We cover founder conviction & tips for engaging with investors with Mahima Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO @ Cocoon, who shares the origin story of her company, tips for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build, and how it’s addressing the problem of employee leave. Additionally, Mahima reveals the process behind early research, how she gained early design partners after user interviews, frameworks for collaborating between design & legal, identifying the ideal customer profile, and her method for delegating & determining where to invest her time as CEO & co-founder.

ABOUT MAHIMA CHAWLA

Mahima Chawla (@mahimachawlaa) is the CEO & Co-founder of Cocoon. Before starting Cocoon, Mahima worked at Square building lending products for Square Capital. Prior to Square, she was at Bond Street (acquired by Goldman) and Morgan Stanley. Mahima grew up in Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and the UAE and studied Math & Economics at Brown University. She is based in the Bay Area.

"We did reach out to some of our strongest sort of supporters during the research period and just asked like, 'Hey, would you be willing to pilot this? It's totally new. Like we know we're not an established company, but we do have a vision for how this can be better.' And I think like kind of positioning it as a design partner where truly we were getting their feedback so frequently and they could almost help inform what this product was gonna look like in the future, I think that's a pretty unique position to be in as a customer and so I think a lot of people were actually quite excited to take us up on that.”

- Mahima Chawla   

ABOUT COCOON

Cocoon is a leave management platform that simplifies the complexities of compliance, claims, and payroll for a seamless, more empathetic employee leave experience.

Whether employees are starting a family, recovering from an injury, or caring for a loved one, they can plan their leave in minutes and trust Cocoon to make the rest easy. Cocoon automates the heavy lifting of compliance, claims, and payroll so People teams can focus on what they do best—caring for employees.

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To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at [email protected]SHOW NOTES:

• What inspired Mahima to start Cocoon (1:48)
• Inside Mahima’s intentional decision to start her company (5:19)
• Mahima & her co-founders’ approach to researching employee leave (7:17)
• Tips for keeping users engaged beyond the initial conversation (10:15)
• How to convert initial user conversations into your first customers (11:31)
• Lessons learned from early user research (12:47)
• Staying committed during your early research phase (14:06)
• An overview of the post-research / early mock ups stage of Cocoon (16:08)
• Strategies for gaining early design partners (17:14)
• Mahima’s approach to finding the right investors & nurturing those relationships (18:44)
• Frameworks for aligning your company with your values (19:59)
• Recommendations for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build (21:31)
• Cocoon’s four core values (23:34)
• How to personalize, achieve & act upon values (25:47)
• Navigating the challenges of building in a highly regulated space (27:31)
• Framework for collaboration between design partners & the legal team (29:55)
• Mahima’s process for identifying the ideal customer profile (31:58)
• Factors for identifying the right customers for the given time (34:11)
• Designing Cocoon’s go-to-market motion now that the ICP is clear (35:23)
• The story behind Cocoon manually stop gapping its product (36:55)
• Mahima’s method for default delegating & identifying where to invest your time as CEO / co-founder (39:29)
• Rapid fire questions (40:48)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Attached. - psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller reveal how an understanding of adult attachment—the most advanced relationship science in existence today—can help us find and sustain love.
• First Round - a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/