Should you build something that investors recognize and want to finance? Or should you build something where you’ve experienced the problem yourself, only to find out that no one is solving it?
Cristina Flaschen and her co-founder decided for the latter option when they founded Pandium. She learned that there is no tool that helps developers at software companies build connections between software systems, apps and databases that work at scale without having to worry about how to keep all that running.
If they had listened to the first ten investors she met, they would have tried building it on the blockchain. However, she had just spent four months talking to more than 200 companies, and none of them had said they wished their integrations were on it.
How Customer Conversations Beat the Tech Hype with Cristina Flaschen – Women Disrupting Tech
In episode 175 of Women Disrupting Tech, Cristina is my guest to talk about what it takes to follow your own lead and build something from scratch that isn’t following the latest hype.
Here are three things you’ll take away from listening:
- Why customer conversations beat the tech hype
- What choosing revenue over users means for sales, support and churn
- How she hires and develops junior engineers
Plus, you’ll hear why she believes that women should get more ‘trips to the plate’, why she believes that female entrepreneurs may not be outperforming men if they get equal opportunities, and what her surprising suggestion is for FundingCoach.
You can listen to the episode by pressing play below. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
The second part of our conversation is full of practical takeaways around building a company, hiring and dealing with investor hype. Here are three insights that I had not heard on the podcast before.
Take media stories about growth with a grain of salt
Cristina points to headlines about companies that went from zero to millions in revenue in a few weeks, with no employees. For every company like that, she says, there are a million founders who are not doing that, and the story rarely covers the years before the breakthrough. In her example, a company had been around for 14 years, burning through venture money on about 200K in revenue a year, before it found its curve. Her advice to founders: “take everything with a grain of salt.”
Read what is happening in the context of what your customers are telling you
Cristina follows LinkedIn and the news like everyone else. She listens to what customers and prospects say more than to LinkedIn, her competitors or TechCrunch, and that includes potential customers who have not bought yet. Each quarter, her team runs a closed-lost analysis on deals it lost: they said this, so what did they really mean? She bases that reading on 20 years of talking to these people, and she calls that analysis really important.
Talk to your potential customers to find the pattern.
For founders who don’t have a product or revenue yet, Cristina’s advice is to “talk to literally everyone that will talk to you that you think maybe could be a customer ever.” The goal is to find a pattern. She spoke to 200 potential customers herself and says that if she couldn’t find a pattern across those conversations, she’d treat it as a sign that she was the wrong founder for that problem or that she should find another industry.
Together, these habits help founders focus on what matters to the customers who pay so they can get the results that please investors.
🤗 Know a founder who could use some support building a product customers pay for? Use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:25 | Getting into tech without a CS degree |
| 05:27 | The problem with integration tools for engineers |
| 07:13 | Why engineers prefer code over low-code |
| 10:21 | Integrations in the age of AI agents |
| 14:03 | Early scaling lessons: unclogging the plumbing |
| 19:33 | Why tech stays fun and mentoring juniors |
| 23:23 | Flexibility with managed integration infrastructure |
| 25:59 | Standing out next to AI coding tools |
| 33:08 | One coding challenge for every hire |
| 38:11 | Selling to engineers as a non-engineer |
| 43:58 | Junior developers and the future talent pipeline |
| 50:26 | Avoiding shiny object syndrome as a founder |
| 54:28 | Why customer conversations beat the hype |
| 58:33 | Product-led growth versus optimizing for revenue |
| 1:03:15 | Why investors keep moving the traction goalposts |
| 1:06:35 | Do women founders do more with less? |
| 1:10:28 | Closing the funding gap for women founders |
| 1:16:24 | What an AI funding coach should do |
| 1:19:29 | Where to find Cristina Flaschen |
The Episode in an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Cristina lives in Brooklyn, and that shows up throughout the episode in her language (trips to the plate) and terminology (Blockchain-opalooza). Here are three more moments from the episode to light up your day:
500 random people and ten million dollars each
It starts as a joke, but there is a serious tone to this experiment: take 500 random people who say they are interested in starting a business, give each of them ten million dollars and look at the success rate after ten years. Cristina says nobody will run that experiment, but she wonders how far the result would be from what we see now. She raises it as a joke after we talk about confirmation bias in investing, because she sees investors pattern matching to a pattern that does not consistently work.
