Genevieve Bellaire Transcript
Clint Betts
Welcome to The CEO.com Show. My name is Clint Betts. We have Genevieve Bellaire, the founder and CEO of Realworld. Genevieve is the founder of Realworld, which is an AI-driven platform to navigate adulthood and its life's moments. She's a lawyer by training, and she experienced the pain points around the quarter-life crisis firsthand when she began her career at Goldman Sachs and realized that despite being educated, she was totally unprepared to navigate all the complexities of modern life.
Whether it was figuring out how to set up and manage her 401(k) or finding doctors who took her insurance, she realized there was no one-stop shop to help her generation understand what they needed to do to set themselves up for success as adults. So she decided to build it. She's built Realworld. Genevieve, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Genevieve Bellaire
Thanks, Clint, so much for having me.
Clint Betts
Tell me what I missed there and tell us about Realworld and how all of this got started and how you became the founder and CEO.
Genevieve Bellaire
Yeah. Well, you nailed it. So I'm a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur. I was very fortunate to have an amazing education. I got a JD and an MBA shortly after graduating from college and began my career at Goldman. I basically started to realize as soon as I started working full-time that I learned so many different things in school, but there was this massive knowledge gap around all the practical life stuff, whether it was figuring out insurance or finances.
I'm the oldest kid in my family, so I didn't have an older brother or sister who could give me the playbook and walk me through how to get that credit card set up this account or choose this health insurance plan. And so, like most people in my early 20s, I just made a ton of careless and avoidable mistakes when it came to a lot of these different decisions. And the more that I started thinking about this, the more I realized there just really wasn't a place where you could go that onboards you into adulthood, so to speak.
It will not only help you figure out how to do these things but also help you figure out the things you didn't even know that you didn't know. And so that was really the impetus initially of Realworld was to build that platform that would teach you all these different topics across dozens of categories that you don't learn in the classroom, but that truly you need to be successful as an adult.
And it's evolved a lot since then, and we can get into it, I'm sure, but really what we've done now is become a place where we don't only teach you about adulthood and all the different areas and topics that help you manage and navigate, almost like a copilot, all of those different aspects of your life.
So whether it's using AI to take important documents and store them in a digital vault, pull out the relevant information for you, everything from your lease to a credit report, to tax returns, to setting important reminders around everything, from when you need to go to the dentist or doctors or passport renewal deadlines, or really is the one place where you can visualize and navigate all of your finances. The idea is to really be that one-stop shop that's helping you as a companion throughout the beginning of your life, so to speak, as an adult, but also through each life stage.
Clint Betts
And how's it going so far? Tell us what the response has been, what the results are, and at what point did you realize, hey, we've got something here; we're getting some real traction?
Genevieve Bellaire
It's funny, in law school, one of the things that you learn and that I felt like I took out of the experience was pattern recognition because you learn so much information. You're reading all these different cases. The whole point is to be able to distill a lot of different information into tangible nuggets that you could apply to other things and see those patterns there.
And so it was very clear and really the earliest of days of talking about and socializing this idea with people that there was a there, there. And it was really this idea and this one phrase that kept coming up, which was I tell them about this idea, and they say, "Oh, I wish I had that when I was younger." It's like okay. Next person you talked to, "Oh, I wish I had that when I was younger." It's like okay. Well, let's build it so that the younger selves of us can have this thing.
What was less clear was what it was. If you're truly defining a new category and you're building this new type of product that doesn't exist, is it a course that we tried? Is it a Duolingo for adulthood, which we also tried? Is it a series of different modules or conversational AI, all of these things that we've tried? One of the big lessons throughout this journey is when you're building something that's truly new; you have to try and fail at a lot of different things to get to that product market fit moment.
As I mentioned, fast-forward to where we are now. We've taken so much just foundational knowledge and learnings over the last few years to now launch this product, which is in the market, which is not only powered by AI, which makes it exciting just because of the technological advances that have come down the pipeline but also it's really grounded in learnings from years worth of talking to people and experimenting with different mediums to help them navigate these questions.
