Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of assault and harassment that some listeners may find upsetting. Terri Phipps and Mary Morrison are no strangers to the challenges women face when using ridesharing services. Having traveled frequently during their corporate careers, Terri and Mary experienced their fair share of uneasy rideshare situations, prompting them to take on different personas, stay on the lookout for potential dangers, and prepare for worst-case scenarios. And they quickly realized they were far from the only ones. Driven by the need to create a safer environment for both women passengers and drivers, Terri and Mary founded Wilma, a ridesharing platform specifically designed for women driving women. For Terri and Mary, Wilma is more than just a business endeavor—it's a project with the potential to provide women with a fear-free public transportation option. They talk about their personal connection to Wilma, share traumatic stories from women rideshare passengers that continue to motivate them to make a difference, and offer some of the best advice for women entrepreneurs we’ve heard so far.
Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of assault and harassment that some listeners may find upsetting.
Terri Phipps and Mary Morrison are no strangers to the challenges women face when using ridesharing services. Having traveled frequently during their corporate careers, Terri and Mary experienced their fair share of uneasy rideshare situations, prompting them to take on different personas, stay on the lookout for potential dangers, and prepare for worst-case scenarios. And they quickly realized they were far from the only ones.
Driven by the need to create a safer environment for both women passengers and drivers, Terri and Mary founded Wilma, a ridesharing platform specifically designed for women driving women. For Terri and Mary, Wilma is more than just a business endeavor—it's a project with the potential to provide women with a fear-free public transportation option. They talk about their personal connection to Wilma, share traumatic stories from women rideshare passengers that continue to motivate them to make a difference, and offer some of the best advice for women entrepreneurs we’ve heard so far.
Learn more about Wilma.
In this episode, we cover:
Quote of the Week:
"No problem can stand the assault of sustained effort." - Terri Phipps
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon," "And It Is There, In Those Depths," "I Refuse to Accept That There's Nothing I Can Do About It," "Short Song 020123," "We Were Never Meant to Live Here," "Short Song 012123," "Take Off and Shoot a Zero."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:00] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Hi, I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos. Starting my own venture wasn't easy.
After a decade working in the corporate world, I realized that so many things were out of my control, like layoffs and changes in direction. I didn't like the instability. I didn't want that to define my whole career at professional story, and so I left. I started my own company and achieved more than I ever imagined.
Now I'm on a mission to share stories from extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who never gave up on their vision.
[00:00:40] Ethan Lee: Hi, I'm Ethan, the creator and producer of the show. Katherin's away on a business trip while we're putting the final episode together. So I'm handling the intro and outro for this one. Personal safety is huge in the world of women's entrepreneurship, but when it comes to ride sharing services, safety concerns for women often take a backseat.
Terri Phipps and Mary Morrison see this as an issue of social justice. As the co-founders of the ride sharing service Wilma, Terri and Mary have combined their passion for safety and inclusivity with their own experiences as women navigating public transportation. In this eye-opening conversation, we explore the origins of Wilma, the unique challenges faced by its target users, and the personal connection that Terri and Mary share with their groundbreaking service.
We also discuss the hurdles they've had to overcome their aspirations for the future of ride sharing, and how their pursuit to change public transportation is bringing attention to universal issues that tend to get left by the side of the road.
[00:01:48] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Hello, Terri and Mary. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today and for being part of this show. We're super excited to have you on board. First, I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourselves a little bit and tell me a little bit about your professional journey so far, and how you got into what you're doing currently.
[00:02:06] Terri Phipps: I'm Terri Phipps, CEO and co-founder of Wilma. I came on this journey through a bit of a circuitous path. Started out as an actress and standup comedian, uh, living in New York, San Francisco, LA. Ended up starting to work in sales with Xerox and had a great career. Was there for about 20 years, but I met my partner Mary when we worked at Compass Group.
[00:02:28] Mary Morrison: My background's a little different than Terri's. I actually started in clinical dietetics, so my background started in healthcare and through some consulting work, I came into being offered a role with Compass Group again to head up business more from strategic initiatives. And like Terri said, that's where we met.
And really being able to travel right across North America. And within that traveling, saw something that was concerning of why am I always feeling like I have to be in a situation when I hail a cab or a ride hail? Terri and I, even after we went different ways, after both of us leaving Compass, we still met and Terri one night when we were meeting for dinner on a rainy night at the Lift restaurant in uh, Vancouver, Terry started with what the problem is that we're trying to solve right now with Wilma.
