On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Xiaoyin Qu. Xiaoyin is the founder of Run The World, the new virtual events platform startup. This interview took place at our IO2020 New Innovators' Summit in October. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Xiaoyin Qu, Founder of Run The WorldBrian Ardinger:  My name's Brian Ardinger. I'm Director of Innovation at Nelnet and Founder of Inside Outside Innovation. And I wanted to have Xiaoyin on, obviously, as I started trying to think about what we’re going to do with this particular event now that COVID hit and we weren't going to be able to have it live. I started looking at a lot of different platforms out there and I ran into Run The World and Xiaoyin and I was really impressed with not only her, but what she's pulled together in a very short amount of time. And so, I figured I'd invite her to the conference and expose her to what we're building on this particular platform and give her an opportunity to showcase what they're doing and tell you the story of what it's like as an early-stage founder, to go from seven failed ideas, to raising $15 million in the middle of a pandemic and launching and scaling and building a business.So, with that Xiaoyin Qu is the founder of Run The World. She used to work at Facebook and Instagram as a product manager, she was an MBA at Stanford before she decided to start Run The World. And went out and raised $15 million, I believe, from Andreessen Horowitz and a number of other folks. With that, I will turn it over to you to give your story.Xiaoyin Qu: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for coming to Run The World. I'm Xiaoyin, the founder and CEO of Run The World. You mentioned one fun fact. I actually didn't finish my degree at Sanford. I dropped out after a year, to start Run The World. It was actually around July last year. We started the company.Initially the idea came because my mom was a doctor in China. She still is a doctor, and she has never been to an international conference before, until last year. So, she had an opportunity to fly to Chicago. And that was a great experience. She met another doctor from Dubai. Turns out they share the same, like rare patient case, but because she's from China, it's really hard for her to get visa.She had to fly to Beijing just to get visa and it's getting unpredictable because Trump has a new policy, you know, every now and then. Basically, it's just really hard for her to travel all of that and really expensive. So, she told me that she doesn't think herself can make it to the next conference. You know, even though that was a great experience.So, the original idea was really like, how can I help my mom? And meet other doctors like her, if she cannot really travel herself. So, we figured the only way it will be, we have to like digitize the whole experiences, especially the social part, so that my mom can meet other doctors.Obviously at that time was before COVID, so saying that you have an online event was consider stupid because people thought, Oh, I'm going to fly to Vegas for fun. My company's paying for it. You know, why do I have to do this online? Doesn't really make any sense. So we do have sell pretty hard, but we actually then decided to run our own event to see if people can actually show up.So at the very beginning, I am a product manager. I knew a lot of product managers. I just got a bunch of product managers from Google and Facebook. When we did our first PM conference, I was the organizer back then. We. just wanted to see if people will buy the ticket to attend it.