KIM TEO - MR YUM
ON WHY SHE LET 17% OF HER TEAM GO SOON AFTER RAISING $89M IN CASH
Kim Teo is the founder of tech start-up Mr Yum. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant, browsed the menu on your phone and ordered through a QR code, chances are you’ve used the Mr Yum platform.
In 2021, she raised an $89M Series A round – the largest ever Aussie Series A for a female led company. But soon after she raised this cash, the tech bubble burst and the economic environment dramatically shifted, and in 2022 she made the hard decision to lay off 17% of the team.
In this chat, you’ll learn:
Why this was a necessary response to the changing economic climate and Mr Yum’s need to maintain a longer runway in the face of so much uncertainty
How she’s thinking about her business as we move into a recession
Her decision-making process around those latest redundancies
Who she leans on for support when times get tough
Why transparency is her most important leadership trait
We hope you enjoyed this conversation – for more podcast action follow us on Instagram @lady.brains, or sign up to our monthly newsletter at www.ladybrains.com
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“Lots of founders that have been through hard times will tell you, if there’s money on the table, you take it. If there’s money to be offloaded, you grab it, and you sit on it, because at some point cash will be king. And cash won’t be cheap. And capital is everything. ”
“My model tells me that I only need $5 million to achieve my goals. But you always spend money faster than what you imagined, and there’s always something that doesn’t go to plan. Take the number that you think you’re going to need and double it at minimum because you never want to be stressed or making decisions under financial duress. You don’t want to be making decisions because the company is running out of money. You want to make the decisions knowing that you’ve got the capital to continue to experiment and make mistakes and innovate and grow. ”
“In hindsight, I think we feel like we pulled off a really hard thing as well as we could have. I’ve learned so much from it, and the more I talk to people who have been in business for a lot longer than me, this stuff happens. It’s going to happen, it’s going to happen again, it’ll happen in 10 years time and will probably happen in another 10 years. ”
“The founders of Linktree are pretty good friends of ours, we have offices around the corner from each other. We live in similar neighbourhoods. They did their redundancies two weeks before us and the Friday of his, he was like ‘what are you guys doing? Can I come over?’ So, he comes over, he just gives us this huge debrief on the last four days of work that they’ve been doing. And everything is so clear in his mind because it just happened. You can’t outlet all of that to your investors all the time in exactly the same way that you can with founder friends. ”
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