[00:03:22] Katherin Vasilopoulos: You did meet in circumstances that were more corporate and you were doing a lot of business travel. And as we know, it's not just the airplane, it's the ground transportation. It's once you land you have to get to where you need to go. And that can be a bit of a hairy situation depending on where you are or whoever's car you get into.
And tell me about maybe a situation or a story that maybe will resonate with some of the listeners, uh, because we've all gone through something like that.
[00:03:52] Terri Phipps: I remember exactly where I was when I was reading a Twitter feed about a woman who was on a business trip, just like Mary and I would be. She had landed in Houston and her driver came to pick her up at the airport and he was a ride hail driver and he was kind of, you know, chatting her up and flirting a bit, looking in the rear view mirror.
And he said, Hey, there's a lot of traffic between here and your hotel. Do you mind if I take a different route other than the app? And she said, yeah, yeah, no problem. It doesn't matter. And he said, yeah, and I need to get a bit of gas. Do you mind if I stop and get gas? And she said, yeah, really no big deal.
I got a ton of emails, and go for it. And so, like most of us, she's nose deep in her emails. And it's not till the app says that instead of getting at her hotel at 8:05, it moves from 8:20 to 8:25. And so she pokes her head up and there is not a light of Houston anywhere. She's actually going 90 miles an hour on the highway away from the city.
And she looks down at her phone and it says no service.
[00:04:40] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Oh gosh.
[00:04:41] Terri Phipps: And she has this sinking feeling like, what, what, what's happening? And so she started to kind of test the waters and, and she remembers you're supposed to personalize yourself and talk about your kids and your husband and stuff. So she does that, and now he's not looking in the rear view mirror.
He is not engaging at all, and she realizes, oh, oh my God, I'm, I'm not imagining this. I think I'm really in trouble. And luckily for her, she makes up a story that she works for a high tech security firm. And knowing her boss, he's waiting for her at the hotel and knowing him, he's turned on track services on my phone, she says, and knowing him, he's turned on voice command.
And then she inserts the driver's name and that works. He takes the next off ramp, he doubles back after a 45 minute detour. And she just wants to kiss the ground when she gets out. But you know, Katherin, what struck me was the amount of women who came on the Twitter feed with me too stories and worse.
And I remember just thinking, oh my gosh, how have we not solved for a safer option for women traveling for business or anything really? So I started to look into it a bit and I came across a website called Alarms.com, and it was alarming statistics that most people don't know. There was a statistic that 3% of women who use ride hailing are assaulted or report being assaulted.
There's probably more than that.
[00:05:54] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:54] Terri Phipps: And that there is 15 to 23% just report being bothered, hit on, contacted after the ride. And you know, three percent's a really big number if you realize that that's a percentage of such a ginormous number. And then on the other side, on the driver's side, that 42% of the drivers have reported being assaulted.
And you know, many of them don't feel safe working on the highest income earning nights like Friday and Saturday night. So I thought, okay, there's definitely an opportunity here. And then I spoke with Mary about it and we went to see a law firm and we said, if we modeled this after a woman's gym, if we created a woman driving women membership model, could we address the anti-discrimination law?
And all four firms said yes. And so that's what gave us the idea to build Wilma as a community, uh, of ride hailing safe, safe for not just women, but gender diverse people.
[00:06:47] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Wonderful.
[00:06:48] Terri Phipps: Because they're often targeted for violence, as we all know.
[00:06:50] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Of course. So tell me a little bit more about Wilma. What's the idea behind it?
How does it work, and where does the name come from?
[00:06:57] Terri Phipps: As I mentioned, it's a membership model. So the way it works is that the rider, other than the fact that she obviously gets a female driver every time, she doesn't pay any of the industry standard booking fees. So it doesn't take more than two or three nights out to cost justify a membership, and then the benefit for the driver, um, other than the fact that she gets a female rider in the backseat, the driver gets to keep 80% of the fair.
And Wilma, where did the name come from? Well, so we were looking for a woman's name that we thought would be like Xena Warrior Princess, you know, and uh, so we googled women's name protector, and Wilma came up as meaning resolute protector in Dutch and German. And I remember thinking, oh, You're kidding me.
[00:07:39] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Wow, that's perfect.