Clint Betts
Why didn't the coursework? I'm interested in that. What was the idea behind that? Was that the first thing you tried on the course?
Genevieve Bellaire
Yes. So when we started the business, the whole idea was to go where the problem was. And for us, the problem initially was education. It's like, okay, why is this a problem? People don't learn this stuff in school. So, we built a product that was designed specifically for colleges and high schools, but mostly colleges. It was kind of like the course you should have taken in college but didn't that would launch you into life in the real world and teach you about taxes and debt and credit and how insurance works and paying back your loans and all of that.
So we built this. It was actually a pretty incredible product, to be honest. It was three and a half hours, with 36 different modules, animated content, very next-gen, inspirational, etc. And we packaged that and licensed it to about a hundred schools across the country. And it was a successful business in the sense that it wasn't a huge revenue generator, but we were basically breakeven.
So we hadn't really raised capital, we hadn't done much at that point and scaled it across the country. The problem with that we found was very long sales cycles to work with schools and really any large institution. But more importantly actually, we weren't really building a direct relationship with our end user. We were working with schools, but then they had to market the product to their students. It wasn't a mandatory thing that they had to do when they graduated.
We started to realize that it was actually the wrong population of people to target, this soon to be graduate as opposed to the quarter life crisis moment person where they're in the real world. They realize this is a problem. They've already made a couple mistakes across their finances or insurance or whatever it might be, and they're ready to invest in that time and themselves to get their lives together, so to speak.
So all that is to say is I think it was an interesting first step for us and a nice way to learn what we needed to build. But ultimately, that passive oriented education versus a more active and frankly personalized experience just wasn't the right path forward.
Clint Betts
I wonder if you think that might be the future of education. I wonder if you were like, "Hey, we're groundbreaking in terms of the tools and the way we're presenting this stuff, but maybe that's not going to work in the future," which probably leads to AI and what you're doing with AI and the way that people are learning with AI. Give us a sense of how you're using it and maybe just touch a little bit too on how you think about the future of education after having gone through that experience.
Genevieve Bellaire
Sure. Well, I'll start with the AI piece. So it's a really exciting time to be building for many reasons, but I think the cost of building things has gone down just because of the efficiencies with AI. Also, just the personalization that you can build into your product has totally skyrocketed. So it's just a very exciting moment if you're a product-oriented person building something in this space. The way that we think about it is really in a couple of ways. The first is to really personalize our product for the individual.
So using information they provide us through onboarding, whether it understands what kind of financial accounts they have set up, where they get their insurance, things along those lines, and then building them a very robust pathway to get them foundationally set up within the product and then provide really meaningful guidance in terms of everything from someone your age and gender should have these doctor's appointments set up, or here's how much more you can spend on or put into your 401(k) based upon contribution limits, based upon how much you've already contributed, things like that.
So, there's the personalization lens. The second thing that we're building into the product is really more of that generative AI component. So being able to have ask real world as opposed to ask your mom or your dad or Google or someone else and get very contextualized answers to some of these life questions. And that could be understanding this health insurance plan versus this one. It could be helping you figure out whether you should rent versus buy, lease a car versus buy a car, and things like that.
But again, based on your unique circumstances, that's something we're actively building now. And then, of course, the thing frankly, I'm most excited for is all the Agentic Workflows and Agentic AI that's coming down the pipeline where one of our missions... Initially, I should say our mission was to simplify adulthood and help people navigate all these different things. It has now evolved to automate adulthood, which is much more exciting, frankly.
