How the Thiel Fellow Stacey Ferreira Turned a Tweet to $1M Funding from Richard Branson

Positioning a crisis into an opportunity and turning a fortuity into fortune have been the verticals of Stacey Ferreira’s entrepreneurial journey. She founded her first startup MySocialCloud at 18. She is 23 now and here’e her story.

In her senior years of high school, Stacey Ferreira started understanding the mechanism of coding and how to build a programme in high school with her brother, Scott Ferreira. In the summer placed between high school and college, the brother and sister duo started to build a service where people could store all their usernames and passwords online and acquire an auto login everywhere with the same credentials. They originally derived the idea when Scott encountered a computer crash and lost a spreadsheet containing all his usernames and passwords.

Stacey, Scott and Shiv Prakash moved to LA, California to build the MVP of MySocialCloud. Around the same time, she found a tweet from Sir Richard Branson who had tweeted about a cocktail party where people could donate $ 2,000 for social service.

Stacey e-mailed Virgin at the address provided on the tweet, saying she and Scott (who was 20 at the time) weren’t old enough to drink cocktails but would love to come to Miami and meet Branson, once a teen entrepreneur himself.

They borrowed $4,000 from their parents to donate and flew cross country 48 hours later in order to meet Sir Richard Branson in an intimate room of 18 people at the Versace Mansion in Miami, FL. About two weeks after the party, Jerry Murdoch, a friend of Branson was standing in their office telling them that both he and Branson would invest $ 1 Mn as the seed capital for MySocialCloud.

“It is always great to start from a problem. Acquiring constant validation of people that I need is another KPI. Keep thinking about all of the products which help us grow and what are all the KPIs they had with their product. When we first started, we envisioned how the website would look, how it would function, if people clicked certain buttons what would that lead them to”, says Stacey Ferreira, who was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016.

The venture was acquired within two years for its incorporation by Reputation.com.

Stacey is still in awe of it all -- giving special deference to the amount of stars that needed to align to make the deal happen. “If I hadn’t logged on Twitter and I hadn’t seen that tweet coming through my feed,” she says, “we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

After the successful beginning of her first venture, Stacey Ferreira, who is also a Theil Fellow of 2015, opined that the world is shifting to one where more people want to have a flexible work schedule, and want to work as independent contractors or on-demand workers. Henceforth, working on this problem, she started building her second product Forrge which helps such people find new temporary job opportunities, manage finances and taxes, and find affordable insurance, so they can feel comfortable about having options to make a steady income, and not feel bogged down by the additional responsibilities of working independently,

In entrepreneurship, we have a million ideas and it is easy to get distracted. Yet, it is necessary to pick one idea that we love, that we cannot stop thinking about. Stacey was chosen as a Theil Fellow in 2015, which is one of the most prestigious entrepreneurship fellowship conducted by Peter Theil, the founder of PayPal and author of Zero to One.

It is always essential to hire the kind of people that fit the culture a startup demands and then make them a leader towards that. When we get a cluster of people who are excited about an idea together, it is magical. She teamed up with Scott Ferreira, Lloyd Jones and Talulah Riley to cofound Forrge, where she serves as CEO. In November 2015, the team raised up to $1.5M in venture funding and they are working from New York City.