Female Disruptors: Lauren Rosenthal of Birdie On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Treat everyone with respect: it’s important to show you value everyone on the team and to take the time to listen to them and their ideas, and ambitions. Even at a start-up, maybe especially at a start-up where this structure is too easily overlooked.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren Rosenthal.
Lauren Rosenthal founded Birdie as a response to the all-too-common endless streaming search. After spending yet another hour scrolling through her queue trying to find the perfect show, she gave up and watched ‘The West Wing’ for the 100th time.
As a self-proclaimed process geek obsessed with streamlining, Lauren knew there was a better way. While algorithms may offer up suggestions for tv and movies — they often miss the mark and aren’t geared toward personal taste. What if viewers could quickly see what their friends and family recommend instead?
And just like that, the idea for Birdie was hatched.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Pretty much every app out there is focused on getting users to spend more time in app, whereas Birdie wants you to spend less time. The whole idea with Birdie is that it serves as a utility — not something experiential. Yes, it’s cute and fun — but in the end the mission is to support our users in making quick decisions so they can get back to their lives and leisure time — NOT spending more time staring at their phones.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
We built Birdie so that our Flock can find their next binge-watch quickly, without too much scrolling. But in the development process, we incorporated the endless scroll into the UI, which is completely counterintuitive to our ethical tech approach. Oops!
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
A former manager of mine, Karla Martin, has served as a personal and professional mentor since we met over a decade ago. She has been my cheerleader and tough love provider and everything in between. It may sound simple but she just always makes herself available — which given her demanding schedule, is a lot. Recently I was having one of those days — I had a lot weighing on me was texting her to catch up. he could sense something was up and demanded we get on a call right then and there. She could read between the lines and it meant the world to me.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I see positive disruption as synonym for evolution. When an industry or product or service moves into its next iteration, typically in a way that’s obvious after the fact. Not-so-positive disruption is when this new iteration hinders necessary muscles being built.
An example is catering to different learning styles. I just recently returned to physical books after years on the Kindle. I had been a voracious reader and recently realized I’d stopped logging as many books as I used to. And it’s because I just don’t absorb information on a screen the same way as I do when reading a book. Same for using GPS. I have a terrible sense of direction and in so many ways the GPS has been amazing, it gets me from A to B. But it has also atrophied what little muscle memory I have in that department. I’ve found that I am trying more and more to turn off my maps app so I can actually learn directions rather than just going off a screen and having it go in one ear and out the other. Would I want a world without e-readers or GPS? Absolutely not! But do I think there’s a necessary in between for some people, maybe most people, absolutely.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Test, test, test — and early: I have had a lot of ideas about the ideal user for Birdie — and most have been wrong. But I tested early to see if it resonated and if it didn’t I moved on to the next test group. I have saved a lot of time and energy by testing out assumptions before going too far down any path.
- Fake it til you make it: for Birdie this meant being creative in gathering your early content and users.
- Treat everyone with respect: it’s important to show you value everyone on the team and to take the time to listen to them and their ideas, and ambitions. Even at a start-up, maybe especially at a start-up where this structure is too easily overlooked.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I’m looking for partnership opportunities for Birdie. Hoping to find an area where Birdie’s currently offering — TV & Movies — could really have an impact. My current hypothesis — dating apps. What’s more telling about a future mate than what they’re currently binging or their favorite series? Even if you don’t have in common it’s a wonderful conversation piece.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Funding funding funding. It’s unacceptable what percent of funding goes to women versus men.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
“The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gowande. I love anything Dr. Gowande writes, he’s amazing. But I find myself referring to “The Checklist Manifesto” more than anything else. It’s amazing what simple tools like checklists can accomplish. They provide a dependable framework to complete critical tasks that we may be too overwhelmed or distracted to otherwise give our full attention to. They’re binary, something is done or it’s not — which can give the person tasked a bit of a mental break — putting them into execute mode which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We can be freed up to use our creative thinking elsewhere.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Birdie’fy the world! I truly believe if there was a Birdie-like tool available for decision making across categories in our lives — it would have a monumental affect. The movement would be two-fold.
First, it would give people time back in their days. Just imagine having an extra 30–40 minutes back in your day to go for a run, or read a book, or take a nap. That’s what having a tool to power quick decision making would give us all back in our lives, potentially more.
Second, it would improve general attitudes across the board. Very few people enjoy making decisions — especially when they’re made between parties. Imagine not spending time disagreeing with your spouse about where to go to dinner, or with your roommate about what to watch on tv, or your colleague on what podcast to listen to on your drive to that client meeting in the boondocks. We far too often go to bed exhausted and frustrated, and unfulfilled.
I’m not saying Birdie can make our relationships perfect, but it definitely can help reduce friction and improve the outcome. It’s a circular framework — I’m in a better place so I’m more patient with my husband, he’s now in a better place so he’s more patient with the barista at Starbucks, the barista is in a better place because he went a day without a rude customer (maybe even encountered some nice ones!), so he goes home and is in a better place so he’s more playful with his kids so they go to bed happy and wake up the next morning in a better place so they’re nicer to their teachers. That’s the Birdie movement.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I’ve heard this for years from managers — as I have a tendency to be a perfectionist. I’ve learned the value of this the hard way — working overtime to take a project another unnecessary 5%, just to have that extra work scrapped in the morning. I’ve also been on the other side of this — having contractors bill me for time and taking far longer than necessary to complete work that could have been reviewed or pushed to production far sooner.
How can our readers follow you online?
I’m not active on social media but I do post occasional thoughts on our blog –
https://join.birdieworld.com/blog/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Lauren Rosenthal of Birdie On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.