The idea here is to do everything we've done in the past, teach you what you need to know, and help you get organized across these things, but then just start taking stuff off your plate. Let us file that claim for you. Let us book your doctor's appointment. And so I think what's exciting about the next phase of all this technology is that it's not that far away. And in some cases, it's already here. So we want to be the place where you have that centralized life dashboard or copilot, so to speak, and it's very much grounded in humans. There's a person on the other side that you can talk to. I can speak a little bit about that, but we offer one-on-one onboarding and things like that with our members. But then a lot of it's just powered by technology, so you don't have to get that stuff off of your mental load and off of your plate. So we're really excited. There's just so much every day coming out that's propelling this all forward.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's wild. Does it ever freak you out or get overwhelming or a little scary? Given that every single day, it seems like there are major advancements that are changing everything, so who knows what it's going to look like tomorrow? Is it always super exciting, great time to build it, or is there a part of you where this is freaking weird, this is wild?
Genevieve Bellaire
To be honest, I follow a lot of the newsletters, and sometimes, it's just drinking from a fire hose. There's just too much to be able to absorb. So sometimes, I actually use AI to parse it down and then get the highlights there. So it's almost like using AI for AI. But I would say yeah, I mean, of course, there's always going to be false starts with some of these things.
You're always going to learn about some technology or hear about some company building something that in theory is amazing, but maybe it's really five or six years away as opposed to down the line. But I think on the whole, it's more inspiring than it is intimidating at this point.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, that's my sense of it too. It's just so wild, though. It's hard to even keep up sometimes, which is crazy. What was a challenge to begin with? You've pivoted a number of times here. What was a significant challenge in this journey that you had to overcome that you think about? "Man, the fact that we got over that really cemented that we're going to be a thing for a while. We're going to be a going concern?" Can you think back to any specific challenge?
Genevieve Bellaire
Yes. I mean, there's been challenges every day, to be honest. It's one of those things as founders; you are always dealing with something or another. But I think some of the big things for us were really thinking that some of these product iterations or even go-to-market iterations, meaning working with schools versus going direct to consumer, thinking it was the thing and putting all of our time and energy in building out everything from marketing plans to resourcing the team to support that vision, to spending months building out some product iteration, and then that not being the right thing and not taking off.
It's disheartening for your team and also for you as you're trying to manage what's happening internally, also externally, talking about the company investors, all of that sort of thing. And there were a couple of those moments where we really felt like we had the next piece and we didn't. And it took a lot of time and energy and backpedaling to then realign how we thought about our strategy and all of that.
That was more frustrating than anything else. But I think one of the greatest skills that at least I've built is just one of my strengths, which is flexibility and being able to look and see. Okay, this didn't work. Let's take a step back and figure out the next pathway. There's always another pathway going forward. So that's definitely been one of the biggest consistent challenges we faced.
Clint Betts
What recommendation would you have for those who may have to also pivot from B2C, which is what you were doing, selling to these universities and educational institutions, to going directly to consumers? What are the differences between those two things?
Genevieve Bellaire
They are so wildly different, and I wish it was something that I had known earlier in starting this business, to be honest. I mean, in business school, they teach you some of this stuff, but not the way that you would really need to know, in my opinion, at least, to start a company. One is the team that you need and where you put your resources. Because if you're building a B2B-oriented business, you need people. Well, it's changing with AI, I should say, but you need account executives.
You need sales outreach. You need people sourcing these people, who the right person is at these different companies or institutions to buy your product. You also need to build a different product and solution. You need something likely that has a dashboard for them to be able to monitor, do data tracking, and all of that sort of thing. Those sales cycles can take a very long time, which I think is actually the most important difference for an early-stage company because cash is king.
So if you're waiting a long time for these contracts to land, that can be frustrating. But two, and almost more importantly, you don't get really solid feedback on your product for long periods of time. So if you have a product and it takes you three to six months to get in the hands of your user, whether that's someone who's working at the company or their team or whatever it might be, your product might actually not be that good, but it takes you six months to get feedback.
Versus the direct-to-consumer side, we can have 10,000 people sign up in a month. If half of them churn, we're like, "Oh, okay, something's wrong. Let's figure out how to change this." Or if tons of them start paying for the product, we're like, "Okay, something's going right." You have such a faster iteration cycle in terms of what you need to or what you can learn if you go direct to the consumer.
