You don't want to skim through this one: What you missed from theSkimm CEOs' lecture

Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of theSkimm, spent their Thursday afternoon meeting, advising and inspiring entrepreneurial UNC students and faculty members on campus. 

The two were invited to speak at the second annual 2019 Shuford Program Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lecture by Dorothy Shuford Lanier — an advisory board member and chairperson on the Innovate and Lead Committee. 

Before the hour-long Q&A session began in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium, a few students from the Shuford Ambassador program met with Weisberg and Zakin. The group talked about the importance of pursuing innovation and cultivating perseverance despite challenges that face entrepreneurs. 

Bernard Bell, executive director of the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship, opened the afternoon's moderated session with a few remarks about the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship. 

He said he thinks that the best part about the program is the fact that it strives to share the entrepreneurial mindset with students across all academic disciplines — not just those studying business. 

Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Terry Rhodes agreed.

"(The entrepreneurial mindset) is more than just teaching how to start a company," Rhodes said. "We are teaching skills that benefit students interested in working in the non-profit sector, technology, the arts — anywhere that creative problem solving and outside the box thinking would be valuable, and of course everywhere."

Shuford Lanier then introduced the audience to theSkimm and its founders, mentioning how the company began with its flagship product — The Daily Skimm newsletter – but has since grown to include a book, an app, podcasts and production team studio for video and audio content. 

Introduction to theSkimm

Bell started the student-curated questions with what he said the department likes to call its "30-Second-Resume," so that students could get to know Weisberg and Zakin beyond their company and its products. The founders then shared their elevator pitch of theSkimm to further familiarize the audience with their company. 

"theSkimm is a membership to living smarter," Weisberg said. "We started it almost eight years ago from our living room couch, and today it is the leading way that millennial women get informed. We equip and enable our audience to make the decisions in their lives that are right for themselves. It started with The Daily Skimm which is the fastest growing daily newsletter on the planet."

Zakin also said that they were led naturally to serve the female, millennial audience because they noticed that when they were both working as news producers for NBC, their female friends would constantly ask them to fill them in on daily news. 

Target audience 

Weisberg then shared why Zakin and herself are so fascinated by their audience. She said that millennial women are out-earning their male counterparts and are becoming more influential decision makers at home and in society-- they cannot afford their first homes, earn less proportionally than their parents did at their age, and are spending more in fertility treatments. 

"There has never been a generation like the millennial women," Weisberg said. "It is unprecedented."

She said that though they did not recognize this opposition when theSkimm was born, they definitely consider it to be the most fascinating factor of their target audience. 

Focused on its target audience constantly, Weisberg said theSkimm has created a voice and persona of the company that all users can envision and trust when getting their daily news. 

The ability to trust the persona of theSkimm and expect the daily deliverance through email, she said, has allowed the company to incorporate itself into the routine of its busy female users who may not own televisions anymore and partake in the tradition of morning television. 

"I think one of the things that was so important to us from day one is that theSkimm was not going to be a coastal brand," Zakin said. "What we knew was needed was not more coastal media companies that were catering to a specific audience and for us, our audience are people who are going to be on the go. There are a lot of people who fit that profile and that has nothing to do with the color of your skin."

Challenges and motivations 

Before opening the floor to questions from the audience, Bell pivoted the session by asking the two to share the challenges they encountered when deciding to quit their jobs to dedicate themselves entirely to theSkimm. 

As self-proclaimed non-risk-takers, Weisberg said that electively deciding to quit her job was the scariest part of her entrepreneurial experience, especially considering that she graduated in 2008 — amid the Great Recession — when peers were struggling to secure jobs after graduation or finding ways to pay back graduate school debt.

"The idea of waiting in line at a big corporation for one opportunity to present itself seemed even crazier than quitting our job," Weisberg said. "I think now looking behind I have real clarity on what was going through my mind that made me feel like it was safer to take a bet on myself than it was to wait for someone to take a bet on me."

@evelyaforte

university@dailytarheel.com