4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Leah Busque is a General Partner @ Fuel Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed funds with the most incredible portfolio including many previous 20VC guests Ryan @ Flexport, Florian @ Mesosphere, Alex @ Clearbit and Dan @ Convoy (episode Friday). As for Leah, prior to VC, she was a pioneer of the sharing economy with her founding of TaskRabbit, one of the leading online labor marketplaces in the US, raising over $37m in the process before their sale to IKEA last year. Due to this incredible success, Leah has been named to Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business".
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leah made her way from sitting on the couch discussing dog food with her husband to founding TaskRabbit and how that translated into the world of VC today?
2.) How did Leah's time in operations affect:
3.) Leah has said before that "authenticity and transparency between VC and founder are now table stakes", what more can be done to improve the VC product? How did Leah select the investors she worked with on TaskRabbit? How can founders truly determine "founder friendly" VCs?
4.) What have been Leah's biggest surprises on her move into the world of VC? What elements has Leah found most challenging? How has Leah looked to scale that learning curve?
5.) What does a successful marketplace look like? How does one know when is the right time to really scale a marketplace? What is the inflection point? How can marketplaces be efficient with their unit economics from day 1? How does one balance the NPS of the supply side with the NPS of the demand side?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leah’s Fave Book: Founders at WorkÂ
Leah’s Most Recent Investment: Bark: Parental Control Phone Tracker App
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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0:00.0 | This is the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, if you have not made the transition from |
0:04.0 | Snapchat Instagram, do it now, and you can find me on Instagram at H. Stebbings, 1996. Hopefully, |
0:09.9 | this will not affect Snapchat's stock price too much. However, to the show today, and I first |
0:14.3 | listened to this incredible guest when I was walking to college around five years ago, and I remember |
0:18.9 | hearing her founding story, and it just left me so |
0:21.4 | inspired. So a very special show for me today, and I'm thrilled to welcome Leah Buskey, general |
0:25.8 | partner at Fuel Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed funds with the most incredible |
0:30.1 | portfolio, including many previous 20 VC guests, like Ryan at Flexport, Florian at Mesosphere, |
0:36.3 | Alex at Clearbit, and Dan at Convoy, |
0:38.4 | whose episodes coming out this Friday, a very special one there. As for Leah, prior to VC, |
0:42.9 | she was a pioneer of the sharing economy with her founding of Task Rabbit, one of the leading |
0:47.0 | online labour marketplaces in the US, where she raised over $37 million in VC funding in the process |
0:53.1 | before their sale to IKEA last year. |
0:55.2 | Due to this incredible success, Leah's been named to Fast Company's 100 most creative people |
0:59.5 | in business. I do also want to say a huge thank you to the wonderful Yuri at Forerunner for the |
1:03.6 | intro to Leah today, without which this episode would not have been possible. |
1:07.4 | But before we dive into the show today, what are we without a great night's sleep? |
1:11.0 | And that's where Lisa comes in. Lisa is the Warby Parker or Tom's shoes of the mattress |
1:15.1 | industry. They've done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating |
1:19.4 | this luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online and shipped for free to |
1:24.4 | your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with three unique foam layers |
1:29.6 | for a universal adaptive feel, |
... |
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