- Laura Barrons Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo, a company that makes shipping easier and more affordable for e-commerce companies.
- Laura started Shippo in 2013 and they currently process millions of shipments every month.
- She had her first experience with startups while working as an intern at YC alumni company, LendUp.
- Laura emphasizes that there is no magic formula to entrepreneurship and it's about hard work, persistence, and standing up after failure.
- She shares her journey of how she got started, dropped out of grad school, and decided to work on an e-commerce store before realizing the pain point in shipping and starting Shippo.
- Laura talks about the challenges she faced in fundraising and the importance of being transparent and straightforward with investors.
- She highlights the importance of focusing on one key performance indicator (KPI) and shares her experience in raising $7 million in a Series A funding round.

- The speaker discusses how to build trust with prospective investors by communicating clearly and directly.
- They emphasize the importance of doing due diligence on investors and seeking references from founders who have worked with them.
- The speaker shares a humorous story about a misunderstanding during a partner meeting at Kleiner Perkins.
- They highlight the importance of being authentic, passionate, and honest when pitching to investors.
- The speaker emphasizes that failure can lead to new opportunities and advises taking a step back to see the bigger picture.
- They encourage founders to be unapologetic about who they are and to hire for complementary skills.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of taking care of oneself and seeking help when needed.
- They discuss the value of having a supportive co-founder and partner in running a company.

- The speaker acknowledges the challenges of being a female founder in a male-dominated industry.
- She shares her experiences of being one of the few females in the room and the surprise people express when they learn she is the founder and CEO of her company.
- She mentions a male VC's condescending comment about her business and expresses her dislike of being labeled as a female founder.
- The speaker's attitude has changed, realizing that hard work does not always prevent discrimination and that the problem lies within the system.
- She believes that everyone can make a difference by creating inclusive company cultures, being role models, and generating outstanding returns for investors.
- The speaker encourages the audience to find their calling and take the opportunity to make a difference.
- She concludes by wishing everyone luck and inviting them to reach out with any questions.

- Laura Barrons Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo, a company that simplifies shipping for e-commerce businesses.
- She started Shippo in 2013 and they process millions of shipments monthly.
- Laura emphasizes the importance of hard work and persistence in entrepreneurship.
- She shares her journey of starting Shippo after dropping out of grad school and realizing the shipping pain point in e-commerce.
- Laura discusses the challenges she faced in fundraising and the importance of transparency with investors.
- She highlights the significance of focusing on one key performance indicator (KPI) and shares her experience in raising $7 million in funding.
- The speaker emphasizes clear communication and due diligence when building trust with investors.
- They share a humorous story about a partner meeting and stress the importance of authenticity and passion in pitching.
- The speaker encourages embracing failure and taking a step back for perspective.
- They discuss the importance of self-care, seeking help, and having a supportive co-founder.
- The speaker acknowledges the challenges of being a female founder in a male-dominated industry.
- She shares experiences of surprise and condescension as a female founder.
- The speaker believes in creating inclusive company cultures and being role models to make a difference.
- They encourage the audience to find their calling and make a positive impact.

Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and cofounder of Shippo. She shared the story of founding Shippo at the 2017 Female Founders Conference.

https://goshippo.com/

You can watch the other Female Founders Conference talks here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5OfUA6Kgif-AfRFJhkFksXI

Hello, I'm Carolyn Leiby, a partner at Y Combinator, and I'm delighted to introduce our next speaker, Laura Barrons Wu, founder and CEO of Shippo.

Shippo makes it easier and more affordable for e-commerce companies to ship goods.

Laura and her co-founder started Shipo in 2013, and they currently process millions of shipments every month.

Laura had her first experience with the startup while working as an intern at YC alumni company, LendUp.

She grew up in Germany, China, Ecuador and Cairo, went to school in Switzerland and started Shippo in the US.

So I'm Laura, I run a company called Shippo.

I am so humbled to be able to be here today.

I attended every other female founder conference before this as a participant, and I would have never dreamt to be able to stand here on stage today to tell you my story.

My story in the last 3 and a half years, well, it's been a roller coaster ride.

There have been a lot of ups and downs, but there have been a lot of good stories to share as well.

Unfortunately, there won't be time for Q&A after this, but this is my Twitter handle, so feel free to tweet at me, and I have a couple of hours reserved after this speech to answer all of your questions.

