Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founders Field Guide. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way. And this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investforfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:56)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:21)
My guest today is Laura Behrens Wu, co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo started in 2014 after Laura realized with her own e-commerce startup 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.
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 a 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.

**Laura Behrens Wu** (3:16)
That's a path down memory lane. I haven't thought about Popout for a long time.
What happened was, I'm originally from Germany. Roughly six years ago, I came to San Francisco first as a summer intern to join a Y Combinator startup called Lend Up. That brought me to the city initially. Working at Lend Up, there were pre-Series A, it was a team of roughly 20 people. We were working just day and night to make sure that we're hitting the kinds of growth numbers that Series A investors would be looking for. So it was an amazing and very energizing experience. And I think coming from a German environment, where I was used to a lot more hierarchy in the workplace, it's nothing like I've ever experienced. I decided that I wanted to stay in San Francisco full time, keep working there. From there, I think my next thought was, given that I like the startup environment this much, maybe there is a company that I could start down the road. I started brainstorming, came up with a ton of different ideas. I might still have that spreadsheet somewhere. The thought was really, there are no bad ideas, anything that I can come up with. And truth to be told, at the end of the day, I didn't have any super disruptive ideas. So I decided to keep it simple, just get started with an e-commerce business. That's what Popout was. So I built a small e-commerce business that was never meant to be anything big. It was a side project to do on the weekends. I was using Shopify, I was using Stripe. Just used all of the existing building blocks. It wasn't supposed to be venture backable or scalable. It was just supposed to be a tool to teach me how to run a small company. And then running that small e-commerce business, I realized that all of the different e-commerce building blocks are really easy and intuitive to use to put together. I've never done e-commerce before that, but it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to set up a Shopify store, how to use Stripe, and how to start selling on the internet. What came as a surprise to me was that shipping was much more difficult. Early on, I first walked to the USPS location, to the FedEx store, and realized that, first of all, the people working there, they're not super helpful, they're not going to give you any advice or tell you how to do things better. But then standing in line there is a waste of time. These locations are only open between 10 and 4, so these are normal working hours. And then in addition to that, when I started looking into just the technologies that these companies provide, the interfaces were extremely clunky. And you can imagine that a FedEx API, a UPS or a USPS API, they're not as easy and simple to use as a Stripe or a Folio API, because these companies, they're not tech companies, they're really good at doing the complex logistics of shipping, figuring out how to move packages across the country and across the world. But they're not good at building simple to use technology, at writing API documentations that are developer friendly.