Stay Focused: Interview with Maria Davidson, Founder and CEO of Kojo
I recently went one on one with Maria Davidson, founder and CEO of Kojo.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Maria: I grew up in Israel and didn’t learn English until the age of 13 when I moved to the UK. While I was studying at Oxford, I went to work in Southeast Asia. Living in such different places led me to develop a passion for construction and building cities. When I moved to San Francisco in 2016 and saw how expensive and difficult it was to build everything from housing to infrastructure, I knew I wanted to fix this. When I was trying to get the company off the ground, if people didn’t respond to our emails or phone calls - which many didn’t! - we would show up at construction sites with boxes of donuts or pizza. We did this for 6 months and ended up having conversations with hundreds of construction workers telling us what the most painful and frustrating parts of their day were. Doing this really helped me understand the unique needs and frustrations out there.
Starting out as an outsider - and a woman in a male-dominated industry - I remember entering meetings as a new CEO and being asked if I was the CEO’s assistant or if I was there to take notes. These types of comments only fueled my drive. I have leaned into being a young, female CEO and used them as motivation to nurture Kojo into a Series C software company that’s raised $84 million to date.
Through hard work and true customer obsession, we’ve built the largest materials management software platform in the U.S. and have raised amongst the largest funding amounts in construction tech. We now have 13,000 construction professionals actively using our platform and have powered over 10,000 projects across the U.S.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Maria: I started Kojo with a mission to make our cities more affordable and accessible to everyone. I followed my gut in moving from London to San Francisco and I was shocked by how slow and expensive it was to build everything from affordable housing to badly needed infrastructure. Wanting to fix this, I quit my VC job. Over 6 months, with no funding and no salary, we reached out to people working on all types of construction projects to understand why they were so expensive and difficult to build. Time and time again, we heard that materials constituted 40% of total project costs but builders had no modern tools to manage their materials processes. Wrong materials would show up on site causing project delays, huge amounts of time were spent tracking down orders, office teams spent their days doing manual data entry, and billions of dollars of materials were wasted. This led me to launch Kojo in 2018 to fix this, making it faster, easier, and more efficient to build the world around us.
Conventional Silicon Valley wisdom says you should build companies to solve problems you yourself have experienced. A lot of amazing companies have been started that way. But my advice is to take a different approach. There are huge industries out there that most of Silicon Valley knows very little about and thinks are ‘unsexy’ that have been ignored by tech for far too long. The impact you can have on those industries if you build something that actually helps solve their problems is enormous. So embrace being an outsider, come in with genuine intellectual curiosity, ask a lot of questions, and solve problems that haven’t been solved yet.
To date, Kojo has saved customers more than $22 million on materials orders, helped source sustainable building materials, cut 90% of waste on jobsites, and reduced manual data entry for teams by 75%.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Maria: It all came down to customer feedback. When we were trying to sign our first customer, we would meet with folks and show them mockups of the product we would build. Even though the product didn’t exist yet, and taking a bet on us was a big gamble, customers took the risk: the problem we were solving was so painful for them, that they were willing to work with a scrappy group of industry outsiders. When 10 customers had signed up for our Early Access program, we knew we might be onto something but we still needed to validate - yes people said they wanted this pain solved, but would they actually use and love the product? To this day, we track usage extremely closely at Kojo as that’s the ultimate test of whether a business idea is worth pursuing.
My advice is to focus on getting the product into customers’ hands as quickly as possible. Never assume you know what customers want - instead, spend as much time as you can with them validating how valuable what you’re building is in their eyes. If they’re willing to pay you for your product, train their teams on how to use it, and then tell you they love doing so - that’s when you know a business idea is worth pursuing.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Maria: Stay focused! Construction is a huge market, but if you try to build too horizontally a solution the risk is you’re not going to solve any specific market segments’ problems.
Initially, we focused exclusively on electrical construction. This allowed us to build a solution that was tailor-made to electrical contractors. It also allowed us to build up a loyal customer base who really helped us to grow by word of mouth. There is no better introduction than a happy customer referring you to someone they know. Eventually, we started seeing we were being introduced to contractors across different trades who were working on the same projects as our customers, and that gave us the confidence to expand across other market segments.
We also wouldn’t have been able to grow Kojo into the business it is today without our focus on customer success. Many of our customers had been burnt with bad onboardings and products that promised the world but didn’t deliver in the past. Focusing on building a seamless onboarding experience, setting correct expectations, and ensuring we were always on hand to answer any questions that came up instantaneously made a huge difference for us.
My biggest piece of advice: start by solving a specific pain for a specific customer segment. Focus on delivering best-in-class customer service. Surround yourself with industry experts who can teach you the things you don’t yet know. And, crucially, persevere - building a company is really hard, and it takes a lot of grit to go through all the ‘no’s.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Maria: Understand your customers’ pain. Understand what the most frustrating parts of their day are and then focus on how you can solve that pain. With Kojo, productivity goes up and errors go down.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Maria: I’m extremely thankful for my life experiences because they not only shaped my path but also taught me so many critical lessons that I rely on as a leader including:
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there
Assume good intent
Be optimistic
Be intellectually curious
Strive for excellence
Approach things with a sense of humor
For aspiring leaders, I highly recommend surrounding yourself with mentors. In the early days of Kojo, I was amazed at how many people I admired who were willing to give me an hour of their time to talk through their experiences. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people who you want to learn from - everyone’s learned from someone at some point in their lives, and my experience is that most people want to pay that forward.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Maria: Create empirical feedback loops wherever you can. You need to have a way of knowing how well a decision panned out to make better decisions in the future. This naturally exists in disciplines like software engineering - if you write bad code, it breaks! But in a lot of other disciplines, these feedback loops don’t exist, and so you have to proactively create them. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Hire people with a growth mindset. Anything you can’t do is just something you can’t do yet. Big and small problems are both really difficult to solve, focus on the big ones. Lastly, think of everything as tradeoffs – it’s rare when there is an absolute right or wrong, your job as a leader is to evaluate tradeoffs.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Maria: First, focus on your customer. Second, embrace a growth mindset, and lastly, create empirical feedback loops wherever you can.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Maria: The single best piece of advice I ever received comes from a concept in Judaism called ‘Tikkun Olam’. Literally, it means ‘fixing the world’. That’s always been the guiding philosophy for me - fixing things that are broken, and leaving the world better than you found it.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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