My goal for today is to help everyone understand that there is no magic formula to entrepreneurship.

There is no 1 single way how a great founder should look like.

It's about standing up again after you fall.

And I think the most important part about being a founder is making the decision to get started.

But in order to get started, you have to have the courage, you have to have the confidence.

I hope with this talk I can help you all get a little more confident by hearing my story.

Well, I did not grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur.

Back in 2013, I was stuck in a master's program back in Switzerland that I did not enjoy.

By pure chance, I ran into a YC alumnus who was also a Silicon Valley investor.

When he offered that he would help me find a summer internship, I jumped on it.

I really didn't know what I was getting myself into.

I had no idea what Silicon Valley was like, but it sounded exciting.

It sounded like something I wanted to be a part of.

So by pure chance, my CV got forwarded to the YC founder mailing list and overnight I had a bunch of interview requests in my inbox.

It was truly about being at the right place at the right time and then not shying away from taking that opportunity.

I ended up with a summer internship at a company called LendUp.

They do socially responsible payday loans.

Back then they were right before Series A.

And I was so in awe about the fast-paced culture that I was experiencing there.

So I dropped out of my grad studies and I decided to stay.

Staying here, I really wanted to start something by myself.

So I reached back out to my now co-founder, Simon.

And together we decided to work on an e-commerce store.

It was a curated marketplace for emerging designers and artists from all around the world.

This was something that's been done before.

We just wanted to get started working on something, anything.

And I think that is the most important decision that a founder can make, the decision about getting started.

You don't need to come up with a grand idea.

Just start working on something, on anything, and eventually you'll find the right problem to solve.

So with my idea, with the e-commerce idea, I approached my CEO back then, Sasha from Lendev, and asked him for his feedback, for his advice.

And 1 of the things that he shared with me that I remember very clearly is to work on painkillers and not vitamins.

What he meant by that was to find an idea to work on a product that people can't live without that solves a real pain point.

Don't build something that is nice to have but not must have, like a vitamin.

The e-commerce store we were working on back then was for sure a vitamin, not a painkiller.

But while working on the e-commerce store, we discovered how much of a pain point shipping is to e-commerce.

We realised that shipping rates are intransparent, that they're hard to compare, that shipping eats into the margins of e-commerce store owners.

We also realized that shipping technologies are difficult to integrate, that they're old and outdated.

Working with these shipping technologies was a very different experience compared to working with the technologies of Shopify or Stripe.

And we were surprised that there was no Stripe for shipping.

Shippo is an API that connects our customers who are e-commerce stores, marketplaces and platforms to a network of different shipping providers.

We help them get access to that network, we help them optimize providers, we help them get shipping labels, get tracking numbers.

In short, we take the pain out of shipping.

We turn shipping into a competitive advantage instead of a cost center.

So now that we had an idea that we thought was worth working on, we had to get funded.

Both my co-founder and I are first-time founders, we didn't have any savings, so we had to rely on outside capital to make this work.

I guess everyone here in this room is either seeking funding now or will be seeking funding at some point in the future.

So let me share my fundraising story with you.

My fundraising story is a lot about rejection.

We applied to Y Combinator and we got rejected.

We applied to 500 Startups and we got rejected as well.

We applied another time and we got lucky and got into 500 startups batch 8.

The reason why we wanted to be part of an accelerator is to get access to their network of investors so we can so we could raise a series seed.

For the series seed I pitched a hundred and 25 angels and investors and I heard a hundred and 15 no's.

In the end we raised 2000000 dollars from 10 investors.

That's a whole lot of no's to go through before we got the 2000000 together.

And to be honest we pitched a lot of the wrong VCs.

We pitched VCs that weren't the right fit.

Either because they weren't the right fit for the stage that we were in or for the space that Chippo is in.

But I don't regret pitching all of these investors.

At the end of pitching all these people I had my pitch nailed down and when we finally met the right investors I knew exactly what to say.

All investors tend to ask the same kinds of questions.

So at the end of this I knew the answers to all of these questions by heart.

While going through that fundraise, unfortunately we had to go separate ways with our third co-founder.

And that's the kind of situation that can kill a deal easily.

In that situation, I also for the first time learned about the power of being transparent and straightforward with prospective investors.

We communicated that change right away, upfront, direct and honest.

And we also communicated that this was the kind of, we also set the expectation right that this was the kind of communication style they could be expecting us moving forward if they do decide to invest.

