5 Founder Lessons From Building and Scaling TaskRabbit

Tell everyone you know, and even people you don't know about your idea. Now this is sometimes counterintuitive. A lot of people will say, oh, I have this great idea. It's going to be massive and I don't want to tell anyone. I want to keep it a secret. Someone's going to steal my idea. Now remember TaskRabbit? Many people had this idea. I was not the first one to have it. But it's all about the execution. It's what you do with the idea that will make it big. I need some tract. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction Podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B O A S T AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy and an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA. Special thanks to our Podcast partner, Content Allies From Podcast Production and promotion, content allies helps B2B companies build revenue generating podcast. We recommend them to any B2B company that's looking to launch or streamline their podcast production. Learn more@content allies.com I generally have personal.

Stories with all our speakers. I do the speaker outreach and tend to pick products that we all use. So I dated my wife since high school and been together for 20 years and all through those 20 years she's told me one thing consistently, you can't even put a nail on the Wall. You can't even put a frame up. You can't even move anything. You do no housework. Why am I even marrying you? I heard this forever. So the awesome thing is, several years ago, we discovered TaskRabbit. Now she doesn't even ask me. Because everything from a nail to a wall hanging to anything in the house gets done by TaskRabbit. So I'm super excited to announce the founder of TaskRabbit, Leah Busk. They recently sold the company to IKEA. Give it up for Leah.

Hey, everyone. Best intro ever. I love hearing the personal stories. How many people in the room have used heard of TaskRabbit, maybe have their own crazy personal story? All right, I see some hands. I love hearing all the stories. People come up to me all the time and say, I have to tell you about this. One time I used TaskRabbit and I'm like, what are they gonna say? Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but that's startup life. So today I wanna walk you through my story of founding TaskRabbit and share with you some lessons that I've learned along the way. I actually started out as an engineer, and so part of my story is really how I transitioned from an engineer into an entrepreneur. It was a journey that I didn't really plan, it just happened that way. And there are a lot of things that I wish I had known and before I founded a company. And so here are a few of those lessons that hopefully inspire you. The first lesson I learned are ideas are everywhere. I think about ideas like the air we breathe. They're all around us, they surround us all the time. I used to be one of those people that thought, oh, all the good ideas are taken and I can possibly think of something new or novel that's going to change the world. I was an engineer at IBM for eight years, working on products such as Lotus Notes and Domino programming and C. And so I always had these little ideas and I would always code them up and do hackathons and things, but I always thought, what is that next game changing idea? I think what I realized is that a great idea isn't an invention, it's a discovery. And you really have to be open to discovering all the amazing, world changing, game changing ideas around you. And to do that, you have to be in a certain mindset. Now, the idea for TaskRabbit came about way back in 2008, over a decade ago. I was living in Boston at the time, which is where I'm from, and it was February of 2008. I remember it was February because it was a cold winter night. It was snowing outside. It was one of these Boston area blizzards. And my husband and I were getting ready to go out to dinner when we realized we were out of dog food. And this is our hundred pound yellow lab named Kobe, who we typically kept very well fed. But that night, when we realized we were out of dog food, we were in a panic. We had called a cab to take us across town to meet friends for dinner. How we were going to get this dog food, it was such a simple problem. Why wasn't there a simple solution? What if all the stores were closed on the way home? What if we grabbed the dog food on the way to the restaurant and then we're going to carry it with us into the booth at the restaurant? It just didn't make sense. In 2008, the iPhone had just come out four months earlier. So there was no app store, no one was building on location based systems. And Facebook was really just breaking out of the college scene and becoming more mainstream. My husband's also in technology, so we'd always have these very geeky conversations in the house. And that night it turned into, wouldn't it be nice if there was just a place online we could go, say we needed dog food, name the price we were willing to pay. We were certain that there was someone in our own neighborhood that would be willing to help us out. Maybe even someone at the store at that very second. And it was just a matter of connecting. This was long before you would jump into a stranger's car, let alone let a stranger into your house. So it really was a crazy idea. But it also wasn't. I wasn't the first person to have the idea for TaskRabbit. Four months later, I ended up quitting my job at IBM to build the first version of the site. Get it launched in Boston. And it snowballed from there. Now people come up to me all the time and say, oh, TaskRabbit. I had this same idea 10 years ago. I had this idea and I was like, that's great. What did you do with it? And they're like, oh, nothing. I just, I thought of it and I'm like, of course. Because it's not an invention. I didn't invent TaskRabbit. I didn't invent the idea that you could call up a neighbor or connect with a friend and ask them for a favor or even exchange money to have a favor done. And so that made me Realize that again, these ideas that are game changing, that are world changing, are more discoveries and you have to be in that entrepreneurial mindset. So I like to tell the founding story like it was this moment of inspiration. I needed dog food that night and I just came up with the idea for TaskRabbit and the rest is history. But the truth is, many months leading up to that moment of inspiration, I was thinking in a very entrepreneurial way. I was getting a little bit bored at IBM. I was thinking about what are the