ABOUT Maia Bittner
Maia is an Olin alumna who graduated Olin in 2011. She was originally, however, class of 2010, though after a summer internship at a startup, she took and leave of absence from Olin for a year and continued working at a couple different startups as their director of marketing. After graduating Olin, Maia worked at a couple more startups before applying to graduate school in Copenhagen. Just before she was about to leave for Denmark, she talked with Meghan Rose, who was starting up a company called Rocksbox and decided to defer graduate school for a later time. She has a passion for starting things from scratch, so now that Rocksbox is off the ground, she has decided to leaver her position there in order to start a new company with another Olin alum.
Maia’s introduction to entrepreneurial thinking occurred during an internship after her first year at Olin. She loves building things from scratch and working with people who share that goal. Part of what makes startups so appealing to Maia is that she loves all of the unique problems to be solved. In large corporations where everything is laid out, it is about optimizing. A large corporation moves much slower with the bureaucracy built up around it. This chain of command of a larger company is not something that Maia finds interesting. She prefers a fast-paced, ever-evolving environment where she can do experiments and try things out without the large consequences that would befall at a more established company. She also loves the relationships she has with her customers and employees. These relationships, she finds, are very important to how successful your company will be in the future.
Olin College Class of 2011
Currently: Starting a company with fellow Olin alum, Michael Ducker
Olin Activities: UX and human computer interaction experience
Known For: Cofounder, Rocksbox Jewelry
Interests: Yoga, Rock Climbing, Crafting Great Experiences
Places Worked: Rocksbox Jewelry
“Here’s a problem; let’s go fix it.“
Life at Rocksbox
Just before she was about to leave for graduate school, Maia was approached by Meghan Rose who knew of Maia’s passions for building things from scratch and startups. Meghan asked Maia if she would like to help found the company Rocksbox with her. Rocksbox is a jewelry renting service in which customers have a monthly subscription to borrow designer jewelry. They can return the three pieces of jewelry that they receive and get shipped three new pieces of jewelry. Maia was initially hired by Meghan to be the head engineer in charge of the website services and processes that the customers would go through. Maia then became a co-founder and has since hired, fired, and lead many people in a company that is now 75 people large.
As with the people involved, startups change as they expand operations and grow their customer base. Likewise, Maia realized that the not all parts of the startup mentality, even ones that contribute to success, scale well with a company’s growth. Noticeably, the main focuses between startups and established companies are different. Whereas startups focus on building a business from scratch, further down the line the priority shifts towards optimizing their current models. Although more possibilities open up as a business grows, Maia found increasing restrictions: while being established tends to imply a greater resource pool, a startup has the versatility to iterate on ideas and make turnaround business decisions at a much quicker rate.
She learned many things during her time at Rocksbox, for before she joined this company, she had never gone through the process of helping start a company. Maia says that many of her friends say that it is so cool that she is a co-founder of a startup. She loves doing it, but she has found it to not be as glamorous as most people picture. Much of her job at Rocksbox consisted of doing tasks that needed to get done though they did not have the money to hire more people. These jobs include everything from taking out the trash to problem mitigation between employees. Neither she nor Meghan had fired anyone before starting Rocksbox, so that too was a new experience in which both of them had to work out how they would let people go. In the beginning stages, they put it off because they were scared for they had not done it before. After firing one employee, however, it became easier. She realized that the employees she let go found a place that was a better fit for them. “When something isn’t working,” Maia explained, “it hurts both the company and the employee.”
Maia also told us about their hiring process for engineers at Rocksbox:
- They can code.
- They are not an asshole: they are not obnoxious to work with.
- They can get things done.
Maia said that she does not personally handle the hiring process of engineers anymore, but the woman who does has an interview with them. During this interview, she works on a project with the candidate to be sure that they work well on a team, as most of what they do at Rocksbox is pair coding. It is hardest to tell if they are the type of person who can get things done in an interview setting, so they rely on references for that.
Although Maia enjoyed her time at Rocksbox and learned a lot, she feels that the company is growing to much for her liking. She likes to be able to do experiments without the fear of detrimental consequences to the company. This is much more difficult at more mature companies than at a startup, for the whole point of a startup is to experiment and make mistakes. Maia realized that she is still passionate about building things from scratch, experimenting, and making mistakes. This is part of the reason why she decided to leave Rocksbox to start a company with a fellow Olin alum.
As with the people involved, startups change as they expand operations and grow their customer base. Likewise, Maia realized that the not all parts of the startup mentality, even ones that contribute to success, scale well with a company’s growth. Noticeably, the main focuses between startups and established companies are different. Whereas startups focus on building a business from scratch, further down the line the priority shifts towards optimizing their current models. Although more possibilities open up as a business grows, Maia found increasing restrictions: while being established tends to imply a greater resource pool, a startup has the versatility to iterate on ideas and make turnaround business decisions at a much quicker rate.
Maia’s passion for creating and solving problems drives her everyday life. She values all of the people she interacts with and finds it imperative that everyone has open communication for feedback. This includes everyone from her employees, to her customers, to her co-founders. While she was at Olin, Maia enjoyed her design classes (like UOCD) and has found them extremely useful to founding a startup. She loves interacting with her customers to gain feedback so that she can improve their experiences and has proved to be valuable at the companies she has worked at because of it. Though one day she may settle down at a company that may grow to be more mature, Maia’s current passions for startups is not going away anytime soon.