And in the end, we were able to close the round from the same investors despite the change in the founding team.

Leading up to the series seed, we were growing our business 40% week over week and that was in terms of shipping volume.

I think 1 of the most important pieces of advice we got back then was to focus on 1 single KPI, to find 1 KPI that defines success for your business best and to focus on growing that 1, instead of getting overwhelmed by all the other metrics out there.

Today of course we're optimising a bunch of other metrics as well, but shipping volume is still our main KPI.

We were able to get 30 warm introductions to investors.

We were able to set the timeline and drive the timeline ourselves instead of having investors drive it.

That means that we set 1 week up for first meetings, a second week for second meetings, 1 week for partner meetings, and then another week for due diligence.

It was important for us that we had everyone lined up at the same pace, so at the end of this process we would be able to get to competitive term sheets and at the end we raised $7 million from union score ventures.

So from the outside it looked like a really tight run and smooth process.

But behind the scenes a lot was going wrong again.

We again had to go separate ways with our back then most senior technical leader.

We got our first bullshit lawsuit during due diligence.

Well anyway, again, we were able to use that situation to like to use that bad situation and turn it into an opportunity to build trust.

Build trust with the prospective investors by communicating clearly, thoughtfully, and directly.

And I think you're going to build a long-term relationship with that investor.

Investors are like employees that you can't fire.

They're going to stick around until there is a liquidity event.

So you better turn the table around and do due diligence on your prospective investors as well, because you want to be able to expect the same kind of integrity from them.

Investors will be, well they'll be fast to offer you references, but make sure that you also do backchannel references and that you're able to talk to people, to founders that have worked with this investor when they failed.

You want to know how the investor behaves when things go wrong.

So from pitching all these people my most important takeaways are be authentic, be passionate and be honest.

And I think the 1 thing that us female founders are really good at is to under promise but to over deliver.

And that's a great characteristic to be known for.

Then there's some situations while pitching that are just totally out of your control.

Weird things happen but they make for great stories to tell later on.

1 of my favourite stories to tell is how I went into a partner meeting at Kleiner Perkins.

A lot of the Kleiner partners were attending, including John Doar, all the Kleiner partners were at 1 side of the table and I was at the other side of the table as the only person there.

I sat right across the table of John Doar, we had a super engaged conversation, I felt great about it, it was intense, it was a lot of back and forth, but I was excited, I felt like I was able to answer all of their questions very well.

At the very end of this conversation, when we were starting to wrap things up, John Doar leaned forward, he pushed forward his notepad and pen and he said to me, Laura, draw me a picture of your team.

I thought this could be some sort of psychology trick question.

Or he's going to look into, you know, if I draw myself bigger than all my other team members.

Or maybe if I draw myself gender neutral, that could mean that I'm not confident in my own skin.

So I decided to draw a little stick figure girl, complete with a dress, long hair, and a smiley face.

And I was just about to start drawing my other team members when I realized people in the room were laughing.

I looked up and John Doar was smiling at me, he was like, Laura, all I was looking for was an org chart.

That happened, it's a real story, I felt like a complete moron, and then afterwards, whenever I go into the Kleiner office, they know me as the stick figure girl.

Anyway, stuff like that happens, it happens to anyone, and these make for great stories to tell.

Don't worry too much about it when stuff like that happens to you.

So today, we are 70 people, all working out of our San Francisco office.

We have 16,000 customers and we've been able to triple our business in terms of shipping volume every single year since we started.

However, I still don't have everything figured out yet.

And I think when people tell you that they have everything figured out, they're lying.

However, there are a bunch of really great learnings that have impacted my life for the better in the last couple of years.

And I want to share a couple of my favorite learnings with you.

First of all, it's a marathon and not a sprint.

In fact, I think it's more like 1 of these crazy 100 mile races that only insane people sign up to do.

And sometimes these ups and downs happen from 1 hour to another.

1 hour you receive a term sheet, the other hour you receive a lawsuit.

During these ups and downs, it's important to keep in mind that your company worth is not equal to your self-worth.

And I think that is easy to forget here in Silicon Valley, because whenever you go out and socialize, people are going to ask you, what is your company?

And then they're going to judge you by that.

But keep in mind that you are more than your company's success.

While going through all of these ups and downs, it's important to remain persistent.

However, persistence does not mean being stubborn.

I think it's important to be persistent about the right things.

