20VC: Back To Back Female Led IPOs & Why It's Harder To Be A Female CEO Than A Male CEO with Leura Fine, Founder & CEO @ Laurel & Wolf

Leura Fine is the founder and CEO of leading online interior design service Laurel & Wolf. Driven by the desire to connect clients and designers through a digital platform, Leura launched Laurel & Wolf from her home dining room in 2014. Two years later, she has a rapidly growing team of more than 60 employees and a marketplace of more than 1,000 interior designers. They have raised over $30m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, CRV and former guest, Kent Goldman @ Upside Partnership. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Leura made her way from interior designer to founder of one of today's hottest marketplace startups, Laurel & Wolf? 2.) Why does Leura feel it is harder to be a female CEO than a male CEO? How are her actions compared and judged differently than those of her male counterparts? 3.) How does Leura approach the selection element of choosing her investors? What should matter to founders that their investors can bring? How does Leura look to select the best board member? 4.) How did Leura approach the chicken and egg problem of marketplaces in the beginning with Laurel & Wolf? What is her big advice to other founders building out their marketplaces? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Leura’s Fave Book: Pride & Prejudice Leura’s Fave Blog: Oh Joy As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leura on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout. Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings with two Bs on Snapchat and it'd be fantastic to see you there and show you all things behind the scenes at the 20 Minute VC. However, to the show today, and as it's Founder's Friday, we have a stellar founder in the hot seat for you today and one I've wanted to have on the show for a long time. So joining me today, we have Leura Fine. Leura is the founder and CEO of leading online interior design service Laurel and Wolf. Driven by the desire to connect clients and designers through a digital platform, Leura launched Laurel and Wolf from her home dining room in 2014. Just two years later, she has a rapidly growing team of more than 60 employees and a marketplace of more than 1,000 interior designers. They've raised over $30 million in VC funding from some of the best in the business, including Benchmark, CRV and former guest Kent Goldman at Upside Partnership.

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  And I do also want to say a huge thank you to Paige Craig at Arena for the intro to Leura today, without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we dive into the show today, you must check out Founder Suite. Founder Suite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Founder Suite customers have raised over $130 million in seed and venture capital. Founder Suite CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel, including a beautiful and easy to use investor update tool and the recently launched new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. Founder Suite is used by startups in Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Startups and every other major accelerator.

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  And listeners of this podcast can get a whopping 40% off a monthly or annual subscription using the promo code 20MINUTVC at checkout, that's 2020-MINUTVC. Check it out today and take advantage of this exclusive offer. Speaking of incredible software, Greenhouse Software designs tools that helps companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Recognized as the 2017 Best Place to Work in the US by Glassdoor, Greenhouse currently works with over 1,500 of the world's most innovative companies, such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap, Ink and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company, but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's applicant tracking system, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people, visit greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow. But enough from me, so without further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Leura Fine, founder and CEO at Laurel and Wolf.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:33Harry Stebbings?

  Leura, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. A huge thanks to Paige at Arena for the intro, but thank you so much for taking the time out to join me today.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, no problem.

• 2:42Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to get started though by discussing how you came to found Laurel and Wolf and the aha moment for you with the journey.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Sure. So I was an interior designer, worked at a very high-end interior design firm for a number of years, uh, working on projects all over the world and overseeing the entire interior design team. And basically I had kind of hit a wall. I felt like I had learned everything that I needed to learn there and left and started my own interior design practice. And as I was starting to build my own interior design practice, very much the old-fashioned way, I think the biggest aha moment that I had was, you know, a combination of two things. It was after a very long, frustrating and very unproductive client meeting where I had lugged physical style boards out to a project in Malibu, spent hours with my clients, no decisions had really been made.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  And it's all things that I could have done by just emailing them a style board and saying, hey, do you like it? Do not like it. So, you know, I realized that I'm in this industry that has literally not changed since it became a profession in the early 1900s. And it's 2014 and it's time for this to evolve. And beyond that, you know, what I also had seen is that literally all of my friends, you know, whether we were 22, 25, 28, whatever it was, you know, were starting to move in their own apartments and their first homes. And then I would meet people who were also much older, more established. They had these beautiful homes and none of them lived well. You know, whether your budget was IKEA furniture or whether you had a multimillion dollar home,