[00:07:40] Terri Phipps: Because that's my late mother's name.
[00:07:42] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Wow.
[00:07:42] Terri Phipps: And she was a high school principal, a mother of five. She was the ultimate in resolute protectors. And so I just, I, you know, I was so shocked because I still remember going to the mall when we were kids and my mom would say, Okay, there's five of you.
One of me, one of you is gonna get lost. And when you do, go find a mom. Go find a Wilma, and she'll get you home safely.
[00:08:02] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes.
[00:08:03] Terri Phipps: And that stuck with me. And then Mary was Googling women in transportation, very first woman ever to do a taxi cab. And it was in New York City in 1915, I think it was.
[00:08:14] Mary Morrison: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:14] Terri Phipps: And her name was Wilma Russey.
So it was like how, it was just so crazy.
[00:08:20] Mary Morrison: She was a mechanic by day and she was the first female taxi driver by night and on weekends. Very glamorous woman, by the way. Mm-hmm.
[00:08:29] Katherin Vasilopoulos: So this was meant to be. It all goes back to the theme of feeling safe, feeling trust in the people who are offering you that service.
The sense of feeling safe.
[00:08:38] Mary Morrison: It also kind of impacts your confidence in feeling empowered because when those two things are taken away from you, feeling safe and feeling I can trust you, you start to wear different masks. Getting into vehicles, how you show up in a vehicle. Am I too chatty? Am I not chatty enough?
And all these things really do start to impact. Why are you traveling that day? If you're traveling for work, you really have to be focused on what's happening for work, and you really start to create identities for yourself. Like we have people that tell us, they make up husbands, they make up addresses, they make up people that they're not even talking to someone on a phone.
They carry weapons with them in their purse or they have their phone or their keys, you know, if they need to assert themselves. So Katherin, I don't think there's a one size fits all to that question. I think everybody really has had to create their own persona of how they feel safe when they're getting into a vehicle.
[00:09:52] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And you shouldn't have to, you shouldn't have to be on high alert when you're using a service that you're paying for. And yet the reality is that sometimes you get cues from your environment indicating that, Hmm, this isn't usual. This is an abnormal behavior. Yeah, this is an abnormal detour, or whatever it is.
[00:10:09] Terri Phipps: Right.
[00:10:10] Katherin Vasilopoulos: So the service that you're offering right now is, It's also social service.
[00:10:15] Terri Phipps: Women that are basically between about 18 and 30 are often targeted for violence. And it's not just them. It's all the people that love them. Our customer bases, the husbands, the fathers, the boyfriends.
We lock our doors at night. We ensure our cars. We insure our house because hope is not a strategy. And so sending off our loved ones into a situation that is statistically unsafe is just not something they feel comfortable with. So Mary and I talk about how many women's trauma bubbles we are going to impact and protect, and that's a big driver for us.
It's kinda like a double bottom line. So it's not only an important investment for folks that are investing in Wilma, but it's going to have a huge social impact on all these women.
[00:11:02] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I like the term you used the trauma bubble because it could mean different things to different people. From your perspective, Mary, what does that mean to you, or what have you heard people say about it?
[00:11:12] Mary Morrison: And the trauma bubble does mean different things to different people, and you can take it from something that just makes me uncomfortable. Which that shouldn't be happening to an all out assault that has absolutely crippled that person that she can't leave the house anymore. These are things that are very dynamic.
They're happening every day. There isn't a neighborhood or a community that it isn't happening in.
[00:11:37] Terri Phipps: You know, and I just wanted to comment on the point earlier about the trauma bubble. Trauma is a core memory that stays with you forever and it impacts the decisions you make every day and your startle reflex.
And if we can do our part to avoid that trauma for women. Violence for the most part is typically man on man or man on women. That's 96% of all violence. Only 4% is women on women, and it's almost always in correctional institutes or mothers against daughters. So this statistically is the far safer way.
Plus women's also statistically, are safer drivers, so it's got so many wins for women to try and protect that core memory and that trauma bubble.
[00:12:22] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah. It stays somewhere deep inside and it can be crippling almost sometimes in terms of decision making in the future. And you don't know when it's gonna appear, but your body tells you.
[00:12:32] Terri Phipps: Yeah.
[00:12:32] Katherin Vasilopoulos: They recognize the feeling again.
