonard
Gotcha. Those are some interesting features there. As you think about your approach to really getting usage rates among these corporations and these enterprises, you’re kind of taking a gamified approach here. Why is that your strategy instead of the traditional way of things? Obviously, there’s a need for disruption but why the gamified approach?
Kristina Williams
Well, if I’m just frank, DEI training sucks. It’s boring, it’s outdated. It’s very stoic. We like to think of ourselves out in Unpacking as the “anti-corporate” corporate training. If you’re going through one of our learning experiences, you are met with GIFs, memes, and delighters that are all over the place to keep you motivated. In the learning process, we use a flipped classroom model, which has you first, do your homework, then come to class. On our interactive platform, all of our engagement activities have interactive experiences, so that you’re actually enjoying the learning process, which means your retention of the knowledge lasts longer. We see 40% longer retention when there’s experiential learning that takes place. Because we are a hybrid model that has you do your homework on our platform, then come to our virtual workshop embedded together, that means you also get an expert facilitator like myself that has degrees in this space and has direct service experience in this space, to go on a deeper dive of the content with you and your peers, and guide you through collaborative interactions. What we see on the market right now is that, essentially, these platforms are saying, “Hey, go watch this video. Now you’re not a racist.” That’s not how empathy is built, right? That’s not how behavior is changed. At Unpacking, we have designed it so that it’s interactive in ways that keep you motivated to want to keep learning about your peers, because we know that we learn most from storytelling, and also to keep you engaged because you are receiving rewards. This gamification component comes from the different types of rewards that range from just experiencing a little laughter in the midst of the training because a funny GIF or meme pops up for you or because you’re earning rewards points as you are completing different activities within our platform that lead to different perks and certifications that you receive for your experience with us.
William Leonard
I love that approach because Unpacking is providing that interactive, actionable next step. I think that’s key to just having one of your employees watch a video and then like you said, “Oh, you’re not a racist.” You’re thinking about engagement, and actively building up that empathy to understand your co-workers, your teammates, who are different, or being impacted by worldly events going on outside of work so I think that’s interesting. And from the individual’s experience, that’s a really great summary of what that looks like. And then from the organization’s experience, it’s scaled learning after their teammates go through them or go through our training as well. Because once a team completes training with us, in that training, they’ve actually completed a whole scorecard of actionable steps that are measurable for them to hold themselves accountable over time. And so post-training, we send out surveys and collect data, a month out, three months out, six months out, 12 months out, to see the satisfaction rating of how well the organization is continuing to implement the action steps that we laid forth during the training they committed to and co-designed. What ends up happening there, as far as rewards, that gamification for the organization is, “Wow, you were consistent, or even you grew in this particular area.” Now you are Unpacking certified, which means you now get to be placed on our best places to work list. Now you have our stamp of approval. You can post jobs to our website and a series of other perks.
William Leonard
It’s kind of like a network effect there for the organizations. And I think the organizational level impact is equally as important as the employee level as well. As you’re thinking about your target customer, are you targeting startups? Are you targeting enterprises? Who is your ideal customer right now?
Kristina Williams
What’s great about Unpacking is that we focus on organizational culture. All companies have organizational culture, right? We do service small to enterprise companies. We have been getting a lot of interest from enterprise companies but they also have an initial experience with us as if they were a startup. Because when we’re working with larger-scale companies, we typically do land and expand model where a department, like a handful, or you’ll get like 30 people and like one of our cohorts will pilot our training, and then it will expand and they’ll adopt it and to the rest of their ecosystem. Now, when we look at that, in parallel of working with a smaller organization, that 30 people within that large organization that just tested it with us could be the entire team at one of the smaller businesses. We’re industry agnostic, and we are size agnostic because the experience and entry point are pretty paralleled across the board.
William Leonard
Okay, awesome. I love that approach. I want to shift gears here a little bit, you mentioned how you’re leveraging your master’s degrees in organizational design. I would love to kind of hear your journey on being a first-time founder. I’m sure it’s been the easiest leap to undergo but do you have any advice for other founders who are maybe looking to make that leap into entrepreneurship, or who are first-time founders really in the midst of building they’re in a pre-seed or seed-stage startup?