And what has worked for us really well is to be persistent about the goals, but to be creative and flexible about the tactics of how to get there.

There will be times when you think that you are failing.

When a failure happens to me, what I like to do is to take a step back and look at the big picture.

I like to treat that 1 point of failure as a piece for a big puzzle and then try to see what the big puzzle will look like.

Sometimes that takes a couple of years before you'll be able to see the bigger picture.

But I think Failure leads to new opportunities, opportunities that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

For example, I was super devastated when we got rejected by YCVAC then, but I'm still standing on stage here today, and everything that happened in between was great.

There are so many expectations about what the perfect founder should look like and what the perfect female founder should look like.

I used to try to be like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but that's ridiculous and impossible because I'm Laura and I'm proud of that.

And I think it's like it's completely fine not to be great at everything.

But you need to know your strengths and your weaknesses and then you'll be able to hire for complementary skills.

Being unapologetic also means that you won't be able to work with everyone.

That you won't be able to work with everyone.

Better a hole in the organization than an asshole in the organization.

This is your company that you're building.

Don't end up building a company that you'll hate working at 5 years from now.

You can be completely unapologetic about the kind of culture that you want to build at your own company.

That also means to hire slow and to fire fast.

A lot of people think when you start a company, you need to sacrifice everything for your company.

It's about a lot of hard work, it's about being persistent and all those other things.

But you need to take the time to take care of yourself.

Because Taking care of yourself is taking care of your company.

At the very beginning, you are your company.

Make sure that you know what gives you energy and what drains you, and then do less of what drains you.

There is no bad boss that you can blame for being miserable.

If you're not happy, you're the 1 who can drive that change.

Taking care of yourself also means it's completely okay to ask for help.

I've been fortunate that I have a great group of investors that are super supportive, that I have an amazing executive coach, that I have an amazing group of friends that I can relate to.

I love hanging out with other CEOs and founders because hanging out with them teaches me that the struggles that I'm going through are completely normal, that they've gone through the same struggles as well.

That these struggles aren't unique to me, but that they're just part of normal startup life.

The Audemars Purcell note, last year I made this great decision to adopt this grumpy looking cat.

She's really the grumpiest, that's her everyday face.

And when I come home from work and things aren't going that well because we're not shipping enough packages, I see her face and everything is a little better again.

More important than my relationship with my cat is my relationship with my co-founder Simon.

Sometimes we fight but we never get hurt permanently.

My co-founder Simon, well he's 100% complimentary to my skills.

He's able to do all the things that I can't do or don't like to do.

I wouldn't be able to be here without him.

For me, it's a partner in shipping to share the burden of running a company with you.

Simon's been supportive through the ups and downs, both in my work life and in my private life.

Simon's the 1 I called when I was going through a bad breakup, and he was the 1 who brought me a bottle of whiskey.

He was also the 1 who remembered to take the bottle of whiskey away from me when he left.

And that was important because next morning at 7 a.m.

I had a recorded podcast interview where I was supposed to tell how awesome it is to be a founder.

And I do think it is awesome to be a founder.

However, it also means that you're going to be 1 of the few females in a male-dominated industry.

And given that we're at a female founder conference today, I think it's important to acknowledge the brave women that have been speaking up in the last couple of months to drive change into this industry.

I've been lucky that I've never experienced direct sexual harassment like that.

However, I've gotten used to being 1 of the few females in the room, especially at B2B CEO dinners.

Somehow there are not that many B2B female founders.

And many times when I'm outside of the office and people ask me what I do for Shippo, they're surprised to hear that I'm the founder and CEO.

What did they expect the founder and CEO of Shippo should look like?

There was 1 time when I was pitching a male VC for my series A, and after the pitch, his first comment was, this is a cute little business you've built.

And there is really nothing cute about a shipping API.

So I used to hate talking about being a female founder.

I disliked being part of these female founder lists Because the market really does not care if this company is run by a female or not.

Customers choose to go with the product that's best.

And I want to ship out to be the best, period, independent of my gender.

I used to live by the mantra to be so good that they can't ignore you.

In the last year, my attitude to that has changed a little.

I realized it's naive to believe that if you work really hard, you won't be discriminated.

I realized that it's not always on the women to prove themselves.

And good news is that we, everyone here in this room, is able to make a difference.

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The Most Important Decision is Getting Started – Laura Behrens Wu