Bobbie: Laura Modi. How a Baby Formula Startup Took Market Share From Two Industry Giants

Laura Modi set out to build a better infant formula. What followed was years of setbacks: a crippling dispute with the FDA, a frustrating search for a manufacturer, and the constant fear that the company would run out of money before it reached customers. But today, Bobbie generates over $100 million a year and has captured nearly 4% of the U. S. infant formula market by challenging one of the most protected industries in America. In this conversation, Laura explains how she made it through—and why many of the moments that looked like disasters ultimately built a better company, and made her a better entrepreneur. You'll learn: Why Laura left a great job to launch one of the most heavily regulated products in AmericaHow she spent nearly $200,000 of her own savings before raising outside capitalHow 64 investor pitches helped her tell a better storyHow a public apology changed the trajectory of the companyWhy Bobbie turned away thousands of customers during its fastest period of growthWhy Laura moved to Washington, D. C., and how she thinks about federal oversight Timestamps: 13:17 – The emotional experience that revealed a massive business opportunity 23:09 – Laura learns about the two companies that had a lock on U. S. formula 25:52 – Quitting Airbnb, starting Bobbie while pregnant, risking her savings 38:52 – Pitching 64 investors—and the brutal feedback that fueled her to keep going 50:04 – The FDA shuts the company down after two weeks 1:01:14 – Building a community while waiting nearly two years for approval 1:09:11 – Launch day, and selling out faster than expected 1:13:59 – Why Laura shut off new customer orders during the infant formula shortage 1:17:12 – Buying her own manufacturing plant to control Bobbie's future 1:20:19 – Navigating Washington, regulation, and building a mission-driven brand This episode was researched and produced by Alex Cheng with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Follow How I Built This: Instagram → @howibuiltthis https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis/ X → @HowIBuiltThis https://x.com/howibuiltthis Facebook → How I Built This https://www.facebook.com/howibuiltthis Follow Guy Raz: Instagram → @guy.raz https://www.instagram.com/guy.raz/ Youtube →guy_raz https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNSfrxNEmCruNtjIzxCBHjg X → @guyraz https://x.com/guyraz Substack →https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/guyraz.substack.com__;!! Iwwt! RZoD751oWzUzoqqdJiqaoL6HdJfRHDUO1TKvYJ424d3Udn7-Pw9Nj6nEsauh9zcgEvLjUEc$guyraz.substack.com http://guyraz.substack.com Website → guyraz.com http://guyraz.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:45Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from US Bank, a question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make, the one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until

• 1:27Guy Raz?

  you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in, business is growing, you've got expenses coming from six directions, gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business.

• 2:07Guy Raz?

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• 2:50Guy Raz?

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• 3:33Guy Raz?

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• 4:24Speaker 01

  Most people thought I was building something as a passion project for my own baby, and I found I was dismissed. I remember one investor who said what I was doing was terrible that women should be breastfeeding, that his wife had breastfed all of their kids exclusively, and he only knew the world by which breastfeeding worked and couldn't understand why I would dedicate my time, energy, and capital to going to making something that the world didn't need.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Laura Modi broke through one of the toughest barriers in food to build Bobby, an infant formula startup that's taking market share from two industry giants.

• 5:37Guy Raz?

  Baby formula is one of those products most of us probably don't think much about until we need it. And when you do need it, it suddenly becomes one of the most important things you'll ever buy. It's also one of the toughest businesses in the world to break into. In the US alone, it's about a $6 billion market dominated by giant brands like Enfamil and Similac. And because some babies' lives depend on it, it's one of the most heavily regulated food products in the world. You can't just decide to make infant formula in your garage and start selling it. But that's exactly the industry that Laura Modi

• 6:17Guy Raz?

  decided to take on. Laura had built a successful career in tech, working at Google and then Airbnb. But after the birth of her first child, she struggled with breastfeeding. It was a deeply upsetting experience that, like so many new mothers, she found incredibly hard to talk about. And when she went looking for formula at the drugstore, she wondered if there was room for something different, a powder made with organic, grass-fed milk that felt more modern and more transparent. So she left her day job and started building a company called Bobby. It turned out to be far harder than she'd ever imagined. In fact, early on, Laura and her co-founder made a mistake that nearly killed the company.

• 7:01Guy Raz?

  They made their first infant formula and tested it with a small group of moms before it had received FDA approval. Very quickly, the agency shut them down. It was a very public brand disaster. But then Laura faced another enormous challenge. Companies like Abbott and Mead Johnson, the makers of Similac and Enfamil, not only dominated the market, they manufactured their own formula in factories they owned, which meant Laura first had to convince someone else to make hers. Today, Bobbie is still a very small brand compared to the giants, but in just over five years, it's managed to win about 4% of the baby formula market

• 7:44Guy Raz?

  in the US, which, given the size of the industry, is a pretty big deal. As for Laura, she moved to the US after college. She was born in the mid-1980s in a small town on the west coast of Ireland called Westport. She grew up in a big family with four siblings and 48 cousins. Her dad and two of her uncles ran the family business, a company that makes protective clothing for workers.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So hard hats, high-vis jackets, masks and gloves, construction clothing.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  Like yellow vests.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Like yellow vests, like high-visibility clothing.

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  That's a cool business because you, like unsexy, but one of these businesses that where you need, lots of people need to have that stuff.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And growing up in Ireland, you walk those streets late at night, you're wearing your high-vis jacket. It's not just on the construction site.

• 8:37Guy Raz?

  You know, by the way, this is something that, because humans are just so wired to see somebody in a uniform and assume something. And you can literally get, you could go to your dad's company and buy a high-visibility jacket and just start directing traffic, and people would just assume, like, anybody could do that. I always wonder about that.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  That is so true. You're totally right. You could walk into a store and buy a high-vis jacket and do exactly that.

• 9:01Guy Raz?

  So when you kind of went off to college, to university in Dublin, did you think, you know, I'm getting out of this small town, and it was great, but I'm going to start my life maybe in Dublin or London or somewhere else?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  So I'd gone to, my secondary school was in boarding school up and outside of Dublin. So I'd already spent a few years outside of Westport and going back and forth. But being in Dublin for college was some of the most formative years. And it was also during the tech boom, of which most of that tech boom was happening in Dublin. And I I sort of watched the renaissance of Ireland and Dublin happening at that time when the tech companies of the world were setting up.

• 9:45Guy Raz?

  Intel and Google and.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it was it was a great time to be studying there and to also watch how a city transformed to support, really, what was the next wave of industry.

• 9:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I guess you were really drawn to tech because I I read that a few years after you graduated from college, you had an ambitious goal that you set for yourself. You you decided that you wanted to work at Google in the US.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, Guy, it was it was such a dream, you know, the idea that I would get on a flight and I would go live in California. So yeah, I applied for a job at Google. I got the job and I'll never forget turning to my parents. We were joking about what we wanted to do that Christmas that was coming up. And I looked at them and I said, well, why don't you come visit me and the whole family come visit me out in California? That pride and shock and excitement and my siblings as well. I mean, it was such a beautiful moment. So yeah, I packed my bags and I I headed out to California. I'd never been. And it was the dream that I was totally imagining. Everything felt like a movie, everything.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And it wasn't just the space. It was the mindset. You know, I always joke, you know, back home in Ireland, you could tell someone like, oh, you know, I want to be an astronaut. And they would say, ah, would you get away from yet? You're not going to space. Like, they'll keep you grounded and they'll keep you grounded pretty quickly. You tell someone over in San Francisco, over on the West Coast, they'll say, I have a friend, I have a book. Let me give you the book. I can get you there. There was this beautiful, open mindset to anything being possible. And when you go from the west of Ireland and find yourself in the epicenter of it all, which is Google, wow, do you feel it?