The magic of early discovery
Cristina compares what Pandium does to building the plumbing that her customers could use to build their connectivity on. In the early days, that meant having to use “the plunger” fairly regularly. When early customers asked why an alert had not fired or when somebody accidentally flooded Pandium with webhooks at three in the morning, the honest answer was often along the lines of “we didn’t know that was a thing that could happen”. It took a lot of finding their own solutions, including calls with Google, but it helped to build a team that is resourceful enough to say that “now we know what to do when that happens”.
Shaking it off before a rough call
When I ask whether she has a ritual before a meeting, Cristina responds that she wishes she could say it was a cold plunge, a shot of matcha and a run around the block. Her version used to be listening to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and taking a couple of deep breaths. Now, she does not need that anymore; she has had so many calls over the years that she could do a lot of them in her sleep.
In all three moments, Cristina meets uncertainty with humor, creativity and a plain answer.
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it the 10 million dollar experiment, the magic of early discovery with Google, or Cristina’s Taylor Swift routine? Or was it perhaps another moment in the episode? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
When we talk about how women could get more trips to the plate, I mention the growing base of female angel investors. Cristina agrees and says what the angels in her own network mean to her:
“…our female angels are some of my favorite, most helpful people and the most inspirational women.”
— Cristina Flaschen, CEO and co-founder of Pandium
She adds that getting founders to the next phase is just as important, from a small business to the medium and the large, and that this takes systemic change.
💡 Know a female angel who made a difference to you as a founder? Tell them, and share the quote to tell them how much you appreciate them.
Or learn about 3 trends I noticed across episodes below.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
One of the more thought-provoking parts of our conversation is about the funding numbers and research that purport that women perform better as entrepreneurs than men. Cristina wonders what would happen if female founders got more trips to the plate to begin with. Less funding for female founders leads to a smaller pipeline of exited female founders who can invest part of their assets to support other women. Here are three trends across episodes that may support that statement.
Junior roles in tech change, but juniors are still needed.
Cristina says the work is becoming ‘more cerebral’, and that many companies think junior work is going away. She disagrees and sees the risk of not having people in the pipeline to become senior. That is why she takes a different approach: hiring junior developers and linking them to a buddy. That approach works, as every current engineer started junior.
You can hear this coming back in many episodes before. Back in episode 139, Melissa Solis and I spoke at length about the shift in how people get into tech. Melissa sees that degrees are no longer a guarantee for a job. In episode 156, Rachel Gilley sees that while basic coding is increasingly automated, some tasks (e.g., strategy, critical thinking, creativity) remain human. And in episode 174, Vanessa Williams Saleh describes entry-level jobs that have “essentially disappeared in some capacity”. That prompted her to use a hiring framework for Gen Z graduates and women at her company Attenlyx.
Pre-Product No Longer Means Pre-Traction
We both see that many investors ask for some sort of traction before deciding if they want to invest. Particularly for female founders and other people from outside credentialed circles, investors keep raising that bar.
Earlier guests describe the same phenomenon at the earliest fundraising stage. In episode 95, Natasha Syed described how she tried raising pre-seed with an MVP and traction and heard that “traction is not enough. You need to have revenue.” In episode 90, Victoria Lawson raised her first round “when I was pre-product essentially” and found a later round harder until the product was live and traction followed. And in episode 146, Faviola Brugger-Dadis says Dutch investors rarely back the ideation or MVP phase and names repeated delay and reframing as red flags for founders.
The power of language in pitches
What was an eye-opener to me is that Cristina listens back to recordings of her own calls and hears “a lot of passive language” and a deferential tone. She suspects the perception that women aim lower comes largely from how goals get worded, and she would use a tool that suggests alternative phrasing.
We hear this signal in earlier episodes from both sides of the table. In episode 53, Veerle Witte recalls a female investor telling her to “please have more confidence,” and she realized she had always presented things carefully. Investors invite this type of behavior. In episode 155, Beata Wandachowicz-Krason says male founders get asked how to scale while women very often get asked: “how can you prevent that we don’t lose money on your solution?” Founders she interviewed told her that sharpening the pitch around hard data changed investor response. Episode 110 adds an interesting counterpoint: FEM-Start’s Marian Spier says, “I don’t think women should change to receive investment,” and she also tells founders to learn the investor lingo. This prompts the question: which edits change the message of a pitch, and which ones change the founder?
