Leaving Deloitte to Build A Tech Startup

We’ve got a fantastic episode of Give It A Nudge today as Steve sits down with Brittany, the founder of Nevam. Brittany has had an incredible trajectory over the last two years, moving from a comfortable corporate consulting career to launching a highly scalable customer experience platform.

Brittany shares her journey of leaving Deloitte while on maternity leave to pursue a vision she had been treading on for a decade. She opens up about the realities of corporate life, noting that becoming a partner often just makes you a baby partner all over again, and contrasts that with the un-fast-trackable lessons of the founder journey. Steve and Brittany discuss the massive validation of pitching at a Propeller event and walking away with 72 direct warm referrals to Chief Marketing Officers at major enterprises.

The conversation gets highly entertaining as Brittany shares her unconventional personal operating systems. She explains why she programed a male-voiced AI to give her confidence boosts in the morning, how she runs a strict, post-it note family strategy session on New Year’s Eve for her three and six-year-old kids, and why there is a non-negotiable bottle of Fireball in her house for parenting emergencies. They also tackle the mental side of being a founder, navigating loneliness, and what happens when winning a major innovation award doesn't change your daily reality of needing to get back to work.

Timestamps

Chapters

00:00:00 Intro and the Malcolm Gladwell inspiration behind naming Nevam

00:01:43 Digital transformation and the frustration of corporate consulting at Deloitte

00:05:21 Turning mirror boards and screen grabs into an automated tech platform

00:09:33 Google mapping Deloitte and entering a massive corporate ecosystem

00:12:18 The myth of making it and the reality of the baby partner concept

00:13:23 Tinkering with a startup idea on maternity leave and budgeting a one-year runway

00:14:54 Moving from the Stride program to Techstars and closing an investment round