• 11:41Guy Raz?

  And tell me about Google. What did you, you know, this was sort of the the heyday of like, people riding scooters around Google and and lunches and snacks everywhere. I think it still has some of that. Tell me about your impression of the place.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It solved everything I wanted in my early twenties. I got my laundry done. I was fed. I was maybe fed too much. I was given a level of work autonomy and freedom. But also, I got to watch and it was it was like doing an early MBA. Not only you're learning from brilliant people, but the work ethic was just next level. And my day to day job was supporting product operations for Google Finance, which almost felt like a little startup within itself. The goal at the time was to go up against Yahoo Finance, which was the number one platform. And I had no real understanding of the stock market and using, you know, these financial platforms before this. But I became such a fast learner,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  I found myself day trading.

• 12:43Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So not only did I love working there and love the job, I also felt like I was growing in my own sort of knowledge and understanding of a new world.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  And how did you do, by the way, as a day trader?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  And not too bad. Actually, my first home was mainly the proceeds of some day trading.

• 13:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you were you end up, you're at Google for about five years, I think.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yep, just under five years.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  And you join a small-ish, at that time, startup, Airbnb, had started in 2008. But still, in 2011, it was gaining traction for sure, no question about it. But you got a job. But tell me about that decision. I mean, it must have been exciting to be part of something that you felt had a lot of potential.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  So I remember I had to do a work trip to New York while I was working at Google. And I had a colleague turn to me and said, well, why don't you just book an air bed and breakfast? And I was like, what the hell is this? So I go on the site and I booked myself a two bedroom flat. And I remember calling my friends back in Dublin and Ireland. I was like, guys, I have my own apartment in New York City. And I lived a real New York life. And I left that week going, I have to work for this company. And I will do whatever it takes because whatever they're doing, whatever they're on, is game changing.

• 14:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  There was an ounce of it that sort of felt a little bit Irish, honestly. It had that real community feel. And you just, you could feel the disruption. And when I said I would take on any job, I mean, that's what I did. I joined to lead parts of operational roles. And I was sort of baton passed through the business in multiple ways. But I knew I had to work there.

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  Was there any part of you, and especially given that you'd come from an entrepreneurial family, was there any part of you that was always thinking, maybe one day I'm going to start my own thing? Or was that not that important to you?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Always. I had a folder, my parents love to remind me of this, just even growing up, I would brainstorm ideas all the time. I would make up businesses. And, you know, you're always looking for that spark. But I wasn't rushed. I think I got some great advice early on, too, which was, and especially knowing I was at Airbnb and Google, I had the most beautiful opportunity to learn.

• 15:02Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay. So you are at Airbnb and it's growing. And and you also, at a certain point, become a new mom, which is going to, it's transformational for most people who become new parents. It was for me, and I'm sure it was for you. But it really

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  became even more than that. So tell me a little bit about becoming a parent. It's around, I guess, around 2016.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  2016. So before my kid was my husband, who I actually met at work.

• 15:31Guy Raz?

  Before you you had kids, your kid was your husband?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Before before kids, I met my husband. I met my boyfriend. And we met at Airbnb. So we were probably the first, you know, team couple to come from Airbnb and and have our first kid as a couple there. I, wow, Guy, I mean, I went into motherhood just maybe with a certain belief of how everything would work out. I watched my, you know, I had a grandmother who had 13 children. She also built her own empire while doing it. I I had a lot of examples around to say that you could become a mother and you could do it all. And no one ever talked about all of the things that could go wrong.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  But I went into motherhood and I immediately felt the tension between the highest of highs and the lowest of lows questioning everything.

• 16:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  You know, I I say this all the time, but I believe women can do anything, but maybe not do everything. But all to say, I also found myself in a position questioning society and questioning the policies in the world around me. I come from Europe, where parental leave was way longer than what we were offering here in the US. And I was watching the same government tell women that you should breastfeed for six months, but we're not going to give you the paid leave to stay home and do so.

• 17:04Guy Raz?

  Let me just clarify that. I mean, that was the message I have, you know, remember that. But where were you, what do you remember hearing that? Like, the pediatric, you know, American Pediatric Society?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. The American Academy of Pediatrics. That's a, it's a line that they use to advise that this is the duration by which you should be feeding your child.

• 17:24Guy Raz?

  Right. Six months of breastfeeding because they say the data shows that it's healthier for a baby, right?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:31Guy Raz?

  That there's outcomes with allergies and things like that. And tell me about how you handled that, because it's a lot, especially because some mothers can't produce enough milk for the baby. It's just, it's a very common thing.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  My sort of founding story has been repeated multiple times. You know, I'm I'm in a pharmacy, late at night, recognizing that I'm unable to exclusively breastfeed her.

• 18:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And, Mom, you are the only person responsible for doing that. This is something, it's the one job that you are expecting to do and that you were naturally able to do. The skies would open up and it would be easy and beautiful and natural. I mean, this is what the narrative is. And I found myself with an infection, five days into having her. It's a common infection, of which, if you get the right support, you can also navigate through that. And I didn't. I didn't get the right lactation support. So it was, I had a high fever, 11:00 PM at night, and I'm walking through a pharmacy, now looking for the bell. I have to go ring the bell to get someone to come unlock it, where they

• 18:45Speaker 01

  call over the, you know, the microphone, like, help on the formula aisle. And I'm going, oh, my. God, the shame that I need to have someone come unlock the food to feed my baby that my body was meant to be able to do naturally. I just felt like I had failed her, I had failed myself, and I was disappointed. I was disappointed in it all. So I did the walk of shame. I'll never forget buying that first can. And all I did was hoped that they put it into a bag that wasn't see-through.

• 19:17Guy Raz?

  That nobody would see you.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:20Guy Raz?

  It's interesting because I think many people, certainly men, would never think, well, what's shameful? Why would you feel shame? Like, it's not like buying cigarettes or, you know.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:29Guy Raz?

  Or even like, you know, condoms or something, right? But actually, I mean, if the message is you should only breastfeed, then yeah, there's this feeling of like, what's wrong with me?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  In society, we love a binary narrative. There's right, there's wrong, there's this, there's that. And in that moment, what I realized is that we have failed all women and mothers in recognizing that it's not binary. It is absolutely a journey, and there's a million and one ways by which you can feed your baby. But for whatever reason, when I open up social, when I read an article, when you pick up that first parent book, there is a message being put back at you that breast is best, and that is the only way that you should feed your child. And I get home and I think, something about this doesn't feel right.

• 20:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  We can do better.

• 20:22Guy Raz?

  I think the intention behind that is good, right? It's like, hey, you know, this is a natural, whatever, our bodies have been producing this since, you know, and this is proven over, you know, tens of thousands of years to be the best model.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  A hun- like, I want to make sure that is extraordinarily clear. Breast milk is the most beautiful, dynamic, liquid gold for a reason. And it is magical, and it has so many properties that can never be replicated. No formula could replicate the magic that is breast milk. And yet, even with that being true, the other truism that we hold near and dear is that not everyone can do it exclusively. And if they can't, that's okay, because there is fabulous alternatives, and you can thrive on something else.

• 21:17Guy Raz?

  All right, so you are a new mom, and you're experiencing this, and you are on leave at the time. And does it start to spark a germ of an idea right away? Or are you, I mean, tell me what you start to notice about baby formula?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  So as a crazy researcher, just in life, everyone assumes like, oh, you had the problem, and then you went and you decided to start a business. And it was nowhere near that at all. I mean, like, you know, I was 40 pounds overweight, I was exhausted, I was a shell of a human. But I go home and I pull out this can of formula, and I did what every crazy researcher mom does. I went to Google, and I started going, what is this ingredient? And what's the impact of feeding my baby this formula? And how do I make a bottle? And how do I tell my husband? And how do I tell my mother-in-law? And you're just, one question, one question, one question. You're going, you're going deep. And now it's 2:00 in the morning, you're under the sheets.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Those questions ended up turning into industry questions, like, why is it that two companies in the US own the market? Why is it that the formula hasn't changed in 40 years? The questions evolved from the basic mom questions to now the curiosity I had as a budding entrepreneur to go, something is here. There is an opportunity to come in and do something better. And I spent the next year going back to work, having Mary, and what I would refer to as my mini PhD.

