First, we started out by first making a website. I designed Jacqueline got our first yes from After the first yes from Tracy, it was easier to get other speakers lined up. We had 16 amazing founders and investors coming to dinner every week.

telling the world about it & recruiting:

We gave ourselves a tight deadline. Build and launch the accelerator in two months. We had no time to waste.

Now it was time to get people excited about the XX. We used five ways to get awesome female founders to read about us and apply:

1. Facebook groups that host female founders and makers, like Direct emails to female-founder organizations all around the country. This didn’t work so well.
2. Publications like Tech Crunch. No one wanted to write about us, unfortunately. Next time!
3. Visiting Atlanta and meeting founders in person. In-person meetings are always the most effective. We met one of the XX founders, Bryanda, from our 3 day visit in Atlanta.

reviewing applications:

We promoted the XX for less than two weeks and got 197 applications. It was clear that founders wanted us to exist. Jacqueline, Nick and I reviewed all 197 applications during nights and weekends.

Out of 197 applicants, we asked 50 of them to send a one-minute pitch video. From the pitch videos, we chose 21 to the final round.

interviewing founders:

In 3 days, we scheduled 21 founders for 30-minute interviews with me, Nick and a founder friend who volunteered his/her time. Jacqueline coordinated interviews for 21 people (in different time zones) in a few days. (Imagine that!)

We grilled the applicants. We asked tough questions back to back to back. No pauses in between. I’d never interviewed founders like this before so it was a learning experience for me. I mostly asked why they wanted to join and tried to get a sense of who they were. If we had more money, we would’ve flown them out to meet in person. Hopefully, we can do this for our future cohorts.

selecting founders:

This was probably the most emotionally difficult part. There were 21 incredible founders and we only had six open spots. Many of them were too early or in fields we didn’t understand well enough. But ultimately, we bet on the people and the formidability of their team.

After many hours of thinking long and hard, we chose six teams:

• Dipa, Justin and Max’s Atlas Mental Health: Improving mental health for students
• Courtney, Jack and Zach’s Pad Piper: Platform to allow people to find short-term housing in different cities
• Erad, Ena and AJ’s Pyggy Bank: Mobile app for kids to save money and learn financial literacy
• Bryanda’s Quirktastic: Tinder for weird, nerdy minorities
• Lucy and Shirley’s Cactus: Slack for friends
• Kate’s Ensembl: K itchenware for small living spaces

We sent personalized feedback to 15 teams we said no to. This was hard but we hoped we could partner with them in the future. And we are.

Jacqueline invited ten of them to SF to be part of mini-XX, where ten founders will live in SF for one week and build companies next to each other. Each day will have a theme and every founder will have a mentor to keep in touch with at the end of the program. They’ll have a fireside chat dinner every night with an eminent founder and we’ll introduce them to all our founder friends.

finding someone to run this thing:

I hadn’t run a startup before (XX is my first) so I had to find someone who could run this much better than I could.

First person I thought of was Cindy.

Cindy is one of Nick’s best friends from But sadly, she declined my offer to live in the Wefunder house and help the XX founders.

I was sad but I persisted and said I’ll check back in with her. We got lucky because Cindy wrote back a month later that she was interested. This made our day and the rest is history.

Cindy is the best person to help the XX founders because she understands founders’ struggles and she cares. She cares deeply about the wellbeing and success of founders. And every day I’m grateful to be around her energy and wisdom.

Cindy and her co-founder Denny packed their bags, drove their Camry down south from Seattle and moved in at the Wefunder house.

Side note: Last night, Cindy told me that she only came down to help me with the XX because she dreamt that we ate cherry tomatoes at McDonald’s together.

prepping the XX house:

It was uncertain where we were going to house them. We had less than a week to find a “swanky house in the middle of SF” that we’d promised. So we got to work and scraped all Airbnb, Pad Piper and Craigslist listings.

We locked down the XX house 3 days before the program started.