• 4:13Speaker 02

  you would go and spend time with people and they all needed help designing their spaces. But the reality is, is that 99% of people can't afford interior designers in the way that they've traditionally charged their fees. And so I thought, here you have this market where people have access to a lot of inspiration now and they can afford to buy really beautiful things at every kind of style type and price point. But the reality is, is they still have no idea how to put it all together. And on the other side, you had all these interior designers who are incredible at what they do. They have great taste, they have expertise, they understand how to maximize your budget, maximize the style, and work with all of your restrictions in the space that you have.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  And they were all looking for ways to expand their business and get connected to new clients. So I thought that there just had to be a better way of building this. Let's not make interior design just for the very wealthy, let's make it for everyone. And let's give interior designers a way to build their businesses and do what they love to do that is representative of the era that we live in. You know, it's 2017 now, I think we should be able to work digitally with people.

• 5:19Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely, I do agree. But on the founding story that you described there, and your role as CEO, you've said before that being a female CEO is potentially harder than being a male CEO. So talk to me about this, and why you think this is, and the challenges that are maybe present for female CEOs that aren't for male CEOs.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  You know, I think one of the things that's hard being a female CEO is that there's just not a lot of examples, right? We didn't grow up having women that we could look up to, where, you know, you're like, oh, I want to be exactly like this female CEO, because there are only a handful of them. And so I think that people have all these different notions of how CEOs are supposed to behave, what they're supposed to look like, what they're supposed to do. And I actually feel like I've gotten more feedback from male CEOs saying like, God, your job must be really tough, because I can scream, I can yell, I can punch holes in the walls, I can be rude, I can be aggressive, I can be literally everything and anything that I want to be, for better or for worse. And people just accepted it, oh, it is what it is, because he's the CEO, he's a man, that's how he's supposed to behave.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Whereas, I always joke, if I give someone a cross look, people think that, oh, she's so disappointed, she's so angry, it's just like, because of my woman, I think that people read the way that I behave differently as a CEO than if I were a man. You know, and I think then there's the simple fact that I don't look like a lot of CEOs. So, you know, being bold is an important part of building any business, and I was Not scared to embrace who I am as a founder, which is someone who is an interior designer and someone who cares a lot about style. And we at Laurel and Wolf have this vision that we're going to change the way people live by giving them access to professional design. But that means that I may show up at a pitch meeting wearing a leopard blazer and dazzling earrings and have my hair perfectly curled.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna conform to what a male CEO looks like in order to sell my business. So I just think you look and act differently than the people that have come before you. And that can be an adjustment both to venture capitalists and to your employees. I just think it's a little bit of a different thing.

• 7:26Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, have you seen this change and develop over the time? And potentially the awareness around kind of female CEO ship since your time with Laurel and Wolf?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I've definitely seen a lot of desire for change and a lot of desire to recognize more of the female leaders in every category. And a lot of conversations about parity in the workplace. I think there's a lot of good energy around it. But then you still go to a conference or you go to a CEO dinner and you're the only woman sitting at the table. And it's not that I'm the only woman who should be sitting at that table. And in fact, I was out to dinner last night with a group that's hosting a conference in Santa Monica, pretty high end kind of tech conference. And they're reading me the list of CEOs that were participating. And I was like, where are all the ladies? They're like, which ladies? You know, and I'm like, oh, you know, the ones that have also raised tens to hundreds of millions of dollars

• 8:20Speaker 02

  and are growing really big businesses in Los Angeles. Like, here's a list of them. Invite them. They're badass and they should be a part of these conversations. So I think there is definitely a desire to support female entrepreneurs and to support female engineers, et cetera, in every category. But it is moving slowly.

