Melody McCloskey

#36/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

In San Francisco, Melody McCloskey stands out as a rare woman in the land of tech start-ups. She has raised some $14 million in venture capital for StyleSeat, an online booking platform for salon professionals that she founded in 2011 along with Dan Levine, a developer. Today, some 260,000 stylists in the US use the platform, and the company employs 31 people.

But Melody’s career in tech was nearly derailed in 2002, back when she was a high school student in suburban San Francisco and she took an advanced placement course in computer science, something of an introduction to coding. “I have always loved computers and I’ve always loved tech,” she said. “I was really excited about it.” Melody, who studied ballet until growing too tall, brought a dancer’s discipline to her studies. “The coursework wasn’t harder than any of my other A.P. courses,” she said. “But I was the only woman in the class.” And right away, she said, “there was all this tension and attention present because of that. All the guys either wanted to talk to me or didn’t want me to be there.”

As an adult, she might have been able to handle that, but as a high school student, she said, “it added extra pressure that I didn’t feel in any of my other classes.” Ultimately, she decided to drop the course — and tech all together, at least for a while. She majored in international relations and French at the University of California, Davis, where she said a counsellor advised her to pursue public relations: “You’re a girl — you have great social skills.” Melody did try public relations after graduating but didn’t like it. Then, she took a job managing online content for Current, the now-defunct television channel. “I was helping to build all the back-end C.M.S.” — the content management system — “like really nerdy stuff,” she said. “It was really fun.”

As is common in the San Francisco Bay Area, she began hanging out with start-up founders and other people in tech. “A lot of my friends were talking about raising money, building minimum viable products and how to get the best engineering talent,” she said, which made her think about starting a business. After a series of disappointing haircuts, she came up with the idea for StyleSeat, a platform where consumers can search for stylists, read reviews and book appointments, something of a Yelp-meets-OpenTable for hair salons and spas. She came up with the idea for StyleSeat more from the consumer’s perspective. She is not from the beauty industry and she didn’t know a lot about the industry either. StyleSeat is a platform for stylists, aestheticians, makeup artists, nail artists to run their entire business. It gives them a website with online booking; it also manage all their client relationships; and it also gives them a mobile app so they can run everything from their phone.

Melody then found a developer to write a program and roped in a friend to design the site. Once she had a prototype, Melody contacted a former colleague and software engineer, Dan Levine. “I said, ‘I’d love for you to be my co-founder. This is the vision. What do you think?’ And he said yes. And I was like, ‘Okay, but you’re gonna have to quit your job, and actually I can’t pay you. I have no money, and we’ll probably have to bootstrap.’ And he said yes. And I was like, ‘Well, maybe you should think about it a little bit. Like we might need some investment from you to get this going.’ And he’s like. ‘Yes. I already said yes.’”

Melody and Dan started StyleSeat in 2010. They worked in the time-honoured tech start-up way – Seven days a week — with no pay. They ended up bootstrapping for the first year and a half of the business. And that certainly wasn’t because they didn’t want to raise money. It was because raising money was a huge challenge for them. The vast majority of investors are male. And so they were not much interested in the ideas of a woman who comes in with this app that’s not just really focused on female entrepreneurs but also caters to primarily the needs of women. And so much feedback initially was that women do not really want this or need this since they are not much tech savvy. Most also believed that the stylists and salon owners were not going to use technology. 

One early backer was Garrett Camp, a friend and the chairman of ride-sharing service Uber, who invested $10,000. To get stylists to use the service, she invited them to parties, where she offered free Champagne and showed PowerPoint presentations on how to use StyleSeat. Finally, after Melody and Dan pitched StyleSeat at Tech Crunch Disrupt, they raised $700,000 from investors, including Ashton Kutcher. They hired a team, built out the platform and attracted users. The user base tripled in a year, she said, attracting other high-profile investors like Sophia Bush and Guy Oseary. Since its launch, StyleSeat has recorded more than $500 million in bookings, and it now operates in 15,000 cities in the US. Melody and Dan have raised another $14 million to keep growing the site.

Thinking back to high school, Melody said she regretted dropping out of computer science, but she’s glad the experience didn’t stop her from pursuing a career in tech. Not many women can say the same. A number of research studies have found that college-bound women interested in science, technology, math and engineering — the STEM subjects — often encounter bias from faculty members and either choose or are steered into other fields, such as arts and the humanities. Women hold less than 25 percent of all STEM jobs, according to Commerce Department data. Still, some schools are creating programs to attract women to tech and since then, it has seen a substantial increase in female computer science graduates.

Melody said she would have kept up her studies if there had been more support, like a “Women Joining Computer Science Club” at school. Young girls face a discouragement that is far more subtle than “take away the calculator and give them a Barbie,” she said. Rather, “it’s more the ecosystem not being particularly favourable to girls,” she said. “No one turned to me and said, ‘You can be a software engineer.’”

Melody now mentors and helps young and “unlikely” entrepreneurs bypass common startup mistakes and accelerate quickly. Her personal story, of experiencing discouragement and failure in her initial computer science studies, to achieving her vision of becoming a successful tech entrepreneur, is truly inspiring.

Source: NY Times blogs and storyexchange.org