🎙 Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.
Rachel ten Brink has lived the full loop: corporate operator → YC-backed founder → GP at Red Bike Capital. She co-founded Scentbird, helped pioneer early DTC growth (before “playbooks” existed), and now backs founders at pre-seed and seed as a VC.
In this episode, Rachel shares thestory behind the wins: the awkward first meetings, the bad business models, the “almost gave up” moment, and the tactical moves that finally made Scentbird click—pricing discipline, retention-first subscription thinking, and early influencer marketing before it was crowded.
Then we flip to the investor lens: what she actually looks for in founders, why traction beats storytelling (especially for first-timers), and how AI changes the game—without replacing the fundamentals.
You’ll hear:
• The early Scentbird pivots that failed—and the one that finally worked
• Subscription survival: voluntary vs involuntary churn (and why card failures can kill you)
• What YC was like when growth expectations were brutal and simple
• The real advantage of “doing things that don’t scale” to land the first enterprise customers
• Rachel’s founder filter: learning speed, commercial sense, and distribution
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