Together, these trends suggest that people who do not fit the tech mold have a harder time getting in, whether that is as a junior employee or as a female founder in early-stage fundraising.
🗣️ Do you think that if women got the same trips to the plate, the numbers would still say they are better entrepreneurs? Let me know your answer in the comments, or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Yulia Farber describes a loop that being a woman in the room can pull you into: trying to be someone you are expected to be. What would it take to step out of it?
In episode 176, I talk with Yulia, Chief Product Officer at Onside.io, an alternative app store for iOS that came out of the DMA opening the market in Europe. Yulia takes us from marketing at Google and banks to the product side of big tech, and to a job that made up eighty percent of her personality. We also talk about how Onside.io lets marketers send web traffic to their apps through web-to-app funnels.
In the clip below, Yulia answers my closing question about what an AI funding coach for female founders would need. She says that what is sometimes lacking is understanding that you’re not less than the people in the room. For Yulia, the power comes with becoming and understanding who you are.
Curious how Yulia moved from marketing to product and ended up at Onside.io? Leave your email address below and episode 176 lands in your feed on 12 November at 8:00 CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
One of the topics we discuss in this episode is that women can do more with less. But is that really true? Cristina begs to differ. She points out that as women receive a tiny sliver of the funding that men receive, the women who do get funding are likely to be exceptionally good entrepreneurs. In that sense, their outperformance should come as no surprise, because the system already pre-selects those who will outperform.
So what is true of the research that women are better entrepreneurs? This is what a high-level scan using Perplexity and Claude yielded:
Women have less access to funding and receive less investment. This is a widely accepted and proven stat that holds up both in venture capital and in this OECD study. But does that mean they do better than men?
One study that did meta-research on 97 other studies covering more than 46,000 respondents in 28 countries found that businesses led by women tend to be smaller and grow more slowly than businesses led by men, but they make about the same profit. This is in line with an earlier World Bank study from 2005 that found that women-led ventures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are often equally profitable.
Another study followed more than 4,000 new businesses in the US for five years. When the results were adjusted for size and risk, women-led and men-led businesses did equally well. Researchers in Australia repeated the study and found the same.
A later paper from one of the same researchers went one step further. It estimated that without the obstacles women face in getting bank loans, women-led businesses would do slightly better.
So where does the narrative then come from? One often cited source is this report by Boston Consulting Group on 350 startups that went through the MassChallenge accelerator. Only 92 had a woman among the founders. The findings are summarized in this table:
| Metric | Founded or cofounded by women | Founded by men | What this supports |
| Average investment received | $935,000 | $2,120,000 | Women-associated teams received less funding. |
| Average cumulative revenue over the five-year period analyzed | $730,000 | $662,000 | An actual revenue advantage of about 10%. |
| Revenue per dollar of funding | $0.78 | $0.31 | About 2.5 times as much revenue per funding dollar. |
Taken together, the research does not establish that women are universally better or worse entrepreneurs. The answer depends on what we measure. Some evidence points to higher revenue and greater funding efficiency in a small group of startups. I wonder to what extent those results would scale in the US and in Europe.
That leaves us with no other option than to give women the same number of trips to the plate and see what it brings us.
Listen to the full conversation with Cristina Flaschen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Cristina Flaschen
Cristina Flaschen is CEO and founder of Pandium, a company that provides integration infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies. She came into tech through a sales job in college, moved into customer service and then ERP consulting, and kept returning to integration work over more than 20 years in tech. She studied at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has been a guest lecturer at New York University. Cristina started Pandium with her co-founder, an engineer who is now its CTO, and took it to market in late 2019. She mentors founders and lives in Brooklyn.
You can connect with Cristina on LinkedIn. Please do make sure you add a message saying you heard her on the podcast.
About Pandium
Pandium helps B2B software companies offer integrations to their own customers. Engineers write the integrations in code, and Pandium takes care of the plumbing: logins, hosting, monitoring and a place inside the product where customers can install and manage them.
You can learn more about Pandium on the website and by following Pandium on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 175 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
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