[00:12:34] Terri Phipps: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:34] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And that comes back and it's like-
[00:12:35] Terri Phipps: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:36] Katherin Vasilopoulos: -Oh no, I'm not going down this path again. I've had a moment where I had a. Almost 20 years ago in Boston. Took a plane there, got off, uh, it was late at night, it was dark and there were people waiting for cabs. And a gentleman who was well dressed said, Hey, you wanna share a cab?
Where are you going? I said, I'm going to this area. He goes, yeah, I'll be in that area too. I'll get off first at my hotel. And then the driver can take you to where you're going. And then when that gentleman was dropped off, the cab driver seemed to have a different attitude with me and seemed to then all of a sudden start taking detours into neighborhoods that didn't seem to match the description of where I thought I was going.
And, uh, started asking questions like, where are we going? Et cetera, et cetera. And he wasn't responsive and I thought, well, is it a language issue? But, you know, he seemed to be okay before when the gentleman was in the car with me. So eventually it just started to feel very awkward and not right. That's the only way I can describe it.
And eventually I told him, please stop. I need to get out. I threw some money at him and went to the payphone, back when we had pay phones and no cell phones, and I called the, the place where I was staying and said, please send someone. I am stranded. And I did not feel comfortable. And so I'm sure many people have had moments like that where they just know that something's not right. And did you also have something like that? Did it ever happen to you?
[00:13:55] Terri Phipps: No, but to someone very close to me. So now that we're in these roles, Mary and I are privy to stories we wish we didn't know. Um-
[00:14:02] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:03] Terri Phipps: -Women being zip tied and, um, assaulted, or falling asleep in the back. There's a woman who went to a book club, two little ones at home, and her husband. And she had five gin and tonics cuz she was at book club, and fell asleep in the back of the way home and woke up with the driver on top for her. And we, we get those stories, we hear those all the time and even bouncers saying, you know, we think we're doing the girl a favor.
She's had too many to drinks and we order her an Uber and we start saying, geez, did we just throw the lamb to the slaughter? Or, our VP of membership works for us, he said, Oh, you know, it just never occurred to me. He said, I get into a car and I fall asleep. And I never thought to myself, oh, I probably shouldn't fall asleep in this taxi or ride hail.
And yeah, because it's a different thing. I remember telling a young man, we were looking at some investing support and he was one of these scouts and I was saying, you know how when you're walking through the parking lot or a dark parkade at night, you put your keys between your fingers just in case you're approached and you wanna have something to defend yourself.
And he said, And What do you mean, a fob? You put your fob between your fingers?
[00:15:09] Katherin Vasilopoulos: No.
[00:15:09] Terri Phipps: And I'm like, no, no, like your, something sharp, like your house keys. And he is like, Oh, and, and what do you do with that? And I was like, oh my gosh. Like, how tall are you? And he goes, I'm, I'm 6'4". And I'm like, and you weighed like, and he said, yeah, like 240.
Like, I'm 5'2".
[00:15:24] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah.
[00:15:24] Terri Phipps: I need something. I need some sort of an advantage to get their eyes or something. And he's like, I've never heard of that.
[00:15:31] Katherin Vasilopoulos: It would never occur to him to have to defend himself or to carry some form of protection or a weapon or a spray. Something that a lot of women unfortunately have to think about, and that's an emotional thing because you're like, wow, I can't navigate this world without wondering who is gonna approach me from behind or from the side, and it's not a good place to be.
That destroys all the trust. I'm sure that's one of the driving factors and why you wanna do this. This is the part of the passion project where that's the core of what you're trying to prevent in the future.
[00:16:03] Mary Morrison: Even something I just posted in our internal Slack channel last night, Katherin. I mean, this just happened over the weekend in Toronto.
A young woman was leaving a bar downtown Toronto. She was terribly sexually assaulted, and the person even took her phone and gave himself five stars and gave himself a gratuity and kicked her out of the car.
[00:16:29] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Oh no.
[00:16:29] Mary Morrison: They know that person's name. Which, the brazenness of it is really unbelievable of this.
It's really important as we're building to remember why we're building, and I often find stories that I think are important for our team to remember our why on our best days, to know the difference we're gonna make on our most challenging dates to know why the struggle.
[00:16:54] Katherin Vasilopoulos: But let me ask you. Where does the Brazenness come from?