• 22:52Guy Raz?

  And just kind of, I mean, as a parent, right? Like, I remember when our first kid was born, 2009, the BPA thing just started to get a lot more traction. And so, I mean, we used glass bottles. We were using, you know, we were sort of freaks, like, we used cloth diapers. You're talking about 2016, by this point.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  It was natural for you as a parent to like, investigate every single thing you were putting in your baby's mouth.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And look, also, I was a European mother, now having my first American baby. So I went straight down the rabbit hole of doing the US comparison to Europe very quickly.

• 23:32Guy Raz?

  And what, what did you find? Like, what was the difference between baby formula in the US versus Europe at the time?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So the biggest was that the European nutritional standards that were governed by the EC were updating those standards every four to five years. And then I did the comparison to that over here in the US, and I realized the last time that the US updated their nutritional standards was in the 1980s. When I sort of took a step back in it, I think the biggest wake-up call was that infant formula was just ignored here in the US.

• 24:08Guy Raz?

  It's interesting because I, like, the European infant formulas were or not, and probably still are not, approved to be sold in the US because understandably, baby formula is super highly regulated.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And it has to be. I mean, it is an essential food being fed to the most vulnerable audience. It has to be highly regulated. And, you know, in the same way that I believe in not shaming how one feeds, I also don't believe in the shaming of different formulas. There's going to be a level of access and affordability and choice that you never want to look back on as a parent and go, I should have, and I could have, and I would have. That is an unfair weight that no parent should ever go through. And again, we can also all look at each other and go, but shouldn't there be choice? And shouldn't we be evolving to be better?

• 24:59Guy Raz?

  All right, so this is 2016, and mainly, I think then and probably still now, the biggest brands were Enfamil and Similac, which are made by, Enfamil's Me Johnson, Similac is Abbott, which is a huge pharmaceutical company. And they have really kind of dominated, like, the Coke and Pepsi of baby formula, right?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yes, they are the Goliaths of this industry, and they have for decades.

• 25:27Guy Raz?

  And the standards were more or less unchanged for 40 years.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 25:31Guy Raz?

  Obviously, they had nutrition that the FDA had deemed, you know, was necessary, and the minimal standards for infants, I guess fats and certain vitamins.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Carbs, proteins.

• 25:44Guy Raz?

  What ingredients did you find that were different between what you saw in US baby formulas and in European ones?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  DHA was the biggest.

• 25:53Guy Raz?

  And DHA, which is the nutrient that supports brain health.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yep. DHA was not just mandatory in Europe, but there was a level that was higher than any formula was choosing to do here in the US. So there's a lot of examples where the levels are different. Example, iron's a great example here, where there's a belief, and I really think this is also an American belief, that fortification and more is always better. And that's not always the case. Designing especially something like the soul nutrition to be optimal for what the baby needs is really critical, because too much iron early on can have negative consequences much later in life.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  So when you look at the iron range in Europe compared to the iron range here in the US, they're wildly different.

• 26:46Guy Raz?

  So as you start to figure out what to do, did you get friends to bring you baby formula from Europe to the US? Or were you just buying, you know, whatever? Maybe you get Earth's Best, or maybe use Similac? I don't know. What were you doing?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I originally bought Similac. And then I realized that there was this thriving black market over in the US where parents were buying European formula. And they were packing suitcases full of European formula and shipping it into the country.

• 27:19Guy Raz?

  And selling it on Amazon, or?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Selling it in the local car park. They were really hoarding it for themselves. And that was another signal. It was like, okay, there's a black market bubbling here, so clearly, there's a desire to create better formula. And I just couldn't get off the idea that we should be able to make European quality formula here in the US.

• 27:42Guy Raz?

  Okay, but you're still, I mean, as a parent, researching this stuff. And I guess a year later, 2017, you get pregnant, you're pregnant again with your second child.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  It was on the eve of 2018, January 2018, yep.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  Okay. But what was the point where you were like, you know, I could do this, I, maybe I should do something here?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Well, I peed on the stick and I found out I was pregnant for the second time. And that feeling of, okay, I'm not having this kid until there's a better formula in the market. It was within days of peeing on that stick, I turned to my husband and I said, I'm gonna go do this full time.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  You were gonna, you decided to leave entirely, you're gonna leave your job Airbnb?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, the conversation even with my husband at the time, you're pregnant with your second kid, you're living in an expensive city, you have a dream, you have strong belief in it, and you also need to have him believe in it, because I'm deciding to leave a salary aside and take parental leave to now go build a company and have to also self-fund this and get it off the ground. And that meant picking up some part-time work and doing some consulting here and there, coupled with turning to my bank account over in Ireland, where I took all my communion money

• 29:07Speaker 01

  and everything I had built over the years, and start a little nest egg to get this going.

• 29:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because, I mean, you presumably had shares from Airbnb, but it wasn't gonna go public. It didn't go public until 2020. So you didn't have any liquidity, probably, at that point.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Zero. No liquidity. I think I had also mapped out a business plan that matched my trimesters at the time. I was like, okay, trimester one, here's what I'm gonna nail. But I was depleting capital, my funds, way faster than I had anticipated.

• 29:42Guy Raz?

  And meanwhile, you need to start doing more research on baby formula, right? Like, so what did you do? Like, how did you go about that?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, you know, I'm not a scientist. And I turned to Google and I typed in baby formula expert, and I found a baby formula expert. I ended up contracting her, and we worked hand in hand every day together. She took my vision of dream ingredients and recipe, and she helped formulate it. And it was one sort of hire after another, but the bills came in. You know, you're cold calling so many people.

• 30:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Between, I don't know, 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM at night, I was on LinkedIn aggressively. And I was pingin' everyone and anyone who had a name that could relate to formulating something I knew I needed to get off the ground. I built a small, little team around me, regulatory experts, scientists, doctors, and we spent those trimesters taking it from idea to ultimately a formulation and concept.

• 30:50Guy Raz?

  Did you give yourself a budget? Like, did you say, okay, I've saved, you know, over my career now, I've got $100,000 or whatever, and I'm gonna use that and take a risk with that. And if it runs out, did you have an idea, number in mind?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. First, it was $50,000. And then it went up to around 80. And then I ultimately ended up spending close to 200.

• 31:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And I pulled it from everywhere.

• 31:17Guy Raz?

  All right. So I wanna kind of get a sense of what you were facing. I mean, because it's not that different today, right? The biggest baby formulas are produced by these two giants, right? And this is a huge, I think 75, 80, maybe 80% of the baby formula market in the United States is kind of dominated by these brands. And I would imagine that if you are so huge, you're kind of calling the shots, right? Like, I would imagine at that point, the FDA and other regulatory agencies have a good relationship with these companies already, and trust that, you know, with some justification, that they're doing everything more or less correctly.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:59Guy Raz?

  So they probably have a lot of power, just simply by virtue of being so big and connected.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  That was also a lot of the reactions I would get. When I would tell people I was, started an infant formula business, the reaction was often that, which is, oh, this industry is dominated by these two large pharmaceutical businesses. And it was almost a series of questions to see if I was ready. Did I understand what I was about to get into? Because anyone who was up against really a monopoly or a duopoly in any industry is entering a fight to some extent. And there was an ounce of naivety, probably, you know? I knew it was heavily regulated. And look, I credit a lot of the experience being at

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Airbnb. I watched Airbnb go up against the hospitality industry.