Kristina Williams
I have so many things, William. First and foremost, this is not my first startup. This is my third startup. The first one was stuck in the idea stage. In the idea stage, I made it to spaces like becoming finalists, Snapchat accelerator, got into FounderGym, and went through that accelerator. I learned some things in that stage and that was for an augmented reality AR app. The idea was to have a Pokemon GO experience with public art, like murals and everything, and be able to scan it and see some really cool information about that art piece. It may happen, it may come back, it’s in my backpack now, right? That transitioned into having the experience of being able to scan a product and get the information and find reviews about the content by other people that share your same skin and hair experiences. What I was finding with the art app was, that wasn’t an everyday use case. That was like a once in a while, it’s for fun, it’s for vacation, but people aren’t as active to use it. That translates into the beauty space where I know from my experience, and then talking with my peers and doing more user research, that having curly hair is a pain point for a lot of people, having hyperpigmentation, having skin issues, these are all realities where people are shopping for products to help solve for them every day. Going into a store and being able to scan a product and immediately pull up reviews by people that share your same hair and skin experiences. That was the idea for that second company. I was working on that transition into the idea stage. We actually got into some revenue-generating stage, not by having a product, but by starting to build a community around the product that was coming. Then what happened in May 2020 was that I graduated with my second Master’s, I posted an event for my previous startup that had a great turnout. George Floyd was murdered and what I recognized was, throughout this time and my previous startups, I had gained a really strong foundation of understanding the ropes of how to build a business. The content and the subject matter of the business wasn’t necessarily that was continuing with me. It was the knowledge of being in a space I was entering as a newbie after having been in education for the majority of my career. One storage boy was murdered, my heartstrings pulled on me to do something in this space, which was my groundedness and longest area of expertise. I transitioned everything that I had learned in my trials within the initial spaces into Unpacking, and guess what? It worked. I’m sharing that because not everything that we start off with is going to be our thing, but that’s okay. We’re still gaining knowledge, we’re still learning, and the reason that Unpacking was able to be so successful so early, was because of the lessons I learned, whether it was from hiring mistakes, or over-committing mistakes, or strategy mistakes. I was able to easily launch a website, know what types of investors I needed to be talking to, how to make my mission statement more clear, all these things came to me because I had trials and errors before. I want to give a couple of points on some more details, like actionable steps for first startup founders. One, if you are a pre-seed company, this is my advice, you may receive other advice from other places, but it’s my belief that if you’re a pre-seed company, you should not be giving away equity in your company. I think you need to be validating that your product has a market fit. And that also means that you should be working with teammates within your means. My strategic plan is wrapped around my hiring process during my pre-seed stage. I hire for quarterly projects. Each quarter, we have a specific focus that builds upon our roadmap goals. So for that quarter, I hired contractors to work with me on those projects. Now those people are going through a 90-day probationary period, essentially, where I’m seeing if they’re the right culture fit for this organization as we continue to grow and if they have the skill set to move forward during the next quarter, whichever products come up, then they do so. If not, it was clearly stated from the beginning. Everyone was on the same page about a three-month project-based work, and that they would be in our pool moving forward when we have the funds to hire people full time. What I’ve been able to do is to tap into amazing talent, quarter over quarter, one group was working on building an additional curriculum for our platform. Another group is working on designing our handbook and creating our sales pipelines and marketing strategies, and so on. We outsource our tech team to a development studio. We got all these pieces in place, and now I’m in the position where I built my own proprietary platform. Within my first year of launching my company, we’ve made over $200,000, we’ve raised over $200,000, we’ve gotten a grant from Beyonce and the NAACP, we have four of our six modules done, and that was all because I was strategic about the money that I had. If we think about the technical skills that it requires to build a product, hiring one engineer in-house is over $100,000. If you hire a tech team or if you hire a development studio, you can get three or four engineers for that same price. Be smart about the money that you have and the stage that you are in. Because once you hit that milestone that puts you in the position to then scale out what funds you have to then hire people in-house to people you’ve already vetted are the right culture add to your company.
William Leonard
Those are interesting insights around company building and hiring. From your perspective, as a pre-seed stage founder, when you are going through those probationary periods with contract workers and at the end of that period, you’re assessing whether to bring them on full-time. What are three traits that you’re looking for that other founders should be looking at?
Kristina Williams
Flexibility. Startups are startups, right? There are no systems or structures you’re building as you go. There are fires, there are bugs, and things are happening all the time. How adaptable are they? Are they chameleons? Are they go-getters? Can they take initiative and get things done without you having to tell them? Are they showing up because they have a personal investment in what we’re building? Do they feel a sense of pride in what we’re doing? Flexibility and then to the initiative. The third thing that I would say is character. Are people a value add just by their presence being there? I’m very lucky because I have quite a few people like that on our team, where just the mere sight of them showing into the Zoom call makes everyone start smiling. That’s something you can’t school, you can’t educate. You can’t. It’s just like a natural ability. The culture that you have in your organization is essential to the success of the companies, no matter what the product is. You can’t keep people there to make the business run smoothly. I also want to get some warning signs of things, right? I’ve had experiences where this is what’s good about the three-month contracts. I’ve had experiences where I’ve had people come on, and they want large amounts of equity or really high salaries, and they’re answering emails or taking notes for you, right? Always remember that we’re observing how people act in the early stages because that’s gonna be an insight into how they’re going to act down the road. You need to use your gut and listening to what is going to be the most conducive place for you to be successful. Who are the people that are going to be most conducive for you to be around to be successful? If it’s causing you stress, you don’t have time for it in your business. At the end of the day, we barely have time to hang out with our friends and our family. Sometimes we just eat or shower that day. Having someone internally that is already causing tension is like we have to learn to cut quickly. It’s definitely a skill that gets developed. But I think it’s one of the most important skills to have because your business is your baby and everything reflects back on you at the end of the day.