How dare this person decide to do that? And on top of it, they can get caught because their name is there, their name is on the rideshare app. Like, what do you think's gonna happen buddy?
[00:17:08] Terri Phipps: I. Yeah, I mean, I, who knows-
-We'd
[00:17:11] Mary Morrison: be rich women if we knew the answer to that question, Katherin.
[00:17:15] Terri Phipps: Well, I just, I wish that it, I just don't know.
I don't know what they're thinking. Or maybe they just something, you know, the id, the ego and the super ego, something takes over the ad and it's just, um, It's really an unfortunate-
[00:17:29] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I guess the real character's when, it's what you do when someone is not looking right, that defines your character. So-
[00:17:35] Mary Morrison: Yes.
[00:17:35] Terri Phipps: Yeah.
[00:17:36] Mary Morrison: And yeah, and what's even more troubling is Terri had spoke about this at the onset for 30 million women and gender diverse people to report that they've been sexually violated.
That's the reports. It takes a lot of courage to call the police and say, this happened to me, because it starts with proving. And as women, we often are brought up to make up, oh, maybe I shouldn't have been so nice. Maybe I shouldn't have been so friendly. Maybe I shouldn't have had that last glass of wine.
All those things become tattooed on ourselves somewhere I. It takes a person to know that what happened to me isn't right, and I'm going to call the police and report this, but unfortunately that's the minority. So when we're working with such big numbers, that's the minority of people that are making those calls to report.
[00:18:30] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I imagine that not everyone is reporting everything so that the statistics are completely underwhelming. Yeah. I wanna go back to the moment where you were still in corporate. Was there a moment where you decided I need to leave corporate, or was there an emotional turmoil inside that said I need to do something else, or, this is calling me now and I have to move on from this?
[00:18:52] Terri Phipps: Yeah. I think for me, you know how in life you, it's either a charact or a stick. You're either running to something or away from something. I wasn't running away from anything. I had a fantastic job, you know, as a senior VP and managing director had a wonderful. Good income. So this absolutely, I felt like I was picked.
[00:19:08] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:09] Terri Phipps: That I was chosen to do this. That's what happened for me. How about you, Mary?
[00:19:13] Mary Morrison: I've kind of done the dance between being an entrepreneur and then getting back into the corporate world. Mostly a client that I was solving problems for. But Katherin, specifically to your question, really seeing something that needs to be resolved. The thing that just, should just be a no-brainer that I should be able to leave my house and go to the airport and not think, God, did I give too much information away? I just thought when Terri and I started meeting for our dinners in Vancouver, it's the time and um, you really have to believe in what you're doing because it's a hell of a lot of work.
[00:19:51] Katherin Vasilopoulos: It is and self-doubt can creep in very quickly the minute the first thing doesn't go well. Cause I know that very well. What I wanna hear about is personal challenges, the stuff that's going on inside when all this is happening. Cuz externally, it's fantastic. Everything is wonderful. You're doing all the steps.
On paper, it looks amazing, but stuff inside is happening.
[00:20:12] Mary Morrison: Terri and I have a beautiful moral compass. Part of having that moral compass is you carry a lot of weight of making all the right decisions. When you're raising money, that's a weight too, because you're managing those expectations to start from a place of building, not just a plug and play, but building.
There needs to be patience built in with the anticipation because that true anticipation can't happen without. The due diligence that's required. It's a significant responsibility. It's a significant responsibility for the commitments that we're making to the communities and the stakeholders. It's a significant responsibility of allowance to ourself to be able to say, Ugh, I just need a day off.
Those sorts of things. I would say when you're working, no matter what job you're working, when you're carrying a business card for a company that you know you're gonna get paid and you know you can take your five weeks vacation, you know, you can go and get some new contact lenses, um, those things don't even play in your mind.
[00:21:23] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah. You need to be able to see what you're doing, right? I like what you said though, with anticipation, you need patience cuz otherwise nothing happens. But what do you become impatient about?
[00:21:34] Terri Phipps: We both know how to scale. The hardest thing has been getting from zero to one.
[00:21:38] Mary Morrison: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So true, Ter.
[00:21:40] Terri Phipps: We're finally, yeah, finally at the end of that fun game, um, after lots of wine, couple of tears.
[00:21:48] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:49] Terri Phipps: Lots of times doubting ourselves like, will this work? Are we gonna meet payroll? Are we gonna. My mom, which is so great that Wilma's named after her, but my mom had this expression: no problem, can stand the assault of sustained effort.
