The Innovative Solution to Retail Fraud | Barbara Jones, Freeing Returns
Release Date: 05/29/2023
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info_outlineIn this episode, we interview Barbara, a technical founder who has significantly impacted the tech industry. Barbara is the creator of a Clubhouse group called Let's Imagine Life with Ladies at It, which helps women learn to code and expand their knowledge and skills in tech. With over 3000 members, the group celebrates women in tech and encourages men to bring more women onto their teams. She is also passionate about helping other women reach their potential and make a difference in the tech industry. Recently, she launched an initiative with a nonprofit and an organization in Angola to get 100 Portuguese-speaking African women coding. She has already hired one of them as a QA analyst for her company.
During the interview, Barbara shares her entrepreneurial journey, including how she started in tech and her experience with hackathons. She also talks about her successful software company that is used in over 4000 stores in the US, Canada, and Japan, and her experience creating algorithms for gift receipts and point-of-sale systems.
Additionally, Barbara shares insights into the value of equity versus raises, and how she used her experience with a previous startup to start her own business, Freeing Returns. She explains how her team won a hackathon sponsored by WorldPay and ended up receiving $75,000 in cash and prizes for their solution to fix returns. This success led to WorldPay becoming one of the first customers of Freeing Returns, and the CTO of WorldPay becoming a mentor to Barbara, opening many doors for her in the tech industry.
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Founder Bio:
Barbara Jones is the founder/CEO of Lillii RNB Inc which is doing business as Freeing Returns. Barbara has been in the Retail Technology sector for over 20 years and has been on the founding teams of 2 Retail Technology startups that both exited for close to $100M. Barbara has created Retail Tech Software that is running in over 4000 stores throughout the US, Canada, and Japan. She has been in the POS Architect and Solutions Architect roles for The Home Depot, LL Bean, PepBoys, and many more solving multi-million dollar issues for them. Her newest venture has been to transition Lillii RNB Inc from a System Integration consulting company to an Enterprise Solutions company with their Returns Management and Profit Optimization platform, Freeing Returns™ - which helps retailers find the Fraud and Shrink that's HIDING in their Data. We have successfully closed our Seed round, led by Serena Williams' venture fund and Aperture Venture Capital - bringing our total investments to over $4M.Barbara lives in Lithonia, GA with her husband of 2 years, but is from Austin, TX. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. She is a Gulf War Veteran, an Avid supporter of Women in STEM, and hires and trains minorities in the space of Retail Technology.
Time Stamps:
03:17 Barbara’s background and professional journey with Freeing Returns
08:00 Benefits of starting a career in tech
12:48 Exploring the growing issue of retail fraud with Freeing Returns
16:15 How Freeing Returns solve the problem: E-commerce loss prevention
18:49 Identifying areas of loss and solutions for improvement
22:10 Defining the ideal customer and exploring solutions for retailers
25:20 Company target and experience with the product
28:18 Difference between building tech for an enterprise and an SMB
30:32 Potential of data science and AI for real-time alerts and predictive capabilities
33:58 Raising $4 million for a startup company
38:48 Validation through hard work: building resilience and preparing for the next funding round.
41:37 Raising a pre-series round for retail technology platform to support growth and scale
43:57 How to get in contact with the Freeing Returns team
Resources:
Company website: https://freeingreturns.com/
LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/freeingreturns/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/freeingreturns