#124 - From Fantasy Stock Betting to Milk Bombs: Generating Ideas with Elaine Zelby

**Shaan Puri** (0:20)
Okay, what's up, everybody?
Shaan here, we're waiting on Sam. He's gonna be joining in a second. We'll let him make a dramatic entrance. And then we have Elaine Zelby with us. Did I say it right?

**Elaine Zelby** (0:30)
Hello, yes, that's perfect.

**Shaan Puri** (0:33)
It's weird, because I've met people, but I've never said their full name out loud.
I do it for the first time on the podcast, and I'm like, well, shit.
Hopefully I get this right, but yours is pretty easy. Yeah, that's for sure. Me and Sam have a mutual friend who I think has known us for, he's known Sam for a long time. He's known me for a couple of years. And he calls me Shaan. He thinks my name is Shaan and I haven't corrected him. And so he just calls me Shaan and I just let it go, which is kind of a weird move on my part. I should probably tell him at some point.

**Elaine Zelby** (1:03)
Yeah, I feel like there's always that awkwardness of if your name is pronounced a little bit different than it's spelled of like, do you correct people all the time? Do you just let it go and be like, what if it's okay?

**Shaan Puri** (1:11)
Yeah, yeah, I usually correct people because I would want, if I was saying somebody's name wrong, I would want them to be like, hey, actually, it's this.
But the moment went by and I didn't say it. And I was like, well, moment went by now. Now I'm stuck with this. Now that my name is Shaan, I might as well tell everyone that's what it is. Okay, so tell people what you do.
And we met because you sent me a bunch of cool ideas once and you were like, hey, we should meet. I like your podcast and I have a bunch of ideas too. And then we did a Zoom call that by the end of it, I was like, shit, I should have just recorded that. That would have been an episode. And so finally got you on for an actual episode. But give people a quick little introduction.

**Elaine Zelby** (1:50)
Yeah, for sure. So I have had kind of a random life and career. I started as a mechanical engineer. I actually did undergrad and grad school and thought I was going to do mechanical device, or sorry, I'm mental devices.
And I'm really impatient. So pretty quickly realized that hardware was probably not a good fit for me. And wanted to do my own company, but couldn't figure out what I wanted to spend seven to 10 years on. So I joined as one of the first employees of an enterprise software company, which they don't tell you that it's the same risk without any of the upside. So I learned that lesson, which was interesting.
But spent about five years there and got to build out a lot of the go-to-market functions. And we ended up getting fundraising from Andreessen Horowitz and some other big VCs. Got to kind of learn a little bit about what VC is, which I had no idea.
And fast forward five years, I went to Slack when Slack was launching an enterprise product to lead their enterprise product marketing. And I had accidentally started my own little side hustle doing growth marketing for seed and series A companies. And through that, I ended up working with a bunch of companies. I got brought to the firm I'm at now, which is SignalFire. So I am a VC at SignalFire.
And I got brought in to essentially just help the portfolio, became an advisor, got to know the team. And after a couple of years, I ended up joining full time on the investment side.

**Shaan Puri** (3:03)
Very cool. And so you're on the dark side, as we say.

**Elaine Zelby** (3:07)
Yes. But I think, you know, I think I got introduced to your podcast on the second episode. I don't remember how, but when I started listening, I was like, yes, my people. I'm just constantly ideating on all kinds of ideas. I love unsexy niches. I see problems and opportunities everywhere. So I'm very excited to chat. All right.

**Shaan Puri** (3:25)
Well, we can just jump in because you have a bunch here and I don't know. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to pick a random one off here. I'm just going to say the little three word description you gave it.
And you tell me what it is and then I'll either react to it. We could riff off of it for a little bit or I'll be like, I don't know what the hell to do with that. Let's go to the next one. Okay.