The flip side of that is you don't necessarily need quite as many people, but you do need more money because you have to get in front of them somehow. And obviously if you can build product led strategies, product led growth strategies, organic growth, that's different, but oftentimes you have to rely on some paid media and marketing to get started. So it can be a little bit more costly.
I think the other thing is investing in brand and investing in storytelling and the design and the entire product experience is just so much more important at the consumer level than it is on the B2B side, which ultimately, in my opinion, leads to a better quality product, but can take a lot more time.
Clint Betts
What has been the response from... And it's mostly young adults who use the product and are focused on how we do this. You have a really interesting situation because they're likely going to want to continue to use the product in 10 years, in 20 years. So you're going to grow with them, and the product will grow with them and all that type of stuff, which seems really exciting. Talking about the feedback, what's a common piece of feedback you get from your users about how they implement it and use it and how it's changed their lives?
Genevieve Bellaire
I think the biggest thing, and this gets back to honestly the earliest origin of the company, was one thing Realworld does very well is defines adulthood, so to speak. It helps you figure out the things you don't know that you don't know, which is really hard to do. And it's one of the reasons why adulthood life, whatever you want to call it, can be very overwhelming.
Because if you don't know the rules of the game and you're expected to go figure all this stuff out, it can be very frustrating, even for the smartest, most educated, most set up person to decipher. And so I think that the biggest piece of feedback has always been it's everything in one place, which is amazing. I don't have to go to all these different apps or do research.
And also, it's helping me make sure that I have this sense of peace of mind, that there's no blind spot. I'm not forgetting that there's open enrollment you have to deal with for health insurance, or did you sign up for your 401(k), or TSA pre-check numbers, frequent flyer numbers. It's all of this stuff in one place. And so I think that's been consistent positive piece of feedback we've heard.
But to your earlier point, just about ideally, people will use this for 10 plus years; it's actually something we've thought deeply about over the years of how do we help you get the foundations as an individual, whether that's at age 22, 32, 42, 52, whatever age you're in that moment. But then, how do we grow through each life moment or life stage? And so what we've done is actually identify the top 15 life transitions, life stages, whatever you want to call it, that people go through.
And then we're building out workflows to help you essentially navigate each of those things in turn. So an example could be anything from buying a house to switching jobs to moving somewhere, getting married, having a child, any of these moments where life changes. Your insurance might change. You might have a different financial picture. There might be health-related questions, career-related questions, et cetera.
Try and simplify and create less anxiety around those different moments. And so our hope is that people join us and get their life set up within Realworld. We'll be there for whatever life throws at them throughout those next stages.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you as CEO?
Genevieve Bellaire
It's a good question. I mean, as a stage founder, every day is kind of different, which is great. It's an exciting part of the job. But I'd say some habits that I've introduced that have really helped me, I don't know, just roll with all the different punches and be able to have a clear mind each day is I get up at 4:00 in the morning, and I have a very structured early morning routine that is everything from reading to thinking about priorities for the week, to meditation, to all of that sort of thing, before really the day begins. And it's been a really life-changing, game-changing practice for me just because I feel like I've already accomplished a lot by the time most people get up. And then, whatever the day throws at me, I've at least had that protected time in the morning. So that's certainly one thing. Exercise is really important to me. So I try and incorporate that at least once at the end of the day before family time or networking or whatever is happening in the evening.
Clint Betts
What do you read, and what reading recommendations do you have for us?
Genevieve Bellaire
Ooh! So, in the mornings, I'll try and do one of two things. I'll either read industry-oriented newsletters, or I'll save articles for things that I think are interesting. I use something called a reMarkable tablet. I don't know if you've ever come across it.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, it's cool.
Genevieve Bellaire
I love it. But it's just a really great way to take all these different articles, save them, and have a nice format to read them. So I'll do that. And I'll typically have one business-oriented book or productivity-oriented book that I'm going through that I try and read in the morning. And this has been everything from Stretch to The 5 AM Club to any of those more business/productivity books. One book... Well, what I'm reading right now is not really a business book, but it's Yuval Harari's Homo Deus book.