• 8:42Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there'll be a catalyst to this change in terms of an IPO the size of Snapchats with a female CEO or founder that would kind of really harness this desire and turn it into actual latent action?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that you're going to hopefully see a couple of tech IPOs happen in the next year to year and a half that are going to be female CEOs. And given how slow the tech IPO market has been in general and the fact that we could potentially see a few of these companies back to back, all be led by women. I think that could have massive impact.

• 9:16Harry Stebbings?

  No, very exciting times ahead really. But I do want to talk about kind of the road to IPO there. And often that's filled with fundraising, something that you've achieved immense success with, with latest round led by the wonderful team at Benchmark. So with with that in mind, it'd be great to discuss your selection process for investors. And what makes you choose one over the other for very competitive rounds, as I know it was with Lauren Wolf?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yes, there's a lot of debate that goes on in the entrepreneurial community about what value can an investor really bring or not bring, right? Investors pitch, oh, we have teams of people who can help you with biz dev or hiring, or we're well connected, or we're famous, or whatever it is, right? I think that venture capitalists bring different things to the table and they have different pitches for founders. And some founders believe that venture capitalists can really change the shape of their business and some don't. And I think that where I fall in this is that having the right board members is really critical to the business. They're not going to grow the business, they're not going to make the day to day decisions that they need to. They're not going to create the strategies for us.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  But having a supportive board who can ask the right questions, find the blind spots, things you may not be aware of, and challenge you along the way in the best possible way, I think is very important. And someone told me recently, I don't know if this is actually true, but someone said recently that it's easier to get divorced in the state of California than it is to remove a board member.

• 10:45Harry Stebbings?

  I think it is true, actually. It's very true.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  So I think as a founder, you need to be thinking about that. If someone is going to be on your board, you should probably consider how you select them in the same way that you would consider a partner.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  In life. Because they're going to be on your board for a really long time.

• 11:04Harry Stebbings?

  You said about being challenged there though by the investor the right way. What does it being challenged the right way look like? Is that taking you out for a coffee and saying, I don't think we're approaching this the right way? Or is this going head on in a board meeting with the rest of the board? How would you like to be challenged?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I have pretty regular conversations with my board members. It's not just in the boardroom, but you know, I'll call up one of our investors, for example, and say, hey, you know, here's the thing that I'm, here's a challenge that we're facing or problem that I'm trying to solve. And here's how I think I want to approach it. Thought about these different scenarios and here's how I think that I should think about this problem. You know, what do you think? Am I missing anything? Is this the right approach? Is this the wrong approach? Or is there just another approach that I totally haven't even thought of? And being able to have those conversations is incredibly helpful because they can say, they can serve as validation. They can say, no, we think you're thinking about this in the correct way. And it seems like you're thinking about it 360 and we would encourage you to move forward.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Or they could say, no, actually you've missed a big part of this equation. And here's something that we've seen in our experience. I mean, I'm a first time founder. I've never built a company before. So having board members who have been a part of building very, very big businesses, both personally and who have been a part of, from the venture capital side, building big businesses. You know, they've just seen the story over and over again and they've seen all of the ways that people can get things wrong. And that's why they're there is to help us kind of try and avoid some of those missteps along the way. So you could lay out any type of plan and they could say, hey, you know, we don't feel like this is the right path. Or maybe it doesn't achieve exactly what we want to achieve in how we think that it could. And have we thought about this, this and the S?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  And even if the answer is still no, I very much believe that this is the right path and the right strategy. Then at least we're having the conversations, which I think is important because you don't want to just blindly be making decisions without thinking like, okay, is there another angle or another side of this coin that I should be looking at?