other things that I could be doing, what else is out there for me? And. And I had actually started building websites on the side and thinking about what are the other ideas around me that I should be exploring. If anyone has read the book by Adam Grant, Originals, anyone? Amazing book. I highly recommend it. He talks about this concept in the book of Vuja Day. Now, you're probably familiar with deja vu, right? It's when you see something for the first time, but it feels really familiar, like you've seen it before. Vuja Day is the opposite of that. That's when you've seen something a thousand times, but you're able to take a step back and look at it differently. And that's exactly what I did that night when I was out of dog food. I have to confess, it was not the first time we had run out of dog food for Kobe, but it was the first time that we took a step back and we said, is there a different solution to this problem? We could have just went on with our lives. We could have went to dinner with friends and never thought about it again. But we didn't. We thought, how can I solve this? And what are the technologies at play right now, social location and mobile that are just emerging in the last four months? How has the world changed in the last four months that can make possible today what wasn't possible before? Second lesson learned. Tell everyone you know and even people you don't know about your idea. Now, this is sometimes counterintuitive. A lot of people will say, oh, I have this great idea. It's going to be massive and I don't want to tell anyone. I want to keep it a secret. Someone's going to steal my idea. Now remember TaskRabbit, many people had this idea. I was not the first one to have it. But it's all about the execution. It's what you do with the idea that will make it big. You also are not going to know everything you need to know to execute on your idea. Maybe you will But I didn't certainly. I was just an engineer at IBM. I had no idea how to raise money, how to market, how to build a team, how to hire, how to fire, how to open new markets, how to open internationally. And so there was a lot to learn. And if you can surround yourself with people that know how to do those things and learn from them, then your journey can go a lot faster. So I mentioned we went to dinner that night with friends and we started talking about this idea for TaskRabbit. About a month later, we were again out to dinner with some friends that Kevin, my husband, worked with. And one of the women there said I was telling her about the idea I had for TaskRabbit. And she said, you would really love this idea. My friend Scott, you should just email him. Here's his email address. I think that he would find what you're doing really interesting. And I said, okay. And I just kept rambling on. I didn't really ask too many other questions. So I actually dug up this email from 2008, and it turned out I sent this late at night one night. The next morning, Scott replies back, I didn't realize it was Scott Griffith, who is the CEO of Zipcar. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, right? I maybe wouldn't have had the nerve. She didn't tell me that he was the CEO of this company to email him. So I sent him this cold email, and I basically said, I need some help. I need some experience, I need some insight. I think I want to build this into a company, but all I know how to do is code this product. I don't know anything about raising money. And to his credit, he wrote back to me quickly. He said, why don't you come by my office, we'll set up a time and you can tell me more. Scott and I just really hit it off. And he took me under his wing. He was one of my very first mentors and advisors. He actually let me sit at the Zipcar office for free for a year. I started getting this idea off the ground. By that point, I decided to quit my job at IBM. And. And it was actually Scott who challenged me and said, I think you're really onto something here. I think you should see how far you can take it. And so I ended up sitting at Zipcar for about a year, bootstrapping the concept for TaskRabbit, getting it launched in the Boston area. And the story goes on from there. Now, I remember a particular moment where I had a lot of anxiety that I didn't know how to build a company. I didn't know how to build a business. All I knew how to do was code this product, product. But what was I going to do after that? And I think sometimes our fear of what we don't know, of the unknown, can be so paralyzing, it can stop us in our tracks. But what I've learned is that you have to think about everything around you as just something that you can learn and grow from. And I remember having this conversation with myself and it sounds really funny, but I told myself it's not rocket science. Whatever it is that I don't know, it's okay, I'll figure it out. I'll surround myself with people that know how to do the things that I don't know how to do and we'll just figure it out together. And so I created this amazing board over the years of advisors and directors and mentors, including Scott, that really helped me along the way. One of the really fun stories I like to tell is about Tim Ferriss, who came on as an advisor to TaskRabbit in 2009 pretty early on in the company's life cycle. Now, I didn't know Tim in advance. It was actually Scott Griffith who had told me about an incubator program that Facebook was running in the summer of 2009 called FB Fund. And it was this accelerator program. And I applied and Scott encouraged me to. He actually connected me to one of the other participants in the program named John Zimmer, one of the CEOs and co founders of Zimrad, which then became Lyft. I talked to John about it. I said, what do you think? And I decided to do the program. I had never been to the west coast in my life. I was an east coast girl. I got on a plane, packed my bags, flew to San Francisco and did this incubator program. I was flying back and forth between Boston and San Francisco that summer. It was a 12 week program. Still bootstrapping the company on my own, maxing out credit cards. And I was on my way back to Boston when I get an email from one of the coordinators of the program saying, Tim Ferriss will be in the office on Monday. He's taking 15 minute meetings with all the portfolio companies. If you'd like to meet Tim, you can sign up here. I was like, oh wow, Tim Ferriss. He had just written the Four Hour Workweek. There was a lot of synergy between what he wrote about in his book about living efficiently and productivity. And what