Perspective X with Pauline Fetaui 
About Taryn Williams
Taryn Williams is founder and CEO of #Gifted, a Shopify app launched in 2023 that helps brands manage influencer product gifting at scale for clients including Accor Hotels and Estee Lauder. She founded modelling agency WINK Models at 21, and later built talent marketplace theright.fit, which raised $2.5 million from investors including AirTree Ventures before she sold it, along with sister agency The Influencers, in 2023. She spoke on the Perspective X podcast about building six companies and the personal cost involved.
- Talks about
- AI, Founder Journey, Venture Capital
- Website
- tarynwilliams.com.au
In conversation.
1 episode
Perspective X with Pauline Fetaui Go straight to the good bits.
Key moments from Taryn Williams: Building 6 Companies — and the Cost No One Talks About.
- 0:00Cold open: "I was 21 when I started Wink"
- 4:08Scouted at 15: modelling as an accidental business education
- 6:21Starting Wink Models at 21 — fixing a broken, fragmented industry
- 9:04Building the first tech product (and the trap of gold-plating instead of an MVP)
- 12:21Launching The Right Fit and raising capital from Airtree
- 17:56How big Wink and The Right Fit actually grew
- 19:34Running multiple companies at once — and stepping fully out of Wink
- 22:13#Gifted, Notable and Online Model Academy: "every year, birth a new child"
- 28:27Why it isn't "the Taryn Williams show"
- 31:37The 2023 exits: running a formal process and the transition
In their own words.
“Ideas are free. The pain is in the execution.”
The path so far.
- Now
Founder & CEO · #Gifted
- Earlier · Startup
Founder · The Influencers
- Earlier · Startup
Founder · WINK Models
Sources: forbes.com.au, tarynwilliams.com.au
#Gifted on Day One
#gifted is an Australian influencer-marketing platform, co-founded by Taryn Williams and James Dumay in 2023, that lets brands run structured product-gifting (contra)…
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