Heather Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder of Solv Health

On our 2nd episode, Jessica and April catch up with Heather Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder of Solv Health and Board Director at Atlassian. Heather started her career working on the McCain presidential campaign before finding her first job in Silicon Valley at a PR firm. In her own words, “it’s ok to be non-linear! I think there's this meme in tech that you have to have been working out of a garage...building a bunch of things to become a tech founder. And it's just not true.”  Heather spent nearly a decade at Trulia, joining as the 12th employee and grew to become the GM and SVP running advertising product, marketing and sales before the acquisition by Zillow Group for $2.5B. She shares the real talk of hypergrowth: “I could talk about my Trulia history in four very beautiful bullet points. And it's like, wow, how great. But the reality of any company is there's a shitload of grind in there.”  Bill Gurley led Solv’s Series A and Heather shares lessons she learned from him: “consumer marketplaces and great consumer technology companies are oftentimes amplifying a consumer trend, not creating a totally new paradigm.” And lastly, we discuss how to lead an organization amidst twin challenges of massive growth and the chaos of Covid. “There were not pivots as much as there were massive accelerations of things that we plan to do that all of a sudden became the imperative to do.” Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, April and Heather share what they’ve learned from Jennifer Tejada, CEO of Pager Duty. The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them. This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening! The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.