[00:22:03] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Oh.
[00:22:03] Terri Phipps: And I say that all the time. To Mary, to the team. Everyone. No problem can stand the assault of sustained effort. And you know, Winston Churchill had just said, never, never, never quit.
[00:22:21] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I wanna go back to what you said, going from zero to one. Describe that. What does that mean exactly.
[00:22:26] Terri Phipps: From the idea of knowing this is a great idea to figuring out the plan, the path, the, you know, getting incorporated, getting your CRA, just like all the little tiny steps, setting up your corporate bank account, getting a corporate lawyer.
All those things we had to learn.
[00:22:44] Mary Morrison: It's to hire slow and fail fast. That's something that Terri and I always talk about. We have these great women that help us with talent acquisition. Bringing people into the company is very strategic. What is this person gonna do? How is this person gonna be successful?
What do we need to see that they're bringing into the company? Those are all really big criteria, but then if it's not working out, it's not working out. When you're working in your corporate world, you often go through the whole 3, 6, 9 month, let's see if we can turn this person around. Not everybody's cut out to be working in a startup environment.
That's a big learning for Terry and I.
[00:23:24] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Why is that?
[00:23:25] Mary Morrison: There's a lot of cloud cover in a lot of organizations. A lot of organizations that they may not have had the decision rights that when we bring people in, we want people that can be autonomous thinkers and doers versus oversight, and we're not great babysitters.
We're bringing people in to bring value to the business and to get the business launched.
[00:23:49] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah, you need a person who gets hired because of their expertise and they bring something to your company as opposed to you telling them how to do something and then they show up and just do it. And I do get the whole thing about never, never, never, never quit.
That's the the basic thing of you gotta wake up and. Do the work, even if it's not perfect or even if you fall flat on your face, you still have to get back up on your feet and keep going. So that was my biggest fear. My biggest fear is that I would eventually quit. And I'm curious to know about your biggest fear.
[00:24:22] Terri Phipps: I've had to learn so much more about technology than I ever thought. Like I know more about Lambda and DynamoDB, Athena, Sockets, APIs. I mean, I could just, I mean, I'm-
[00:24:33] Mary Morrison: She's, she's a scrabble whiz.
Get her a Scrabble board and watch the, watch the words that she can build.
[00:24:39] Katherin Vasilopoulos: You inventing words now?
[00:24:41] Terri Phipps: It is crazy. The stuff we need to know about real time location services.
[00:24:45] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:46] Terri Phipps: And what is the least expensive way to build out an infrastructure to do that? The things we worry about go from little to big, but the biggest one is just keeping cash in the bank, keeping cars on the road, and building up our traction with our members so that we can expand into other cities.
[00:25:07] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mary, what's your biggest fear?
[00:25:09] Mary Morrison: I like to run little scenarios of the what ifs. Even if the what if scenarios aren't ideal, and I think it's really important as startup founders to run those what if scenarios, because you're gonna get hit with them sooner or later. And you have to remember, you've done your what if scenarios.
You're competent and confident in the current plan. But both Terri and I, we are very much agile founders. We can shift where we need to shift, and again, that takes confidence. So the fear is really managing the fear.
[00:25:44] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Interesting. Very interesting. Like what does it mean to you to be an entrepreneur? Now, you must get emotional about this at some point.
It's not always facts and let's be prepared and we've done our due diligence and we've surrounded ourselves. There's gotta be an emotional component to this. Like, what does it mean to you?
[00:26:01] Terri Phipps: Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Can I really do this? You know? Yeah. The FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
[00:26:11] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Oh, the fud. I never heard that one before.
[00:26:13] Terri Phipps: Fear, uncertainty and doubt.
[00:26:16] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Oof. Yeah. Those will sound like bad dudes.
[00:26:18] Mary Morrison: Yes.
[00:26:19] Terri Phipps: Yeah, and you know, we have them. We have them in our brains. We are always asking and answering questions all the time in our brain. Because, I used to do motivational speaking as well, and one of my big talks is on choice, not chance determines your destiny because it's really your attitude controls your actions and your actions control your destiny.
[00:26:43] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes.