• 13:05Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. In terms of the funding round itself, a lot of founders that I speak to have potentially issues around communicating it to the team with transparency and kind of delaying productivity within the team. I'd love to hear how you look to structure your communication and all structure more meta thesis wise within Laurel and Wolf.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So I think one of the challenges is when you have a fast growing business and your teams are changing sizes pretty dramatically is you assume in early days, everyone knows what's going on because you're so small. And then you get a little bit bigger and things start to get a lot muddier. And, you know, we're actively working on how we can do a better job of communicating within our teams and cross functionally all of the time. But I think you have to actively think about it because just because two people sit side by side in an open area office and have Slack and have email and have each other's cellphone numbers, doesn't mean that they're communicating about the right things at the right time. So we've tested different methods of communication to the team. We

• 14:06Speaker 02

  do a town hall twice a month where we do presentations by different business groups within the organization and metrics updates and kind of focusing on what are the primary drivers of the business that we're focused on right now. So we're always trying to think about like, is the strategy clear to the organization? Is it clear what they need to be working on? Is it clear why they're working on what they're working on? Do they understand what the mission is? So does the leadership understand and are they communicating it down across their teams in the right way? So there's kind of like the high level stuff that is all about, you know, do the teams understand why they're doing what they're doing? And then I think within an organization and especially a business like ours, which is a three sided marketplace, everything is tied to everything. There's a lot of cross

• 14:50Speaker 02

  functional work that has to be done. And you end up having a lot of different teams and a lot of different people who have to touch projects. And streamlining that process is always going to continue to be a work in progress. So I think if you're actively thinking about it and saying, you know, one of the things that we do on the product and engineering side is we do postmortems of projects and say, okay, how did this go well? How did this go badly? And how can we do it better? So I think if you're constantly kind of a Assessing it, you're talking about it, then you can figure out better ways to have more successful formats for communicating the things that you need to communicate.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. You've brought up a passion though of mine in terms of marketplaces that I have to touch on because you said about the three sided nature. Now, as an investor now, I always hear about the two sided nature. Talk to me about the three sided nature and how that interplays with your business. I'd love to learn.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  So we have our clients, our designers, and then we also work with all of the vendors. So we actually sell goods from hundreds of different vendors. And so it's all about what are our clients looking for? What are the designers needing to find for them? And then do we have the relationships to get it into our designers' hands to put in front of the client?

• 16:00Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. In terms of kind of building out that marketplace, often the pinnacle problem is the chicken and egg of supply and demand. How did you look to really navigate this in the early days of Law & Wolf?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Sure. Luckily, I came from the interior design world, so I was able to start with a handful of interior designers that were friends of mine that were willing to give this a shot. And what I had always believed in the early days of the business was most designers don't have enough work right now. So even if we get them on board and we can't send them a ton of work right away, I have the belief that they will be fairly patient with us and kind of stick it out as we build the business out just because it's not like they're being thrown so many opportunities that, you know, they're going to leave us if we don't immediately deliver a result. Whereas from a consumer experience, you can't do that. You couldn't say, oh, well, we're going to drive thousands of consumers to the site and then not give them interior design services. That would defeat the entire purpose.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  So for us, it was all about, you know, let's build up the community of designers first so that when we do get those clients, they will have access to a great designer who we know will give them a beautiful space. And we knew that the designers would be a little bit more patient with us as we continue to build out the business.

• 17:13Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is the element of frequency a challenge for you in terms of it's not like an Uber which you'll get many times a day or a week? Designing at home is quite a one off experience in terms of every few years, is it not? How do you address that element of frequency within the marketplace?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Well, frequency is actually not as big of an issue as people would think because most people, and especially our customers, can't afford to furnish an entire home at one time. So the average American moves every five years. There's major life cycle moments that kind of happen every two. So whether that's after someone gets married, typically baby comes about two years later. Babies tend to come every two years in between. You know, you have all these things that will not only be kind of predictors in terms of you moving your space, but then also you're going to change the space that you're in based on different life cycle moments that are happening. And then there's the fact that when you move into a space, you're going to go through and you're going to decorate one room at a time because of how expensive furniture is. So people are coming to us and they're typically starting with one of their public spaces,

• 18:14Speaker 02

  like a living room, dining room, and they're going to decorate that first. They're going to spend thousands of dollars on that project. So then it'll maybe be another four to six months before then they're coming back and now it's time to do the master bedroom, or maybe we're doing the kitchen, or we're doing a nursery. So there's, I think, more frequency than people would think. And also because we're allowing our customers to come to us and actually finish a space. It's very different than how they've tried decorating their homes in the past, where it's like, oh, you know, I need a couple of things for this room and a couple of things for that room. And you end up trying to buy one thing at a time and never really finishing up anything. Whereas our clients, because they're coming through and they're getting, you know, their entire room done, they're like, oh, wow, now my living room is done.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  It looks great. I'm now ready to mentally and financially move on to the next space.

