Dani Grant of Jam: Finding Product-Market Fit Fast without Breaking Things

**Hans Tong** (0:19)
Coming to you from GGV Capital, this is Evolving for the Next Billion, where we interview local champions and global giants in tech industry who are shaping the lives of the next billion internet users.
My name's Hans Tong. I'm a managing partner at GGV Capital, and I've been working at and investing in startups across the US, China, and other emerging markets for the last 20 years.

**Rita Yang** (0:45)
My name is Rita Yang. I'm the marketing manager at GGV Capital. On this show, you will hear stories about ambition, ingenuity, and resilience, unfolding every day from Singapore to St. Polo, Beijing to Bangalore.
We also recommend you to join our listeners community on Slack, WeChat, and WhatsApp, where you can connect with like-minded people and attend our offline events across the world. You can join by visiting nextbn.ggvc.com.

**Hans Tong** (1:17)
Hello, everyone.
Today's episode is a crossover collab between Next Billion Podcast and the Founders Real Talk, which in itself is an amazing podcast hosted by my partner, Glenn Solomon. Glenn will be my co-host for today.

**Glenn Solomon** (1:30)
Hey, Hans, really glad to be here.

**Hans Tong** (1:33)
I love to have you on the show. Today on the show, we'll have also feature Dani Grant, the co-founder and CEO of Jam.dev. Jam is a developer tool that allows for faster communication between product engineering teams about bugs and fixes. With Jam, developers, engineers, designers and product managers can capture screenshots and develop logs in one click.
Founded in 2020, Jam has helped close to 15,000 product QA engineering design leaders to ship bug-free software. And the customers include the likes of Unilever, Staples, T-Mobile, Dell, SeatGeek, StubHub, Ramp, Autodesk and Undeck. Jam's also a GGV portfolio company.

**Glenn Solomon** (2:16)
Yeah, we're super excited that Jam's a GGV company. And prior to founding Jam, Dani worked as a product manager for Cloudflare before moving on to Union Square Ventures, where she spent two years listening to VC pitches from startups and picking up tips along the way for when she and her co-founder, Ertifa, founded Jam.
In late 2020, Jam raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Union Square Ventures, and Version One Ventures from Angela Tran participated alongside angels such as GitHub CTO Jason Warner, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, and former Robinhood VP Josh Elman, who I think made the initial introduction, Hans, to Dani.

**Hans Tong** (2:59)
That's correct. Thanks, Josh.

**Glenn Solomon** (3:01)
To Dani, welcome to Founder Real Talk and evolving for the next billion. You get two for the price of one. Great to have you.

**Dani Grant** (3:07)
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on.

**Hans Tong** (3:09)
Welcome. And Dani, please take us back to the very beginning.
Before Jam, you had experience in both working at a tech company as an engineer, and then also on the VC side of things. What was the shift for you from going to working at tech startup to join the dark side on VC, and then what eventually led you to do the right thing to start a startup of your own?

**Dani Grant** (3:30)
In my first job out of college, I was really lucky to join one of the fastest growing startups in the Silicon Valley, Cloudflare. I joined when the company was a hundred people. It's now a $20 billion public company. And there I got to see an amazing management team at work, and I got to work with such an awesome, incredible, hardworking, smart team.
I joined as the fourth product manager, and then when the company hit a certain size, they wanted to explore what are the new green field opportunities for Cloudflare. And I was really lucky to be given the opportunity to join that team that was enabled to figure that out. So my now co-founder, Ertifa, and I were the two product managers on that team, and we worked with 30 engineers, and our job was to launch net new businesses for the company.
And if they worked, we would spin them out into their own org, and if they didn't work, then we would just quickly sunset and move on. And we got to launch amazing products on that team. The last product that my co-founder and I worked on there was 1.1.1.1, which is a secure way to access the internet. And I think now more than 10% of internet traffic goes through it. So it was an incredible experience. And I met my co-founder there and much of the early jam team, so that was amazing too.
And I loved the job at Cloudflare, but I knew that if I wanted to one day be a founder, I also needed to see the early startup side of things and the venture side of things. And so when the opportunity came to join USB, I knew I had to go and do it, though I was of course sad to leave. And it was so inspiring to get to work with these early stage founders, who they all saw some corner of the world that they wanted to improve. And rather than wait for someone else to do it, they decided to take matters into their own hands and go start companies to go and change that little corner of the world.