• 32:51Guy Raz?

  Right. The hotels, right.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  The hotel lobbyists.

• 32:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  So I got a taste for what disruption was like. And nothing fuels a mother more than knowing that what is blocking them from developing something better and giving them their baby something better was an industry that was ripe for disruption.

• 33:13Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're working on different recipes with these consultants. And, I mean, presumably, it's like, can I break down what infant formula is? It's powdered milk, right? Presumably?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Powdered milk. So it needs to mirror breast milk and its macro components, which is carbs, proteins, and fats. Look, even going back then, this was me going to Wikipedia to learn this. I'll never forget looking for a book, trying to figure out how to understand recipes and manufacturing and all of it. And I found one. It was a hardback book called The Biochemistry of Infant Formula Manufacturing Practices. You can imagine how dry this book was. And I found it on Amazon. And I remember turning to my husband and saying, okay, honey, this book costs $217. If I buy this book, there's no going back.

• 34:11Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Laura gets an unexpected visit from the FDA, which sets her business back by a year and a half. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 34:35Guy Raz?

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• 35:17Guy Raz?

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• 36:00Guy Raz?

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• 36:44Guy Raz?

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• 37:26Guy Raz?

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• 38:09Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2018 and Laura's committed herself to creating a European-style infant formula for the US market. But unlike most food startups, you can't just mix up formula powder in your home kitchen and test it on people you know. Yeah, how do you do that? You got a panel of babies.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  So there's these essentially kitchens, micro kitchens, that you can work with. And they're innovation centers. And a lot of big companies would turn to them and say, I have this idea, I want to go formulate it. But they don't have a pilot plant or a pilot kitchen to go do it in. And this is where the money went, right? So as soon as we got to a place of having this formulation in hand, it was a spreadsheet. It was a spreadsheet of numbers and a list of ingredients. I would then drive down to the innovation center, which was about an hour outside of San Francisco, and I would meet with the team there, who were just a big, beautiful team of nutrition scientists. They would go order the ingredients, and we would work in a lab, essentially, to formulate the product so that we could

• 39:15Speaker 01

  do some taste testing and sensory analysis. But one thing to note, unlike other CPG products, infant formula has to be made under a commercially-ready manufacturing facility.

• 39:29Guy Raz?

  Part of the expense of this process is, it's like drug testing, right? That's what makes a drug so expensive, because the testing is so regulated and expensive. Because if you break it down, it's like, we're talking about like, nonfat milk, and whey protein, and coconut oil, and safflower oil, and lactose, right? It's not, but it's the fact that it has to be done in a highly regulated and highly controlled environment that makes it expensive to even like, experiment with?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And that's where thousands of dollars went. But yeah, you hear the stories of CPG companies who go down to the farmer's market, and they go sell their first product, and they get some feedback and reactions. We couldn't do that.

• 40:13Guy Raz?

  Okay, so when did you know that you had something good enough that would let you kind of show it to people, you know, when you were ready to raise money?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So as soon as we got to a sample, which was a sample that you could pour into a drink, and you could taste it, and you could also do a side-by-side, you could make up Similac and Infamil. And, you know, I remember sitting in the room, and you're looking at all of the different samples, and once the color and the sensory, and now the nutrient testing of that product was coming back, and meeting all of the regulations that we knew we needed to hit, we were ready. And that took several months.

• 40:50Guy Raz?

  I mean, presumably, you were also able to, I mean, and it's safe, right? You were able to test on your own kids?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I was able to test it on my own kids. And they all got different versions.

• 41:02Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay, so let's get, so you, 2018 is when you really start this process?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 41:09Guy Raz?

  And by the way, you register this name Bobby, and I tell the story behind the name.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  At the time, I thought I was going to call it Reform, because I wanted to reform the industry. But then someone said, like, you know, cute baby names are always good, or just using a human name. And I was like, you know what? My daughter calls her bottle a Bobby. She'd ask for it at night, she wants her Bobby. I didn't even think twice. I sent an email to my lawyers, and I said, I want to register the company named Bobby. It can be Bobby with an I, Bobby with a Y, or an IE. They ultimately responded and said, IE is open, it feels safe. I was like, beautiful. It even has a bit of an Irishness to it. And that's the story of how we landed on Bobby with an IE.

• 41:53Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you have the name, and you've got a prototype.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:58Guy Raz?

  And you have, I mean, at this point, you have some deep experience. You've been at Google, you've been Airbnb, so you have developed connections, contacts. And how much were you trying to raise initially? Because this is going to take a lot of money

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:14Guy Raz?

  with this approval regulatory process. So what did you think you needed initially?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  I got to a place at around eight months pregnant, and realized taking the next phase meant raising institutional capital. And my husband was all for it, like, this is the time we've burned through every dollar that we've had here. And I remember going, I will give myself until this baby comes. And if I don't raise money then, I may put my pen down, and have to revisit this at a later point. You're still in the, I hope this works, moment. So I thought I needed to go out and raise a million. And that million sort of divided up in use of funds was really to just create the first batch of product.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  And I hit up every Silicon Valley investor I knew. I spoke to 64 investors. Every day, I was on the phone, making introductions, driving all across San Francisco with my baby bump, and pitching Bobby. And it, you know, the other things that happened during this period, I hired a designer to develop the first look and feel, and the logo. We designed the packaging. It was the hustle towards a pitch. But ultimately, after 64 pitches, most of them said no, and four of them said yes.

• 43:34Guy Raz?

  That's pretty good. I mean, it's not a bad, right? You got to take a lot of shots. But I wonder whether, you know, because 2018, this is like, the D to C boom is really in full throttle. And this was a category that hadn't really seen any, you know, modernization. So I would imagine that there was, even those who may have said no, some excitement, or am I wrong?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  There was a lot of skepticism, a lot. That journey of raising that first round was the biggest education to how I would go on to build a brand. I remember one investor just couldn't shake the idea that there was anything wrong with corn syrup.

• 44:17Guy Raz?

  Corn syrup was in the bigger formula brands.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Correct. I'm in the middle of the pitch, and he says, well, what's wrong with corn syrup? I met with another investor, who said, what I was doing was terrible, that women should be breastfeeding.

• 44:32Guy Raz?

  They really say that to you? Because that, I mean, that's surprising to me, that somebody would be, even if they thought that in their brains, that they would say that to you?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I know. I really wish I could say that that wasn't the case. I said this earlier, but everyone has their own story. And what he shared back with me when he said that was that his wife had breastfed all of their kids exclusively, and he only knew the world by which breastfeeding worked.

• 45:01Guy Raz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  And couldn't understand why I would dedicate my time, energy, and capital to going to making something that the world didn't need. It was such fuel, because it made me realize that the silent majority that were experiencing the shame, and the guilt, and also having to turn to something they weren't proud of, they weren't talking out. And there wasn't a brand that was speaking for them, and making them feel like they belonged to something. You feed your baby, if you think about this, you feed your baby a bottle, or you breastfeed them seven times a day for their first year of life. And yet,

• 45:45Speaker 01

  parents were hiding their can of formula when a guest came over, or they were lying to their pediatrician.

• 45:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You know, the reason why I'm pushing back a little bit isn't because I doubt the veracity of the story. It's more that, you know, in years past, on this show, we've had stories of founders who, you know, went out and tried to invest, and part of the story was the resistance they faced, and maybe some insulting things they heard. And in more recent years, I've kind of reflected on this, and I've come to maybe a bit of an unusual conclusion, which is, I actually have, in some ways, more respect for a VC who's going to be honest about how they feel, and give their honest feedback and pushback, and then reject it, rather than somebody who's like, great, love it, and then you

• 46:34Guy Raz?

  just get a note saying, hey, we're going to focus somewhere else, somewhere, you know? And I say that because if a person is giving feedback, and explaining why they don't want to do it, and are pushing back in ways that might even be a little bit offensive, it is still a data point.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I would not be who I am, and the company would not be where it is today, without that feedback.