It's the sequel to Sapiens. Yeah, it's great. The first one, Sapiens, was amazing. He has another one called Nexus, which is more about AI and information networks. I'm excited to read it. But sometimes it's just getting out of the super tech zone and thinking a bit bigger picture around some of these things. But one book that I always recommend is the story of Ernest Shackleton, it's called Endurance, that is all about Shackleton's trip to Antarctica and the challenges he faced with his team and company and then how he successfully made it back and the resilience and all of that that he showed.
Clint Betts
How have you thought about fundraising and raising money and taking venture capital? How have you thought about that just overall? I mean, originally you said like, "Hey, we bootstrapped it with the course thing, but we were breaking even." How have you thought about it since?
Genevieve Bellaire
We have raised metric capital. We've raised just about $8 million total from some amazing investors. We've been really lucky to work with everybody from large family offices to VCs to angels who've been operators at some amazing consumer and other-oriented companies. So, really, I feel like I've won the lottery in terms of our investors, which has been great. We have thought about it really as a way to frankly test and iterate off of these different concepts and different visions for the product and then start to show some scale.
And I think one of the things that you realize when you're building something that is truly new is that it takes time to figure out that product market fit moment. You're not just creating something that's 2% better, 2% faster than another existing product. It really takes figuring out the go-to-market strategy, figuring out the product itself and who your target market is, and all of that. So, we've used venture capital to be able to propel us throughout that journey.
Clint Betts
Yeah, how to take it, when to take it, all that type of stuff, it's such a fascinating and important part of being an entrepreneur, and everybody approaches it really differently. That's actually really interesting. What do you think about the most important attributes of leadership? What have you learned about being a leader?
Genevieve Bellaire
I remember that in business school, we read a case, and it's going to escape me now, but it was basically about different types of leadership. It was one of those Harvard Business Review cases where they take different examples of this person operating this way; they operate this way and assign them titles in terms of leadership styles. And I think something I've realized is that my leadership style has changed over the years, and it's changed based upon different dynamics that I'm facing, my own personal and professional growth, the team that I'm managing, and things like that.
But I think at the end of the day, the most important traits are really being resilient and being resourceful, particularly at an early stage, and just having a very strong vision and focus on what you're trying to do. And I think there's a difference between having a vision for a product to the company and what you're doing that week and being able to separate out what needs to happen from an execution perspective and focusing on the step, not the staircase, so to speak, but then having the north star that's long-term where you're trying to go.
So I think those have been things at least I've really tried to build in myself. And the people that I look up to, those are some of the skills that they certainly have.
Clint Betts
Who's a leader that you really admire?
Genevieve Bellaire
I mean, there's so many. I'll give you one that's off the beaten track, but was our first investor was a guy named Ben Sutton. And he was the guy who took the chance on me, so to speak, and really helped us launch Realworld in the beginning, very early days. And one thing I really appreciate about him, he's a very successful entrepreneur, really just the American Dream, American story, so to speak, that got him where he is today.
He also talked about building a really strong team and how culture eats strategy for lunch. And if you really instill people with the mission and you find people who are dedicated to what you're trying to build and you support them and you help them grow and you invest in them, those are the people who will help you actually get the job done. And he had proven it out in his own businesses. He had people who had worked with him for 15-plus years.
He's grown every step of their career and has obviously been very successful. So I think that's one piece. Then the other thing I admired so much about him was his constant eternal optimism. No matter if problems were happening, there was always the next step. There's always a way out. It's always so exciting to be building something and having that twinkle in your eye when you're talking about something that excites you.
Clint Betts
What do you know now that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?
Genevieve Bellaire
I mean, so many things. What do I wish I had known? I think one thing that comes to mind is I was pretty young to start the company. I was like 27, 28 years old and relatively fresh out of school and all of that. And so I spent a lot of time seeking advice from other people, and that might be advice on how the venture capital industry works or understand the education ecosystem or customer discovery or whatever it might be.
