As the youngest female founder ever to take a company public and CEO of the only female-led tech IPO of 2017, Katrina Lake understands the upside of being underestimated. Her company, Stitch Fix, the online personal styling service, has consistently defied skeptical investors since the company’s inception in 2011. Having raised a mere $42 million in venture investment, Lake has built a $3 billion-dollar shopping business by revolutionizing the traditional shopping experience.
“The adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger could not have been more true for us,” says Lake, who admits to embracing the advantages of her funding shortfall out of necessity and not intention. “If I had been handed $100 million, I don’t know that I would have understood the business as well as I did. It forced us to understand our strengths. It forced us to think about profitability really early so that we weren’t dependent on venture capitalists.
I recently sat down with Lake to discuss how she’s navigating her first year at the helm of a public company, what she’s learned from doing more with less, and her best advice to the next generation of female founders. Edited highlights below.Lake, who launched Stitch Fix in San Francisco in 2011, is candid in sharing that her time at Stanford did not provide the entrepreneurial inspiration many would assume.
Lake eventually caught the entrepreneurial bug after working in venture capital, where the diverse backgrounds of the entrepreneurs she met with were evidence that she could start her own company if she wanted to. “You don’t look at a resume and say, ‘Oh this person’s qualified to be an entrepreneur.’ I realized that I was just as qualified as any of them.” Lake went on to pursue a master’s degree in entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, where the idea for Stitch Fix was ultimately born.
Lake held strong to the belief that making personal shopping more affordable and less time-consuming was her opportunity to disrupt the fashion retail industry, and that belief was consistently reinforced by her growing customer base, which now surpasses 2 million. “This is a business that turned profitable within three or four years. The math has always worked.
As cheesy as this quote sounds, it's pretty accurate.
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