Stitch Fix: Katrina Lake
Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, explains how she validated a personal shopping service by manually curating boxes for 20 friends using a $6,000 credit card and wholesale inventory before launching. She details the struggle to raise seed funding from 30 angel investors who rejected the inventory-heavy, human-stylist model, ultimately securing a term sheet from Steve Anderson. Lake describes building Stitch Fix as a data company from day one, hiring Netflix alum Eric Colson to develop recommendation algorithms that combine human stylist judgment with machine learning to solve the discovery problem in e-commerce. The episode covers her journey from a Harvard MBA student prototyping in Boston to taking Stitch Fix public as the youngest female CEO, while navigating gender dynamics in venture capital and managing early team dynamics.