Her Story
About Andrea
My professional journey spans around 15 years in the technology industry, where I've worked in sales, sales leadership, and sales enablement roles at companies like Gartner, the Hackett Group, and Mediafly, a sales enablement SaaS company. About 3 years ago, I started Vera AI, bringing everything I've learned to the remodeling industry, which is very antiquated. This mission is personal to me because my dad was a general contractor when I was growing up, so I've been around kitchen and baths and whole home remodels my whole life. At Vera AI, we're building a sales platform for remodelers that lets them design, price, and close a project in one meeting, ensuring that every decision is buildable before the customer even commits. My day looks like understanding where we are today and where we're going tomorrow - right now we're about to pilot our system, so I'm finding partners to pilot with and assessing businesses that could leverage our platform. I've gone from not writing any code to now writing code during the day because we're running a very small team. I'm also articulating the vision between our team members and currently trying to raise a round to help propel us forward through an injection of capital.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Andrea
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would give a lot of credit to mentors in my life that have helped me along the way, as well as my family, that kind of shaped the person I am, and my determination to keep climbing and keep going. I've never sat satisfied - there's always more to reach for and achieve, but you need to have a good backing of those to support you to be able to help you out when times are tough. I think that having a group of mentors and a support system is very important.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've received is probably to keep the tenacity, to keep that will to win, and always be very self-aware. You need to be very self-aware of yourself.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say that this is an industry right now that is very behind, and it's been very male-dominated. For women, if you see a vision, and you see something that's broken, it doesn't matter what your background is, or where you think you sit, you can go and fix it. You have the ability to do that.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One of the biggest challenges is accuracy at scale across real products and constraints, because what we're trying to do is very complex. It's very tech-heavy, and it's the hard part, but it's also what creates the advantage. Being able to have accuracy at scale with our products is going to be the advantage in this industry. As far as the industry itself, the industry is very laggard, and there's a lot of people that have solved different parts of the problems along the way, but the actual problem at the root cause and where it starts more upstream hasn't been solved, and that's what we're trying to solve today.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I would say values would be trust and transparency. We're a startup, so it's very important to be transparent to those on your team when things are great, but also when things aren't. I think it's very important to show that transparency, and then that transparency also helps earn trust.
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