Luckily, we found a gorgeous 2 bedroom house 8 blocks away from our house. It was gonna be tight but the owner Jonathan loved what we were doing and he was happy to host our founders.

Then the XX started

Four of the six teams moved into the cozy house (two teams were already living in SF). 3 teams flew in from Canada, one flew in from Atlanta and two others drove in from Berkeley and Stanford.

First day, we made breakfast and awkwardly got to know one another. They had to get chummy chummy real quick and figure out how to share one bathroom together.

For our first fireside chat, we invited Siri from Draper Associates. XX founders cooked our first dinner together and fed us bibimbap, bulgogi, amazing desserts and wine. We stayed up talking till midnight about fundraising, history and policy.

And somehow, 9 weeks have already gone by. Here are some of our favorite moments from those nine weeks:

We were lucky and got some incredible guests to come share breakfast and dinner with us. Founders candidly shared their biggest oh shit moments, fondest memories, things they struggle(d) with, why they do what they do day in and out and advice.

Here’s a list of our generous fireside chat speakers that made the XX possible:

• Nate Blecharczyk (Tracy Young (Holly Liu (Siri Srinivas (Shawn Tsao and Richard Din (Nancy Hua (Shruti Shah (Move Loot)
• Reshma Saujani (Laks Srini (Tom Willer (Miriam Brafman (Alice Zhang (Newsha Ghaeli (Chris Smoak (Jahanzeb Sherwani (Lolita Taub (Danielle Strachman (Maria Alegre (Beth Turner (Sam Hashemi (Kat Mañalac (Chris (We couldn’t keep the learnings to ourselves so some of us wrote about it:
  • 

    What we learned

    Three weeks in, Ena (founder of Pyggy Bank) told us she looked forward to coming to dinner and seeing us every week. I, too, felt something magical happening. Founders became best friends and each others’ mentors and accountability buddies.

    In nine weeks, founders released their apps, found a co-founder, pivoted their products, went back to their initial dream vision, spoke with hundreds of users day in and out and knocked on neighbors’ doors to do user testing.

    All in all, the 13 founders and we found in each other friends and mentors for life.

    

    Next steps: XX for immigrants

    My gut said that we did the right thing. And we were going to do more of it.

    Next February, we’re starting our next cohort and this one will focus on immigrant founders. We’ll welcome any teams with at least one immigrant co-founder (born outside of the US) to apply for our 12-week program in SF. We’ll offer housing in SF (bigger house this time!), fireside chats with our best founder friends and a pro bono immigration lawyer for free.

    We’re doing this because we care that there are more and more d iverse founders in the world. Any talented, formidable and driven person should have a chance to make the world a better place by making things people love (thanks YC).

    Let’s help ten immigrant founded teams take their shots: xx.team/sf

My thank you’s

Thank you to Jacqueline, my XX soulmate and partner. Jacqueline is usually in the sidelines cooking food (for 30+ people on average), arranging the dinners, writing to hundreds of reporters and taking meetings in faraway places so we could help more diverse founders. She quit her job for our mission and made the XX possible. We worked long nights and weekends, sick and healthy, to make it a reality for six female founded teams to live in SF and thrive. I couldn’t have done this without you, Jacq. Through our ups and down, I still believe we’re a dream team.

Thank you to Nick for always believing in us and pushing us to think bigger.

Thank you to Cindy for driving down from Seattle and mentoring XX founders and being their favorite person. They love you. So do I.

Thank you to Greg for mentoring founders even when you had a million things to do.

Thank you to Jenna for starting a podcast for the XX. I’m dying to listen to the episodes when they’re out.

Thank you to Ena, Jack, Erad, Courtney, Dipa, Justin, Max, Bryanda, Kate, Lucy, Shirley, Zach and AJ for being in our first cohort. We learned from your hard work and hustle.

Thank you to Wefunder team for hosting founders, cleaning up before/after dinners, cooking and inviting your friends.

Thank you Ana Kilani, Nicholas Tommarello, Cindy Wu, Ree Ree Li and Omar Shammas for reading my drafts.