[00:26:43] Terri Phipps: So you really, even above attitude is your thoughts. And so when you have negative self-talk or you have negative thoughts or fear, they can be really paralyzing and we all have them. I've tried to train myself, and this again comes from my mother when fear or negative thoughts come in, I think, okay, how can I do this and enjoy the process?
And so we have a call every Friday with our recruitment ladies. And so we've all now got sock puppets.
[00:27:13] Mary Morrison: No, no, we do not.
[00:27:15] Terri Phipps: Okay, all of us but Mary.
[00:27:18] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Show me. I wanna see.
[00:27:20] Terri Phipps: I'll, I'll show you. I gotta show you my sock puppet.
[00:27:22] Mary Morrison: Oh my graces.
[00:27:23] Terri Phipps: It's hilarious.
[00:27:23] Mary Morrison: It's not hilarious, Katherin.
[00:27:25] Terri Phipps: It's a little blue bunny with a big red mouth.
And now, now my dog thinks it's hilarious. Um, but I mean, we use the sock puppets and we always end the call with a word of the day.
[00:27:38] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:38] Terri Phipps: The word is never appropriate and you have to work it into a sentence through the day. So, you know, trying to bring some fun and remembering that we are doing this to bring good to the world, and so we've gotta enjoy the process.
I try to remember that just when you think you can't take it anymore, something's gonna change. Something's going to happen, and so to just keep at it, to stay positive and it's okay to be afraid. But to just try and move through it and know that this too will pass.
[00:28:07] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes, it's temporary. Everything is temporary. There's no problem that's gonna be there forever. My, one of my final questions is basically what would you tell young aspiring entrepreneurs?
[00:28:17] Terri Phipps: I used to be an actress and I remember because my dad was in acting as well and I'd be have the, these butterflies and he said, you don't need to remember the whole script, honey.
You just remember, need to remember your first line. And as soon as you do that, the rest will follow. And that is very much what it's like to be an entrepreneur. Just start, just do the first thing, and then if you do one thing every day towards your goal and your dream, you look back in three months or a year and you've built a company.
[00:28:46] Mary Morrison: I would actually remove the word young because I think no matter what stage you're at in your life, if something is really important to you, Then just do it.
Just like any relationship, a startup is a relationship. If it doesn't matter that much to you, it's gonna be a crap relationship and that's how you're gonna treat it. So it really has to be something that you can say, this is important to me. For Terri and I, it is a legacy. We're building this to leave to every place that gets to experience Wilma.
[00:29:21] Katherin Vasilopoulos: What an amazing discussion today. Is there anything else you wanted to add? Did we. Did we cover everything?
[00:29:28] Terri Phipps: Pick a co-founder you trust.
[00:29:30] Mary Morrison: Oh, yes.
[00:29:30] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes.
[00:29:31] Mary Morrison: I was saying this to someone the other day, Ter, just through the incubator programs that we've been involved with. You know, you kind of get to meet everybody and often they're friends, but they don't know how they are in business.
Your co-founder has to be someone that you see them in business because we have friends in our life. And I'll tell you what, none of my friends in my life would be in this business. They just wouldn't. And that's okay. But it is really, really important to have that trust and that vulnerability with that person as well.
[00:30:05] Katherin Vasilopoulos: What will it look like when you achieve your success? I know it's a very cliche question because it means different things to different people, but we have to understand what that means to us. Otherwise, we'll never be satisfied. What does success look like for you?
[00:30:19] Mary Morrison: I think for me it's Wilma just becomes a word that we use in our life.
[00:30:25] Terri Phipps: Actually, Wilma stands for women in life moving around safely.
I love
[00:30:30] Mary Morrison: listening to the university students of what Wilma means to them. For some young women, they think it's a safe word. So if they're in a bar that Wilma and some guy's bugging them, or if they think that their drink's been hassled with, and that was another reason for choosing Wilma.
She is now a personality and what success means to me is seeing Wilma really grow in her reach and having a widespread personality that we just hear about her all over the place.
[00:31:03] Ethan Lee: Many thanks to Terri and Mary. You can learn more about Wilma in the episode description. Like we mentioned, narratives about women and ride sharing aren't talked about nearly as much as they should be. So if you enjoyed our conversation, we would love it if you shared this episode with a friend.
And So, She Left is made by Cansulta and myself, Ethan Lee. We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode. Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the episode notes. On behalf of Katherin Vasilopoulos, I'm Ethan Lee, and thanks for listening.