• 19:00Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. No, I didn't think about it in the segmented spatial way. I thought kind of the all in one. So no, fantastic. But I'd love to dive into a quickfire round now, where I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts, about 60 seconds per one. How does that sound?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 19:14Harry Stebbings?

  So let's start with your favorite book and why. What should I be reading?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Pride and Prejudice.

• 19:19Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, I love it. No, I love it. I actually watch the Colin Firth version every year.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  It's fantastic. I like a, I like a spunky female heroine.

• 19:30Harry Stebbings?

  I think that's one of my favourite quotes I've ever had on the show. Okay, brilliant. And then you've said before that you'll realise that you're a lot stronger than you think. Where do you gain your inner strength from when when times are tough?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Two places. From the business, I gain strength from reading our client reviews, reading our designer reviews. It is, nothing is more powerful than realising that you're actually changing people's lives. We're changing how our clients are living and how they get to experience life on a daily basis and bringing a lot of opportunity to our designers. So I always find that to be very inspiring and encouraging. And, you know, on a personal note, I am blessed to have an incredible husband and wonderful parents and family and friends. And I look to them in times of challenges and they're they're wonderful in supporting me through those tough moments.

• 20:18Harry Stebbings?

  What's the favourite blog or newsletter? Are there any must reads when they come in?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  We're very keen on Oh Joy at the moment. We think she has a really interesting eye, really modern on brightly coloured products. An idea ten is fun. So at the moment, we're we're big on Oh Joy.

• 20:36Harry Stebbings?

  What are some underrated perks of working at a tech startup? Why should I leave VC for startups?

• 20:41Speaker 02

  I think getting to work at a startup is fun because you actually get to make changes. You have impact. Everything that you do, for better for worse, can drive the business forward or keep the business from hitting its goals. Which I think if you're someone who's ambitious and you have big ideas and you want to execute, then there's no better environment to be in than to be in a startup because you can actually just shit done.

• 21:01Harry Stebbings?

  And then let's talk to me, the next five years for you and Laurel and Wolf, what have we got in store?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Laurel and Wolf is going to be a global brand. So we see this as an opportunity to help people all over the world design their homes and, you know, there's there's nothing stopping us to get there.

• 21:16Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And I cannot wait to see it. But Paige told me it would be a fantastic show and I cannot thank you enough for giving up the time to come on. So thank you so much.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 21:27Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic episode that was with Leura and fantastic to hear about the joint love for Pride and Prejudice. A huge hand to her for giving up the time today to come on the show and a big thank you to Paige Craig for making the intro today without which this episode would not have been possible. And if you love the show today and would like to see more from us, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs to see behind the scenes at the 20 Minute VC. We'd absolutely love to see you there. But before we leave you today, you must check out Founder Suite. Founder Suite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Founder Suite customers have raised over $130 million in seed and venture capital. Founder Suite CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel, including a beautiful and easy to use investor update tool and the recently

• 22:10Harry Stebbings?

  launched new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. Founder Suite is used by startups in Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Startups and every other major accelerator. And listeners of this podcast can get a whopping 40% off a monthly or annual subscription using the promo code 20MINUTEVC at checkout. That's 2020-minute VC. Check it out today and take advantage of this exclusive offer. Speaking of incredible software, Greenhouse Software designs tools that helps companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Recognized as the 2017 Best Place to Work in the US by Glassdoor, Greenhouse currently works with over 1,500 of the world's most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap, Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire

• 22:54Harry Stebbings?

  is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's applicant tracking system, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people, visit greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you next week's episodes.