Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 5 When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 5: When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge

When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge

Laura Behrens Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo. We cover the early days of Shippo finding its first customers, how Shippo's strategy has evolved over the years, and the complexity involved when digital and physical worlds collide.

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[00:02:57] – (First question) – The story of Popout and how it led to Shippo

[00:07:40] – Challenge of working in a huge and crowded market

[00:10:36] – How Shippo changed shipping for small businesses

[00:12:30] – First big break in their favor 

[00:13:39] – Their master account with the major shipping companies

[00:14:39] – Why is the shipping industry so complex

[00:16:25] – Most painful part of building Shippo

[00:18:20] – Advice for people in early company building 

[00:19:26] – Pricing software in early days

[00:20:32] – The early days of Shippo and getting it to where it is today

[00:23:17] – Going to market and targeting new customers when they’re mostly small businesses

[00:25:48] – Partnering with a larger company, in their case Shopify

[00:27:52] – How they think about their long-term planning

[00:30:48] – Competing in a world where companies can own their own infrastructure 

[00:32:39] – How often they think about other competitive advantages

[00:34:20] – Worst question an investor asked her: what if Amazon tries to copy them

[00:35:17] – Her superpowers as a founder 

[00:36:41] – API vs dashboard and the difference in their customer bases

[00:38:52] – What businesses that need shipping today need to know

[00:40:14] – Changes in how businesses are being built today

[00:41:28] – What excites her most about the future of this business

[00:43:28] – Kindest thing anyone has done for her

When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Laura Behrens Wu, co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo started in 2014 after Laura realized with her own eCommerce start-up that shipping was an incredibly difficult task for most merchants, so she set out to fix the problem for everyone. Shippo lets merchants, small and large, use its dashboard or APIs to simplify the shipping and tracking process. Our conversation focuses on Laura's background prior to Shippo, how Shippo's business and business strategy have evolved, the inherent challenges of building a shipping platform, and the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. I hope you enjoy our wide-ranging conversation.

How Shippo Started

So, Laura, I was thinking of an interesting entry point for this conversation. I'm always interested by how entrepreneurs come across the problem space that they then spend their careers on. You had started the company called Popout prior to Shippo. I'd love to hear that story and how that experience led you to this problem that you're now building around in Shippo.

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