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Philips Innovation Award Special: Diversity in tech and starting a startup with 7 co-founders, with Marsha Goei from Breeze.

·30 min·1 clip

Breeze's algorithm is not pushing diversity, and Marsha says some diverse profiles are being shown less.

1. Start to scale records a Philips Innovation Award special with Marsha Goei about Breeze Social and diversity in tech. 2. Marsha Goei is Breeze's co-founder, Lars Kramer interviews her, and he is private lead at Up Rotterdam, an entrepreneur support program by the city of Rotterdam. 3. The episode asks how Breeze became the first offline dating app and what a female founder learned while building it with six co-founders. 4. Marsha says she was a master's student in 2019 when she and friends in Delft decided to test startup ideas systematically. 5. She describes a group of multidisciplinary students collecting ideas from their phone notebooks and validating or invalidating them one by one. 6. The dating-app idea emerged after the team looked at the current dating industry and saw a mismatch between user intent and app behavior. 7. Marsha says people wanted to date, but existing apps kept them swiping, chatting for weeks, and then getting ghosted. 8. She says the team even hijacked an office cubicle at the university and spent about one and a half years working there. 9. Breeze's model charges €7.50 per date, includes the first drink, and handles the planning so the company earns money only when people meet. 10. Marsha says users do not chat beforehand, the algorithm only shows a handful of profiles each day, and mutual likes lead directly to a date. 11. She says using her own app taught her about product fixes, including notifications and explanations that needed improvement. 12. Marsha says the first half hour of her own dates is often spent pitching Breeze because she discloses her role on her profile. 13. She says Breeze has organized about 70,592 dates and that early follow-up calls produced stories about same-weekend first dates, marriages, dogs, houses, and Breeze babies. 14. Marsha says investors questioned the seven-founder structure, but the team explained that each person has a defined responsibility. 15. She says women like one in 10 profiles while men like one in four, and that men often need better, more authentic profiles. 16. Marsha argues that Tinder's design reflects a male point of view, and she says Tinder gets most revenue from about 10% of male users. 17. She says she began by assimilating to the men's style in her founding team, then realized her intuition mattered for serving female users better. 18. Marsha says a mentor from Libre and Lieke Pijpers from The Next Closet helped her as a young founder, while the interview stays conversational and practical. 19. Founders building dating, marketplace, or consumer apps with gendered usage patterns. 20. Listeners wanting startup war stories without product, gender, or inclusion questions.

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