Laura Behrens Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Talia and Jeremy first met the shipping API company in 2017, and as early investors in Shopify, they observed firsthand the explosion of independent e-commerce companies. Thanks to Shopify, merchants could easily set up their stores online. Thanks to Stripe, merchants could easily accept payments online. Yet shipping remained complex and opaque. After our first meeting with Shippo, Bessemer quickly realized how their solution was the critical missing piece of the new “e-commerce stack,” streamlining and optimizing shipping operations for merchants of all sizes and types. In this episode, Jeremy and Talia talk to Laura about her entrepreneurial journey and Shippo’s evolution.
Takeaways:
- Persevering while pitching investors: “Everyone was very friendly as we raised our Series A, but it is still soul-crushing to hear a no after a no. At that time, we knew if we wanted to stay in San Francisco, we'd need to raise a certain amount of money to qualify for a certain visa. So, there was a lot on the line. The main lesson I gleaned was that every no was an opportunity to learn and improve my pitch for the next time. By the time I got to the people who ended up investing, I was very prepared to answer all of these questions. I've also iterated on the story so many times that by then, it was very fluent. And in hindsight, all of that practice went to good use.”
- Research partners, not just the VC firm: “I think it's important to not take an introduction to just any partner at that VC firm. But you want to make sure that you get access to the right partners,” Laura said. “The simple example here is, if you are an enterprise business, you don't really want to be introduced to the consumer partner, who might not understand your business as well. Once I understood who the right partners were at those firms, I then sat down with the VCs that had done my seed round to figure out what our connections are to potential Series A investors.”
- Re-evaluating Shippo’s early-stage metrics: “I think there is no one-size-fits-all around early-stage metrics. It needs to be something that's the right fit for your business,” Laura said. “Our product helps them ship packages, so the more packages they ship, that's a good indicator for us growing, and people being happy and satisfied with our product. So, the seed and Series A round were raised based on shipping volume. [Shortly after Talia and Jeremy got involved] we started realizing that volume and net revenue wasn't perfectly correlated. So, while we're growing volume, we weren't growing net revenue. And what that meant for us was that we were going after customers that were expensive to acquire, because they were larger. Therefore, we were bringing in high shipping volume, but we didn't have the right pricing, or the right product to command that pricing. At that point, we realized that volume for the sake of volume just didn't make sense anymore. We'd have to look at how we're able to monetize that volume, and how we can grow in a more sustainable way.”
To learn more about Laura's journey go to https://www.bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a
