Founders: Leah Solivan on building and selling TaskRabbit

**Sarah Rogers** (0:03)
Hello, this is Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Sarah Rogers. Today's founder is Leah Solivan, the founder of TaskRabbit, an app that connects people with taskers who they pay to help with everyday jobs like building flat pack furniture. Hi, Leah. Welcome.

**Leah Solivan** (0:19)
Hello. Thank you so much for having me on.

**Sarah Rogers** (0:22)
Now, Leah, you started in tech before founding your own company after a simple frustration. You needed dog food and you didn't want to go out and get it yourself. Now, that relatable moment sparked TaskRabbit in 2008 and made you a pioneer of the gig economy before the mainstream. You built it into a global business, sold it to IKEA, but success, of course, did come at a personal price, which we'll talk about. Now, you're on the other side of the table as a venture capitalist and you've got a book coming out next year. Not much then.

**Leah Solivan** (0:55)
Not much going on, exactly, yeah.

**Sarah Rogers** (0:57)
So, let's go back to before all that. Before you got the dog, you grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. What was family life like?

**Leah Solivan** (1:08)
My father had been in the Air Force for 35 years. He worked at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.
And my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I have a younger sister who's two years younger than me. And I remember being very interested in and very good just naturally at math. And that kind of led me to computer science in college. And even way far back, I remember my father came home from work one night. I must have been, I don't know, eight years old. And I don't know why I asked him this, but I asked him what the highest position was in a company. What is that called?
And he said, it's being a CEO, a chief executive officer. And I remember starting my first company at that moment. It was called Pollution Solutions. And it was a recycling program I set up in my elementary school. I don't really think we made much money, but I remember that vividly from childhood.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:08)
How old were you when you asked your dad that question?

**Leah Solivan** (2:11)
I think I was probably about eight years old. I was also really into dance. I was a ballerina. I studied dance growing up. I actually danced for about 25 years before I started TaskRabbit.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:23)
That's really different from the girl who wants to be the CEO. Also want to be a ballet dancer.

**Leah Solivan** (2:29)
I know. I also wanted to be an astronaut. So there were a lot of things that I was interested in.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:34)
Keeping your options open.

**Leah Solivan** (2:36)
That's right.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:37)
Were you good with money? Who taught you about finances and money?

**Leah Solivan** (2:43)
I remember my parents decided to set up an allowance for my sister and I.
And we would do chores, house chores during the week. And it might be setting the table for dinner or cleaning our bedrooms, whatever it was. But they kind of posed this interesting question, which I still remember to this day. And they said, we will pay you $3 every week, or we will pay you $5 every two weeks, and you can decide. Now, I think they were trying to see how smart we were or trick us, maybe. But I did the math and I realized, well, getting paid the lower amount, but every week, frequency was better. And so that's what I chose. But I think those little lessons learned around money were from saving, were from acting fiscally responsible, and just being really careful, actually, about money and how it was spent.

**Sarah Rogers** (3:37)
You then went to college. Your first proper job was in tech. You were a software engineer for IBM, which stacks up because you were really good at maths. So you were on a really good career path. Why not stick to that?

**Leah Solivan** (3:49)
I really enjoyed my time there. I learned so much. I learned so much about how to build software that millions of people around the globe were using. And that's what really excited me, actually, that I could create and build things that I knew other people were using and finding value in.
And so, I had the idea for what became TaskRabbit, and it was like a bug that bit me, and I wasn't able to let go of the idea. And so, I did end up quitting my job at IBM four months later, and built the first version of the site from there.