What do you eat for breakfast?
An egg sandwich and a triple cappuccino. Starbucks is only 30 feet from our new office.
What do you do for a workout?
I do Pure Barre two or three times a week and I swim at the Stanford pool on Sundays. Nothing beats swimming outside and reading a book by the pool on a nice day.
What’s on your phone home screen?
It’s just a random picture, nothing special. Although usually it’s covered with Slack notifications so I can’t see it.
What makes you passionate as an entrepreneur?
I love building a company.
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There is nothing more amazing than creating something from scratch and figuring out how to make it awesome. I also love how challenging it is. I am the type of person who needs constant challenges to be happy and being an entrepreneur is the most exciting experience and hardest one I have ever taken on.
Lastly, I love it because I feel I can have a real impact on people—from creating the most awesome work culture for our employees and trying to make sure they are empowered to create amazing things, to building a product that changes the lives of our partners. At the end of the day, if I know something I did made the life of an app developer easier or helped one our employees achieve something great that day, I can go to sleep happy.
Why does your work matter to you?
I run marketing at Branch Metrics. We are a company that helps developers grow their apps. Before Branch I built an app with my co-founders (Kindred Photobooks) and really struggled to understand where our installs were coming from, or to build organic growth features into our app.
After we sold Kindred, we decided to take all the struggles we faced as app developers and build a solution for them—that’s how Branch was born.
I love what I do because ultimately it helps other app developers solve the problems I faced
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as a developer—how can I build a referral system for my app, how can I build sharing, how can I understand who is inviting who, where all my installs are coming from?
And moreover, we do it for free, and I know that goes a long way with developers who are just starting out and don’t have funding. We were there less than two years ago, building an app without any funding and trying to grow it.
What’s your “entrepreneurial superpower”—your go-to strength?
I think it’s my focus on making things happen—I will set a goal and try everything in my power to get to it.
I will learn a new programming language, take a class on design, cold e-mail 100 people, whatever it takes.
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Now I think I am learning to empower my team to do that, and I try to view myself as the person who picks up the things that no one else gets to and makes sure all is executed at the end of the day.
Entrepreneur you admire?
I am a fan of Danielle Morrill.
I love what she is doing at Mattermark, and I feel I learned a lot from her talks on marketing to developers.
So what do you think about being a female entrepreneur?
I tend to not think of myself as different. I guess there are differences, but if I don’t focus on them, I am just another entrepreneur.
I think the worst is that people categorize you as being different when really, I myself am just another developer-turned-marketer who is trying to help other developers. The fact that I am a woman should not play into it.
What the best advice you ever got?
I know this will be a bit cheesy, but I think it’s from my co-founder, Alex.
He says to
just keep building, to keep trying until something sticks
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I think sometimes it’s easy to get attached to ideas and even if you see there is no future, it’s hard to let go. But you have to, as soon as you sense there’s no chance of success. But you have to learn to read data and when things are not working, switch direction. That the only way to be successful.
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Mada Saghete’s success follows a trend of women investors spotting and supporting interesting solutions from female founders.
- Learn more about top female venture capital firms in our recent coverage.