• 46:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, remember, at the time, I'm also eight and a half months pregnant. And most people thought I was building something as a passion project for my own baby. I found I was dismissed as the potential entrepreneur, and pitching the market size, and what this business could be, because there was a lot of personal storytelling tied up in this. You know, I wasn't, think about the pitches that were coming in. These pitches were scalable and sexy. I'm walking in, talking about powdered milk that is owned by the pharmaceutical industry, that is controversial. But the yeses I got were game-changing. It was the

• 47:40Speaker 01

  first sign of belief. And I am so grateful, because it was only two weeks before having my second baby, did I get funded. And that was such a deep breath.

• 47:52Guy Raz?

  You raised a million, you raised...

• 47:54Speaker 01

  I ended up raising two and a half million.

• 47:55Guy Raz?

  So you've got some validation, and then you have your baby. And tell me about...

• 48:03Guy Raz?

  Tell me about your life at that point.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Bobby was now, you know, it was like a living, breathing.

• 48:10Guy Raz?

  Your third child.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  It was my third child. And I took a few days off with my second baby, but it was a very different emotion than I had with the first. I wanted to get back to building the company. I wanted to get back to it so badly that my son, Colin, sort of came along that journey with me. He was side by side.

• 48:32Guy Raz?

  This is your second kid.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  My second kid.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  He's under the desk, working with me.

• 48:37Guy Raz?

  And your husband, he's working too, right? He presumably you guys are, he's helping, but he's also doing something.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's helping. He was a founder and CEO of his own design firm. And he was heads down, you know, making, I wasn't yet really earning much money. Our first round of funding, I gave myself my first salary, which was, I think I paid myself less than $50,000. And, you know, we're living in San Francisco with two kids. So my husband was very, very supportive and also really helped bridge our needs at that time.

• 49:12Guy Raz?

  Okay, so now you've got two and a half million dollars. It's 2019. Tell me what the first few steps are now. What are you like in terms, let's, let's talk about hires first. Cause up until this point, it's you and, and just contractors, right?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Contractors, I had two, I had two full-time scientists at this point.

• 49:31Guy Raz?

  On staff.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  That's right. And something that really I knew deep down was that I wanted to build a culture and build a team. The constant question on my mind was, do I do that with a co-founder? And at the time I had so many investors say to me, you know, your co-founder needs to be a scientist. They need to, they need to be the opposite of what you are.

• 49:54Guy Raz?

  Sounds logical.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Sounds very logical.

• 49:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Tech business, they would say, go get your CTO. And I spent a long time thinking through that, but I didn't come from that world, which means I didn't have a long-term relationship with someone that would have played that opposite. What I did have was someone, Sarah Hardy, who I had worked hand in hand through thick and thin. Through building Airbnb, you're going through a lot of highs and lows.

• 50:19Guy Raz?

  And she was at Airbnb at the time?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Correct. She was at Airbnb at the time and I'm telling her all about what I'm doing. And remember, we had worked together while having babies and we never talked about our problems, breastfeeding or going through motherhood. And this was the first time that we were sharing in that experience. And she worked within the, the HR and people organization. And not only was she totally understood on the mission, but she was also bought in on building a next generation workplace and culture.

• 50:51Guy Raz?

  And it's interesting because it's such an unconventional, I guess I'm kind of giving away the story because you would ask her to become your.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Co-founder.

• 50:58Guy Raz?

  Co-founder and COO. But it's an unconventional, like everyone's saying, go find a scientist, a CTO. And you would think culture will come later, you know, we can deal with that later.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Culture never comes later. It was really important that we built a culture that could last longer than our product, that could sustain the hits of the business. Cause there was gonna be, there was gonna be hard times, but a really good culture can get through those.

• 51:25Guy Raz?

  Okay, so she, she comes aboard.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  She comes aboard and then it was a series of unconventional hires. The next hire I made was an Emmy award news anchor. And the Emmy award news anchor is now my chief brand officer. And I would say, when you look across all of our key hires, every single one of them, their resume does not match what they have built or done at Bobby.

• 51:48Guy Raz?

  Were they all women?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  You know, they were. Now, we, we do have diversity. We do have men on the team, but most of the unconventional hires were women. That is true.

• 51:59Guy Raz?

  And the early hires, I guess.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of the early hires were women.

• 52:03Guy Raz?

  I mean, it makes sense because you can relate based on.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:06Guy Raz?

  Obvious experiences. So, okay, so you start to build a team, more of an executive team. And you've got this prototype, but now, first of all, where are you, where were you able to make it? Because you don't, you know, I mean, if you want to make a food brand, there are lots of places in the US where you can do that. They are regulated, but not like a, I mean, this is like making a drug, right? And I can't imagine, probably the existing big brands have their own vertically integrated systems. I know there's one big company called Perrigo. They make brands for a lot of different baby formulas, but you're probably really small at that point. So where, where could you make your formula?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  So Perrigo was the only, it is the only manufacturer of infant formula here in the US, outside of the vertically integrated.

• 52:54Guy Raz?

  Wow, outside the big ones. It's the only one that, because they don't have their own label. They make, I think they make like Walmarts and.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 53:02Guy Raz?

  Costco and.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Earth's Best at the time. Yep. So I remember calling this contract manufacturer and they declined. You know, we're, we're moms in a basement. They're not going to take us on. This wasn't something that they typically do.

• 53:17Guy Raz?

  Okay, so what did you?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  So I went to the birth land, the homeland of infant formula, which is in Germany. And I came across a family-run manufacturer led by a woman, led by a mom. We spent many a week going back and forth about the potential of her being able to make our product. And she ultimately said yes. But there was one major dilemma, which was manufacturing a product like infant formula in Europe meant that it didn't match the regulations of making infant formula here in the US.

• 53:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And by the way, they couldn't match them? It was not possible?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  It's a manufacturing process.

• 54:01Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  So you would have to change the way you were manufacturing again. Is it because anything was wrong? No, they were just different. But that didn't stop me. This was the only place I was able to get my product made and made Bobby, brought it over as a pilot and decided to make what I thought was a very smart decision to position it as a supplement, as a companion formula to breast milk, which means that it moved out of the category as being the sole nutrition. And now it was in the supplement category.

• 54:34Guy Raz?

  Companion formula, so just something else to give your baby.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Something else, exactly.

• 54:39Guy Raz?

  Okay. And the idea was you were going to set up, you say pilot program. This is going to be a direct to consumer.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Direct to consumer. We only started selling it to San Francisco families and we would personally go and deliver it. Remember, I remember very, we had 93 customers.

• 54:58Guy Raz?

  And you've delivered them canisters of.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Canisters, yeah, canisters of the formula.

• 55:02Guy Raz?

  And it was branded and everything. It said Bobby on it.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Branded and everything.

• 55:06Guy Raz?

  Okay. Companion formula.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 55:09Guy Raz?

  And again, because if it said infant formula, that triggers a different set of rules?

• 55:14Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And coming from a world of tech and disruption, I thought this was a genius way to enter.

• 55:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you just go for it.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  You know, good start. We got a product into market. We'll see how this goes for a while and then we'll move into the process of maybe going back to that contract manufacturer and seeing if they'll make our product then. But we were not on the market for less than two weeks before I got a phone call from our warehouse manager who said the FDA is at the warehouse.

• 55:46Guy Raz?

