KiwiCo: Sandra Oh Lin
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.8 • 31.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2023
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
KiwiCo founder Sandra Oh Lin took an after-school pastime and turned it into a multi-million-dollar business. After quitting a high-powered job in tech, she dived into doing after-school projects with her kids, like making puppets out of Styrofoam or combining baking soda and vinegar to see what happens. When she discovered that other parents liked these projects too, she decided to create a subscription box company that sent out science and crafts kits every month. She gathered kids in her garage to test-market her ideas, and pitched her plan over and over to investors in Silicon Valley, where her car was “the only minivan in the parking lot.” Today KiwiCo is the leading subscription box for kids, and has shipped over 50 million crates worldwide.
This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music by Ramtin Arablouei.
It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Josephine Nyounai.
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Transcript
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| 1:00.5 | Need to hire? |
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| 1:03.0 | We were not your typical kind of founders. I do think especially for early stage investing there is an element of pattern matching for |
| 1:16.3 | investors and I was a you know a mom entrepreneur and what's funny though is that being a mom actually made me uniquely qualified to start this business |
| 1:29.0 | but I would say my vehicle aivan, was the only minivan in the parking lots of Sand Hill Road. |
| 1:37.6 | It was not easy. Welcome to how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how home arts and Crafts projects grew into a multi-million dollar business |
| 2:06.7 | when Sandra Olin launched Kiwico, now a top-selling subscription box for kids. |
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