Woman Entrepreneur Building a Successful, VC Funded Business: Olivia Skuza, CEO of NuORDER (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is the business all in LA now?

Olivia Skuza: We have 80 team members today in four offices. A majority of that team is in Los Angeles. We have an office in New York. We have customer service and sales in London. We now have customer service in Australia too.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent company. I’m thrilled to hear your story. I’m going to ask you the last set of questions on a slightly different topic. What has it been like to be a women entrepreneur in the technology industry for you in California?

Olivia Skuza: It’s been interesting. I talked about finding partners when we were raising money. A big driver behind why we decided to go with Upfront was because when we were raising money, there were some very old school people in the board room. Majority of the time, I’m the only female in a large group of men.

Heath usually is the one who does the talking and presenting. They always direct questions to the male. That wasn’t the case with Upfront. We divide the business equally. He does the sales and business development. I’m in charge of product and customer success. He knows that if we were going to raise money, they’d have to listen to both of us. He wants that as much as I do. Upfront was a really good partner. They were asking questions to me and what I thought.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else you want to add?

Olivia Skuza: I think we’ve covered the history and what we do. We talked about raising money. One thing that people don’t understand today in terms of the opportunity of B2B commerce is that it’s so big. Even when we’re talking about networking and raising money.

I’m always in the market speaking to potential future investors. They still don’t believe that everything is done in pen and paper. We have 850 brands and 400,000 retailers. That’s such a blip on the radar in terms of the actual percentage of the market. It’s incredible that even today in 2018, this is how people operate. We’re excited that we were early on in the space.

Sramana Mitra: Today, a large number of your retailer customers are most likely e-commerce companies. There are a lot of e-commerce companies that are in the market and who must be in your pool. They are more technology savvy, just by definition.

Olivia Skuza: Absolutely. There’s a large volume of e-commerce companies who are using our platform. Also what we really cater to is the mom and pop stores. We’re helping their business in a significant way. You understand that with Amazon coming into play, it’s very hard in their world today to maintain a sustainable strong business that’s growing.

We’re really helping the mom and pop stores be able to do that. They can’t sell exactly what Amazon is selling. Another way to do that is to use our product. We have a lot of demand from retailers around the world who want to find new offerings and be able to create an experience to their shoppers. They also don’t have the means anymore to travel and go to trade shows. This makes it easy for them.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. It was great talking to you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Woman Entrepreneur Building a Successful, VC Funded Business: Olivia Skuza, CEO of NuORDER
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