But I think that I've come now more to just trust my own gut and to trust data and to seek data over advice. And I think there's a good balance between the two to get, but I found myself looking back and saying, "Okay, in the last week I've had all these different conversations with people, got so many different perspectives, which is helpful." But had I sat down and just looked at the data of how our users were performing or looked at the data of where the market was going or whatever it might be, I might've been able to have some opinions on my own that would've been better than someone who's spending their entire life thinking about this problem space versus someone who's spending 30 minutes thinking about it and giving me their advice.
So I think it's something to balance certainly, but I love the idea now of really trusting your gut and owning when your gut is wrong, but being able to focus your attention there.
Clint Betts
What do you think about the current market? We're in an interesting period. We're in 2025. We're almost through the first quarter of it. In 2024, there will be a lot of uncertainty for a variety of reasons, such as elections and things like that. 2025 seems like there's a lot of uncertainty still, no elections coming up or anything like that, but it does feel like particularly with tariff policy, but probably you don't have to really worry about that in a lot of senses. So, how are you thinking about going into 2025?
Genevieve Bellaire
I mean, I think I agree with you. Over the last few years, it has been weird. It has been weird to be a founder. It's been weird to be in the tech ecosystem, VC, et cetera, really starting midway through 2022 where companies that have raised these huge valuations and then having trouble getting to the next step and raising capital. The cost of engineering talent, the cost of a lot of tech talent had gone up so high that there were all these massive layoffs.
People were looking to get closer to profitability versus focusing on growth, which had been the narrative for years past. VC's dry powder, so to speak, had either dried up, or just the goalposts around metrics had really moved so that a lot of companies got squeezed during that time. So I think the last couple of years have been strange in addition to everything you described, including all the geopolitical American politics, etc., happening. But I am very optimistic about 2025 because I think there's now... While there's still a lot of uncertainty, the companies that have made it through the last couple of years are probably going to make it. And they're going to be able to make it because they've gotten leaner, they've gotten more focused, they've figured out how to do more with less. And now, with the advent, again, of all this new technology, you'll be able to automate a lot of these processes, automate a lot of the things that maybe took more time or caused uncertainty or whatever it might've been with your business.
And so I'm feeling very optimistic about what the tech world at least looks like right now. I also think that consumer sentiment is changing too in a positive way, particularly around things like the way that we approach the world is having control over your own life, having a clear sense as to how these things work.
It seems like people are moving a little bit away from the constant commercialism and focused on consuming things and actually slightly more internally focused of how do I get my life together? How do I focus on my career ambitions? How do I focus on some of those things closer to home? So I'm optimistic.
Clint Betts
Finally, we end every review with the same question, and that is at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Genevieve Bellaire
First person who comes to mind is a woman named Jean Case, who is just an incredible entrepreneur, credible business leader in of herself. She runs the National Geographic as well as many other institutions and also runs a family foundation that does a lot of work around impact, particularly entrepreneurs and underrepresented entrepreneurs.
And when I told her what I was thinking about building before we'd even built the course, before we had done anything, she offered me the opportunity to be an entrepreneur in residence out of their foundation so that I could have a place to work, a place to experiment with this idea, have a community to be part of, and just generally speaking, start to feel like an entrepreneur as opposed to a lawyer and then someone who worked at Goldman Sachs.
And it was that first step I think that started to help me really create that identity in my mind of someone who was building something and focused on innovation and in that world. And she ended up being one of our first investors as well and is still a very strong mentor of mine today. So I thank her for that first step, so to speak, in the journey.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Genevieve, thank you so much for coming on the show. Honored to have you. Congratulations on everything you built. It's really a really, really cool product.
Genevieve Bellaire
Thank you.
Clint Betts
Everybody, check it out. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on.
Genevieve Bellaire
Thanks, Clint. I appreciate it.
Edited for readability.