  An FDA inspector knocks on the door and comes on in, showing their badge?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Correct. By which, anyone who comes from the food and, and drug space, the FDA doesn't just normally show up. That just never happens.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  But the FDA shows up and I go down to the warehouse, I meet the FDA officials and they look at the product and they say, hey, we hear that you're selling infant formula. And they pick up the can, they look at the ingredients, they look at the formula and they said, yeah, I see what you're doing. I can see that it's positioned as companion formula. However, it looks like a duck, it cracks like a duck. This is infant formula.

• 56:26Guy Raz?

  By the way, how do they even know about it? A hundred, I mean, how did they even get tipped off about this?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  You know, I, here I am, almost eight years later, and I'm still wondering the exact same thing. We had gotten some media attention on, on TechCrunch and, you know, our launch of bringing this, this formula to market created some stir and our belief is it probably made its way to the FDA. And FDA has thought, this looks like another way to bring formula to market and this doesn't match the regulations.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And they issued a national recall.

• 57:04Guy Raz?

  They shut you down right then and there.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Right there and then issued a national recall of what was a pilot. And at the time, I remember feeling like, but this is unfair. That there's nothing nutritionally wrong, but you're putting us into this position where now people are questioning our motives. And it's hard to recover from a recall, especially when it's something related to infants. But we were so small and the very fiery group that we were serving at the time, I remember them coming. And we had this rallying cry from them being like, this is crazy. We gotta figure out how we get the FDA to get this approved.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  We ended up firing up a community to support our next moves.

• 57:52Guy Raz?

  But you were angry. You felt like this was unfair and you were angry. I mean, on the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to this idea because it's like, let's just get it out there and try it. And it's very much a Silicon Valley entrepreneurial in that spirit. At the same time, I'm like, yeah, but it's like, you can't, this is like one of those things. You can imagine if there wasn't this regulatory environment, it could be abused and you could have really dangerous products going into babies.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  100%. And we were used as an example. And to be fair, if they didn't use us as an example, it invites more, as you said, more ways to be able to enter the market that could potentially be dangerous.

• 58:36Guy Raz?

  But you got bad press probably right away.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  We got some bad press, but we were so small, we barely existed. But what did come from it was that I sat there for, it was a few weeks. We debated what the next moves were. There was no manufacturer to turn to. And one day I opened my email and there was an email from the one contract manufacturer that makes infant formula in the US.

• 58:59Guy Raz?

  Perrigo.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Perrigo and said, we watched what happened with the recall and we want to make your product.

• 59:07Guy Raz?

  They said that we, because you had approached them before and they were not interested in breaking, because you were too small presumably.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 59:14Guy Raz?

  And now that they saw this kind of fiasco, they called you and said, why would they call you and say, want to work with you?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  They pointed a lot to how we handled it.

• 59:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How did you handle it? What was your public response?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  My public response was I put out a letter of apology. It wasn't about being defiant. It was about being compliant, very different to maybe what it was like being in the tech industry. And that letter resonated and I, we got this email. And it was actually an internal champion. He led their R and D team and he was watching all of this. But what he was so impressed with was the product that we had developed was the one that he was internally championing for years.

• 1:00:01Guy Raz?

  That he wanted to develop a, a new kind of baby formula.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  He wanted grass fed milk. He wanted to lean into European nutritional standards. He was a huge fan of DHA. So you can imagine being in a big company and you are a voice in there trying to champion change. And he's watching that change happening outside with us. But I give so much credit to those internal, like Pedro is his name, was really the internal voice to tap his manager on the shoulder and say, we should give them a call.

• 1:00:32Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  And we spent the next 18 months course correcting our supply chain to get our product made.

• 1:00:38Guy Raz?

  Okay. Because the, the actual recipe was going to remain largely the same. It was just the production process that violated, that meant that it could not be labeled as infant formula or described that way. But I, I still have to, I mean, because that was a significant setback because all of a sudden you're not going to be able to test this with customers, real customers, and you're going to have no, no revenue coming in. And right in theory, you should have done that from the beginning, but at the same time, it's so onerous and slow and can really, in the meantime, there could be competitors coming in who are better funded or more connected. And, and so was any part of you like freaking out when this happened?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. You go through your own identity crisis. I had investors say, you gotta change your name. Bobby could never exist.

• 1:01:32Guy Raz?

  Cause it was black, the name was blackened now.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And I would have other people say, this is going to be like your C-section scar. You're going to go, it'll always be there. And then on the other side, there was a lot of folks who came forward and said, like, you need to lean into this story. This is a story of, of David versus the Goliath and you need to get out to the FDA and you need to own this moment. I did ultimately decide to own it and stick with it. And we ended up actually getting some press to speak to the full story. You know, even part of that press makes you cringe and you wonder if we didn't make this move, what would we do? But I also don't believe in playing hindsight. And that email that came in from that contract manufacturer to say, we'd make your product.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I don't know if that ever would have happened.

• 1:02:21Guy Raz?

  I think you also attracted another investor because of that.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:02:25Guy Raz?

  What would have been a fiasco, but it was kind of turned around. And I guess there was an investor who also liked how you handled this.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  It piqued the attention of those that wanted to see this industry change and probably recognized, oh, this isn't easy. And if Laura does get through this, this could be very big. So we had an investor come forward that we had spoken to in the past as well. And they ended up funding the business, another $4 million, which allowed us to spend the next 18 months, get our product off the line at this facility and into the FDA.

• 1:03:00Guy Raz?

  Okay. Here's my question. You had a formula, you had an ingredient list. And from my understanding, the problem with, with how it was made in Germany wasn't the ingredients, but how it was made, like the order of operations or whatever. It's not an FDA approved factory. Now you're, you're going to get it made by Perrigo, which is, you know, they make all this contract formula. Why was it going to take so long? I mean, you have the, you had it all ready to go.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Because we were obsessed with certain suppliers we wanted to use that they weren't yet using.

• 1:03:34Guy Raz?

  So it wasn't actually the FDA, it was suppliers?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  It was, it was both. It was both. So shifting your operation from one place to another means sort of shifting the entire supply chain to be able to get made there. And if there was a supplier that they weren't yet using, that means they would have to run a product trial of that off their own line. So there's a long process to, it's not as simple as just switching it and getting it made. And that process took some time. And then once they were ready, you then have to submit it to the FDA. And submitting it to the FDA, we waited another six months before we were able to get the green light.

• 1:04:09Guy Raz?

  Cause you're in a queue, right? Of people.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  You're in a queue.

• 1:04:12Guy Raz?

  They, they gotta go through a bunch of applications.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:04:15Guy Raz?

  So what is your team doing at this point? I mean, you're waiting, you've got a formulation, you're waiting, and then you've got six months of waiting for FDA approval. What in the meantime is your staff, your team doing?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  So we were still a relatively small team. But one of the things that we started doing was sort of gearing up the brand for when we would come to market. And one of those was to meet with community members, meet with parents every week. And there was this belief, I, I had someone share with me once, there is a before you launch and there's an after you launch. And the before you launch moment is a period of time and freedom that you'll never get back once you're out. And you use it really wisely. You build your founding community. You decide what your positioning is, you really hone your brand. And we took that very seriously.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  We created a blog called Milk Drunk where we would publish articles and we would become a thought leader on the world of feeding. We would meet with community members every week that we would find on Instagram and different socials and Twitter who were talking about the feeding journey and we would invite them into conversations. They were the founding community that helped accelerate the business when we ultimately launched. And they still do. I see them chiming in on Instagram all the time. And during this period, by the way, I also went on to have my third baby.

• 1:05:44Guy Raz?

  So the idea comes to you in 2017, roughly 2016, 2017. And it's going to take over three years.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Guy Raz?

