Hardware Podcasts

Stitch Fix: Katrina Lake

How I Built This · 2 Apr 2018 · 50m

What this episode covers

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.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Stitch Fix, Netflix, U.S. Bank, Nordstrom, Blockbuster, Amazon
Also
Steve Anderson, Eric Colson, Harvard Business School

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