William Leonard
No, those are all great things to really assess and things to watch out for at this stage. You’ve raised a couple of $100,000. You’ve won a grant from Beyonce and NAACP. I think you say the closeout or you’ve built about four out of six modules for the rest of 2021. What does success look like for Unpacking?
Kristina Williams
Well, I’m very happy to announce that this week, we have started our first training on our new platform. We’re running training this week, which is really exciting. It’s going pretty well. We’re getting really great responses already. Tomorrow’s the last day of the workshop. What we’re planning for the rest of 2021 is continued development in what we have to offer on our platform. We are producing content that will serve as our fireside so we are producing content with social impact leaders from national commentators to senior executives, Fortune 500 companies to celebrity activists, etc. We’re filming that content. We have our library of videos there as supplemental to our training. We are rolling out workshops and roundtables to start building buzz and brand awareness. We’re completing tasks now that gears us up for our large launch, like our big official launch, which will take place at the beginning of 2022. We’re checking off all the boxes and making sure our architecture and our foundation are solid. Our launch goes really smoothly at the beginning of the year. The other thing I’ll add, there is testing marketing ads. We’re seeing what works really well. Putting those out incongruent with good timing. This is also something that was important for us to know as founders are who your customers are and what their schedules are. We know that quarter four is when companies start to plan their budgets for the upcoming year. We know that we’re testing marketing ads right now. We know what to run during October through December so people are booking us to start their training at the beginning of the year. We already have a sales pipeline that we know of, at the end of this year, for what revenue we can already start projecting will be coming in for the upcoming year. Be strategic. Y’all, pay attention.
William Leonard
I was gonna say like, first of all, congrats on getting your first training on the platform. Second, I think that’s a tidbit of advice in itself. Taking a proactive approach to the next quarter, two quarters ahead, right? Because you’re already strategically planning out q4, right? I think it’s good because you’re not getting lost but you also have to stay laser-focused on where you want this company to be at 6, 12, 18 months down the road.
Kristina Williams
Honestly, I really feel like my biggest piece of advice is just breaking things down into chunks, like really honestly, doing this quarter over quarter product-based stuff like it allows you to see, well, that’s where I want to be then. So let me work backward. Where I can break it up into the strategic goals there.
William Leonard
Starting with the end in mind. Interesting. As we’re wrapping up the conversation here, Kristina, I know, you’ve really been on the West Coast for the majority of the time while building Unpacking but you’re relocating to the city of Atlanta. What was the factor behind that move there?
Kristina Williams
There is so much to Atlanta, where do I start? First and foremost, I felt a sense of community. I feel as though people want to see me. I feel supported. I feel people want to collaborate. I feel like there is a tech ecosystem that has black people there that are visible all the time, all day every day. People have a legacy within this space that looks like me and that is a huge attraction because we can do as much as we want on our own but when we really see ourselves reflected, it’s like, iron sharpens iron. That is the biggest thing for me was, the sense of community in the black tech space. The second component down there that really attracts me is our market. There are so many headquarters of Fortune 500 and other companies that are based in Atlanta. Having that backdrop where I’m able to know my clients in person and have interpersonal relationships that aren’t just on Zoom is a huge factor for me to be there. I also have family that’s in Nashville, and so being able to be close enough to go and visit and a really quick trip is really exciting for me there as well. I’m beyond myself and being able to move out there and I cannot wait to get settled in and really just dive in and meet people.
William Leonard
I think you hit the nail on the head there; the culture, the companies, the established enterprises that are already here, and equally the enterprise is in the making. I think there are so many companies in Atlanta that are going to be on that enterprise-level employing thousands of people over this decade. I think you’re really positioning yourself and the team well, and positioning you all for success over these next few years. I’m elated that you’re relocating here to the city. Of course, I’m biased. Atlanta is home. For me, Atlanta is an amazing city and I think it’d be a great place to build Unpacking. Kristina, I think this was a really great conversation. I’m confident that our listeners are going to find a lot of useful insight out of your tips around fundraising, company building, thinking about hiring at the pre-seed and seed level. I think that those are unique insights that we haven’t heard on this podcast before. I think it’ll resonate well with our listeners, and really appreciate you joining me this afternoon, Kristina.
Kristina Williams
Absolutely. Any time I’m here for it. Thank you, William.
Lisa
Thank you for listening to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. You know, we’re not just a podcast, we’re a community, and we’d love to see you at one of our digital or physical events, go to valor.VC and sign up for an event that makes sense for you. We have events for founders and the investors who back them. Another event you might enjoy is Startup Runway. The Startup Runway Foundation is a Valor organization that provides $10,000 grants to founders who are women or people of color building next-generation software products. Applications are free and we’d love to hear from you at startuprunway.org. And as always, thank you so much to the organizations that make this podcast possible. Not only Valor Ventures, but also Write2Market, a tech marketing and PR agency in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Startup Runway Foundation and Atlanta Tech Park Valley’s headquarters, and also headquarters for over 100 local entrepreneurs, building global businesses. See you next week. Please bookmark the podcast and join us.