  Before you get an FDA approved product ready to go. But meantime, it's COVID. COVID's going, right? So are you guys working in an office? Are you working remotely? Like, how are you, even before COVID happened, how were you, did you rent space? If you had a warehouse, I know.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  We're in my basement.

• 1:06:13Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  In my basement in San Francisco. And it's a big team of moms and COVID hits. So everyone goes home and they start working from home. But it was August of 2020. We were on a Zoom call and my head of regulatory sends me a Slack. And she said, Laura, the IFN, which is essentially the letter from the FDA just came through. And she said, we got the green light.

• 1:06:39Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Now, when most businesses were in a place during COVID of going, will we exist? Do we have the capital to do so? Does the world even need us in this moment? The most reassuring thing during this time was that we were making a product that no matter a recession or another pandemic, this product was needed. And not only needed, people were looking at the quality and safety of what they were consuming in a completely different way.

• 1:07:08Guy Raz?

  But you had no money coming in. So did you have to raise more money to, because you gotta order product? You gotta launch direct to consumer and you gotta start a marketing campaign.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Correct. I mean, look, that second round of capital that came in, that $4 million really did help. So the intention was not to go out and raise just yet. It was to get to market. We're all sitting on the edge of our seat, wondering, how are people going to react? And the amount of times investors would say, what's your forecast for the year? What do you think you're going to do? I'm like, I have no clue. Come on. It's putting a finger in the air. And anyone who says before they launch that they're setting a forecast they believe is accurate is totally lying. You're going out on a hope and a whim that there will be good reception to this and it will take off.

• 1:07:58Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Bobby finally launches and Laura suddenly has to take manufacturing into her own hands. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 1:09:33Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's January 2021, and after years of setbacks, Bobbi Infant Formula is finally ready to launch. But Laura has to be very careful about how they promote it. What was your message? Because I imagine the messaging is also highly regulated. Like, there's things you can and cannot say, or things that you have to be careful of by risking, like, class action lawsuits.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%. One of the earlier hires during that founding team build was my head of regulatory. And she came from having worked at the FDA. She had worked at Abbott. She schooled us on what we can or can't say. And today, she will still turn to me, years later, and be like, Laura, you cannot say that. The marketing team needs to remove this.

• 1:10:23Guy Raz?

  But it must have made the marketing team crazy to have somebody.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it still does.

• 1:10:27Guy Raz?

  Like, can't say that, can't say that. Like, what's something that you couldn't say?

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  So the biggest thing to avoid was making any functional benefit claims.

• 1:10:38Guy Raz?

  Like smarter babies or better for your brain health?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10:40Guy Raz?

  Because they may be brain healthy, you could say.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Your kid has a chance to go to Harvard. You know, like tying the nutritional value of this to very specific outcomes was a big no. And as a brand, we weren't here to try and shame different formulas or point to specifics. At the end of the day, we were a European-style formula that was made here in America. And that positioning of our product, it resonated.

• 1:11:09Guy Raz?

  That's all you had to say? European-style recipe?

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  That's all we had to say. And then where we put a lot of the positioning and the brand work was around the emotional claims, not the functional ones. And the emotional ones were really about, what is the help and support and the recognition that parents are going through in this moment? It was telling the stories of those that weren't able to exclusively breastfeed. So there was the product piece of it. But then there was also the cultural society and stigma pieces of it that really resonated when we came to market.

• 1:11:46Guy Raz?

  So you launched this in January 2021, and it's still COVID. I mean, people are still working from home. But this is direct-to-consumer only. I mean, you hit the go button, and what happens?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it took off. We realized we had immediate sort of product-market fit, brand-market fit. But what we failed to do was that we didn't have really business model fit, or maybe forecasting fit. We ran out of product very quickly. I remember in that moment being told, you know, you're either great marketers or terrible forecasters, or maybe both. And the lead times to produce more infant formula, again, because of it being so complicated and regulated, and also capitally intense, we stocked up just enough, but we weren't ready for the amount of demand that came through.

• 1:12:40Guy Raz?

  What was the lead time?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Lead time is five to six months.

• 1:12:44Guy Raz?

  Five to six months from the time you order it and to the time it's delivered?

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:12:49Guy Raz?

  And this is not being put on a ship from China, in a container?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12:53Guy Raz?

  This is made... Wow.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  When you make product for infant formula, you actually have to let it sit for a period of time. And you have to have the testing go out, and you've got to wait till those testing results come back and you're in the full clear before you can bring product to market. So the forecasting, and when you're a new company, you want to be careful that you don't order too much and then find all of your capital wrapped up in inventory. But also, when it comes to feeding babies, you also don't want to have gaps in serving those that you promised. So we ended up running out of inventory, but not on our existing customers. We were able to, because we were a subscription business, manage who got that product and who didn't. So we actually turned off our growth and our top of funnel.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And that was a very intentional decision.

• 1:13:42Guy Raz?

  I think in that first year, which is just remarkable, you did $16 million in sales.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  That's right. We had hoped we would do around $4 million, and we ended up doing 16.

• 1:13:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. So that year, 2021, you decide to move to Washington DC from San Francisco. Because I guess, at this point, it's because of COVID era, you guys are totally remote anyway. Tell me the decision to uproot the whole family and move to Washington DC.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it was a few things. It was definitely post-COVID, three kids. And then there was an element of this, which was both me and my husband, directly or indirectly, were working with government agencies.

• 1:14:25Guy Raz?

  Oh, because your products were regulated by the government?

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:14:29Guy Raz?

  And he's in AI, I think, right?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  He's in AI.

• 1:14:32Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  And he was doing some work with the government as well, also supporting on some design work during COVID.

• 1:14:39Guy Raz?

  And the advantage is you are close to the FDA.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:14:43Guy Raz?

  You're close to HHS. So it was also strategically important for you to be there?

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:14:49Guy Raz?

  Okay. I imagine, I think it's the case, that one of the reasons why the two big, you know, 800-pound gorillas in the space are Similac and Famila, you know, they're widely used for a reason. But they're also, a huge amount of their revenue comes from government programs, WIC, Women, Infants, Children, I would imagine, right?

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:15:10Guy Raz?

  Basically, the formula's eligible for these government programs that help people who can't afford.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:15:18Guy Raz?

  These products. That is huge if you have that contract, right? If you have the ability to get your product approved for WIC.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  So WIC, these behemoths, these goliaths, saw an opportunity to be able to subsidize the cost of this for the government. Every few years, you go and you bid for a contract, and then a brand will win that state. What that means is, as a mother, you're going in, and if you're buying your formula on WIC, you can only choose that brand.

• 1:15:52Guy Raz?

  One product.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the fact that 50% of babies born in this country are choosing a formula under WIC, which means they are limited by choice, huge opportunity to reform this program. But it starts with more businesses and brands existing. And it takes companies like Bobbi to gain more market share. Because the reality is, even though I want to see a change, I'm not yet big enough to be able to serve WIC either.

• 1:16:23Guy Raz?

  Okay, so this is still an ongoing thing, right? Because you're, I think, I looked into it. I think Enfamil and Similac are primarily what's available across the country for WIC. In meantime, you've got this first year, a great first year, right? And then comes 2022, and there's this, like, crazy infant formula shortage, which some people might remember. I mean, the shelves were, like, empty. People could not get baby formula. And I think part of the reason was that Abbott, which makes Similac, had this huge recall, right?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Correct. So the recall happened because Abbott had a contamination in one of their facilities. And that contamination led to very sick babies, some fatalities. It was very serious. They had to shut down that facility. But at the time, I turned to the team, and I was like, there, this is going to have a very negative consequence on the industry. Because a market, we've gotten to a place now where they're not just serving a large percentage of it, we've become reliant on them to feed babies. There wasn't more manufacturers, like we've already talked about, that could just turn on the faucet really quick and just, all of a sudden, start producing more.

• 1:17:39Guy Raz?

  You could not do that. You couldn't get, I mean, Perrigo couldn't just do that for you.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  You couldn't just flip it on. Now, we immediately started ramping up. And we started producing more product than we had even dreamed of in 2022. But at the same time, it's like, how many rooms are in a hotel? Like, when the inn is full, the inn is full.

• 1:18:00Guy Raz?

  So I imagine that parents who are looking for alternatives all of a sudden start flooding your website.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  They do.

• 1:18:07Guy Raz?

  And you can't serve all those people, presumably?

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And at the time, we're fully stocked up. We've learned from our first year. So now we're sitting on a lot of inventory. But what ended up happening was that recall happened, and our growth skyrocketed. It was numbers that we had never seen before. But the problem is that we're growing faster than our ability to replenish product. And if we keep growing, we run the risk of using inventory that we have that should be given to our existing subscribers. We're going to end up acquiring too many people, and we won't be able to serve them. Now, this was like a COVID situation. You're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's all going to be over in a minute. Like, there's no chance this could go on forever.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can't forecast how long this stuff's going to go on. So I did a round of phone calls. I called my board. I'm going, look, here's a little bit of the dilemma. Most of them were like, this is crazy. Just keep the growth going. Like, these moments don't come around often. Like, great moment for the brand. But I went to bed that night, and I remember taking off my CEO hat and playing the mother and going, if I signed up to feed my baby Bobby and then one day received an email to say, sorry, we don't have product to send you this month, you've lost me. You've lost my loyalty. I can no longer stand behind the company. And the next day, we decided to turn off the website.

• 1:19:33Guy Raz?

  Existing customers could order, but new customers could not.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  That's right. It made people realize what we were prioritizing, which was our existing subscribers. And that loyalty has paid off years later.

• 1:19:46Guy Raz?

  That year, year two, full year, 84 million in sales. So just growing like crazy. But you have a dilemma and an opportunity, which is you know, you know there's demand, and you also know that you're constrained because you have, you're depending on one manufacturer who a lot of other people are depending on, and their capacity is probably at full throttle. So you have to presumably start to think about how to solve this, how to become more vertically integrated.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Correct. And the idea of owning manufacturing, you know, even 18 months into starting a business was not something that was on the agenda. That was not a roadmap item in any way. But I changed my mind very quickly. And when I realized that I was one phone call away from potentially being out of a business and not being able to serve this beautiful demand, I had to own my own destiny. And I was introduced to really a founding father of formula. He had built a company 22 years before that, selling toddler formula. And he made a much wiser decision than any of us to go break ground and build a modern infant formula facility in the heartland of this country in 2019.

• 1:21:02Guy Raz?

  And this was for the brand Nature's One, right? He, so this was a small brand that decided to build their own facility. And I imagine it's not cheap to build something like that.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  He raised capital, but this was happening behind the scenes. There was a building of a facility that was still underway. And by the time we had come to the conclusion that we needed to own manufacturing, they were now completed. When we came forward with huge demand and he had the perfect facility and also the need now for capital to be able to invest in this, we decided to purchase this facility and combine our businesses.

• 1:21:45Guy Raz?

  And also the brand?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:21:47Guy Raz?

  So you acquire Nature's One. And does Nature's One still exist as a standalone brand?

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  There is still the baby's only toddler formula. That's right.

• 1:21:56Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So you buy this facility in Ohio, but from what I understand, because it's 2023, you're not actually producing right away. There's still things you have to do there.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is the most painful part of it all, which is I've now acquired an expensive fixed asset, but we had yet to get full FDA approval.

• 1:22:17Guy Raz?

  Uh huh. You had to get, right?

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  You had to reapprove the facility. You had to reapprove your formulations, and nothing happened overnight. I still relied on my contract manufacturer to serve our, essentially our demand for the next two years. And we went out of stock again in '24 for almost seven months.

• 1:22:38Guy Raz?

  Wow. I mentioned earlier about the two, you know, Abbott that makes Similac, and I mentioned Me Johnson that does Infamila. And I should, I should have said that Me Johnson was acquired by Wreckit, another company. So I guess technically they oversee it. And I mention this because I know that it's just a weird moment in history where everything is, is a minefield, right? You have dealt with some of this. You were invited to the White, to the HHS in 2025 by the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy. Lots of people love him, lots of people don't love him. It's just the world we live in, right?

• 1:23:18Guy Raz?

  And you were invited along with the heads of these other big baby formula companies, like Wreckit, Abbott, and Perrigo, to come meet with them. And you got some grief and pushback from your customers who are like, they think that the brand should represent, you know, certain political perspectives. So, yeah, tell me about navigating that. I mean, you were invited to meet with him. He's the head of the Health and Human Services Department. You are in this space. It kind of is a no-brainer to me, but getting a crap for that.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  As an infant formula, you're regulated. So, you know, to put it another way, it's like the head of HHS is like my principal. And when the principal in your school calls you to the office, you go to the office. And it happens to be a person who has raised some eyebrows. Now, what is not being spoken about is that for the multiple administrations that have been in seat, I am not choosing when and if I walk into that room or whether I take that invite. Previous administration, this administration, if I have an opportunity to shape the face of our industry and to be the voice of parents and be the voice of mothers, you better believe I'm going to take that call.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  And we can't look at what we do as politicized. There's nothing more bipartisan than what it means to feed babies. And if we are building a legacy business and we're doing this right, it will mean that we're going to be dealing with characters that are polarizing. It will mean we're going to be dealing with different administrations along the way. And our job is to remain as centrist as possible through this position.

• 1:25:01Guy Raz?

  So I think it's a, it makes a lot of sense. Here we are in 2026 now, we're talking, and you guys are growing and growing in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales now.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:25:13Guy Raz?

  And you have, I've read about 4% market share in the US now, which is pretty great.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Just under 4%.

• 1:25:19Guy Raz?

  Just under 4%. And tell me about the ambitions here. You know, in 10 years' time, what do you want Bobby to look like to be?

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Start first just with the culture change. No one should be embarrassed about how they're feeding their baby. When I look back in 10 years, I want to be at a dinner table conversation and to be able to hear a new mother talk about the formula she's using. In fact, I want to see her wear a sweater, wear a sweater with the brand across her chest because this is something that is playing such a big role in her life that she has that emotional connection to it. Secondly, I hope we change policies because they're broken. Mothers are overlooked. Parents today are up against too much society pressures. And then lastly, I think growth will follow. And hopefully, one day, we're not as big as the Similacs and Infamils of the world

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  because I don't think anyone should be. But ideally, we're serving a good 10% of the market.

• 1:26:17Guy Raz?

  When you, when you look at, at the journey you took, you know, and how quickly, I mean, really, they started, they started selling in 2021. Here we are, five years later, and you're in hundreds of millions of dollars and a respected brand. How much of that do you attribute to the work and the grind? And then how much do you think just had to do with like luck and circumstance and what was going on in the world?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  I mean, as an Irish woman, I have very strong belief in luck. I don't believe there's a shortage of luck. I believe that there's a shortage of awareness to how you use that luck. We would not be where we were if we did not hustle with harsh and a lot of hard work to get us here. So luck is the invitation, but hard work is why you're sitting at the table. It's a good mix. It's a very good mix.

• 1:27:10Guy Raz?

  That's Laura Modi, co-founder of Bobby. By the way, Laura says one of the things she's proudest of is the company's advocacy group, Bobby for Change, which is working to influence policy in the industry. And one of the things the group has done is to help introduce a bill in Congress that would allow women who've had breast cancer to get insurance coverage for infant formula. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please do sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was researched and produced by Alex Cheng with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 1:27:55Guy Raz?

  It was edited by Neva Grant, and our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Kerry Thompson, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, John Isabella, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.