I was building was taskrabbit And I was like, wow, he'd be an amazing advisor and, and maybe he could even connect me to people in his network. But I'm on a plane flying back to Boston at this moment. What is it going to cost me to get turnaround when I land and get back on the plane to San Francisco just so I can meet Tim Ferriss for 15 minutes. Is that really worth it? And so I looked up flights and it was $700 to get back on the plane and go back west for a 15 minute meeting with Tim. $700 is a lot of money. It was especially a lot of money to me then when I was maxing out credit cards in order to build this business. And so I made a deal with myself. I said, all right, if I go get this ticket, put it on the credit card, fly back west, meet Tim for 15 minutes. I have to turn that meeting somehow into a seed round of funding because we're getting close to the end of the incubator program. There was going to be a demo day. I thought maybe Tim can help me raise a real seed round of funding for this company. And so I said, okay, if I can turn this $700 into a million dollars, that is the only way this will be worth it to me. Any other outcome, I have failed. And so Tim and I met for 15 minutes. I turned that 15 minute meeting into a lunch conversation that happened the week. And at the end of that lunch conversation, Tim agreed to be an advisor. So I was really excited about that. And then he said, why don't you let me introduce you to some of my favorite investors. One of those people being Ann Mierico, who's the founder of Floodgate Fund, who wrote a million dollar check into TaskRabbit. Thank God. I decided to follow my gut, to follow my instincts and to take that $715 minute meeting with Tim and, and progress it into a seed round of funding. Now, I've reflected a lot recently on this and the path that it took for me to go from an engineer at IBM with Zero Network, zero entrepreneur friends and startup in Boston, all the way to raising my first million dollars in seed. It was Kevin, my husband's friend, A.G. who had connected me with Scott Griffith. Scott and A.G. had worked together at a prior company, and so she said, reach out to Scott. It was Scott then that had connected me to John Zimmer, who was cutting a deal between Zimride and Zipcar at the time. And I met John as he was flying through the office in Boston one day negotiating a deal with Scott. He helped me get into Facebook Fund from Facebook Fund it was. That was how I met Tim Ferriss, who then introduced me to Ann at Floodgate. Completing the circle. When I think about all the other connections along the way that made up this massive sort of serendipitous network of happenings, it's really astounding to think about because at any given point along the way, what if I hadn't gone to dinner with AG that night? What if AG and Scott had never worked together? What if John Zimmer hadn't been in the Zipcar office that day so that I could meet him in person to talk about Facebook Fund? What if Tim Ferriss said he wasn't going to come by for 15 minutes to meet the portfolio companies at Facebook Fund? And what if then I had never gotten introduced to Ann? There are so many reasons why a certain path isn't going to work. It just can't work. But there's also all of these serendipitous moments that happen and you just never know what is going to be the conversation, what is going to be the connection that helps you take your company to the next level. I believe as an entrepreneur, it's our job to remember that every single connection we make, every single conversation we have can lead to something greater and be optimistic about that. So having big, hairy, audacious goals is lesson number three. I like to think about them as the the monsters from the book where the Wild Things Are. These big hairy, audacious goals that are just so massive and so crazy that you're afraid to just share them with people because they're embarrassing sometimes. I remember this one time at TaskRabbit, I challenged my team to do this post it note exercise where we all put on the whiteboard all of the crazy goals and crazy ideas we could possibly build with TaskRabbit. And someone on the team said, we'll be successful when. And this was 2010, when President Obama posts a task on TaskRabbit, we thought that would be so funny and so hilarious and we put it up on the board and we went on our way. Three years later, we found ourselves at the White House Press presenting to President Obama and his team about how the TaskRabbit platform could be used as part of disaster recovery efforts in organizing volunteers around a particular location, particular skill sets. And so for me, the lesson learned was you have to have these big, hairy, audacious goals, just really crazy ideas. But you have to understand what the baby steps are to get there and to meet them, you have to think about what can I do in the next 24 hours to move my company forward. And today that might mean something as simple as taking out the trash, but tomorrow that might mean actually preparing a presentation to the president. And so every day thinking about what I can do today and then having these big goals in mind for the future. This lesson is interesting because I feel like on so many teams, as we hire people, great people around us, we sometimes forget that surrounding ourselves with entrepreneurs and finding people just as agile and scrappy and lean as you are can be really important, particularly in the early days. One of the lessons here is that done is always better than perfect. So getting things out the door, shipping things, getting them out to customers, getting feedback is so important. And working entrepreneurially in this cycle of testing and iterating, measuring and improving is really helpful. There is a danger here though that I'll warn you that I experienced at TaskRabbit and that is if you're always testing and iterating in short cycles, then you may be missing bold new peaks. And here's what I mean by that. In 2014 at TaskRabbit we made a massive product change. A year prior to that, I challenged the team to really think about are we optimizing for, for the right things, Are we building the biggest business we can? We had an auction based marketplace, we had a beautiful web presence, but we hadn't really tackled mobile yet in a meaningful way. And so I said to the team, we're optimizing on this peak and we're improving the log and flow and we're improving conversions and revenue is growing. But is there a bigger peak out there? Is there another mountain we should be climbing that we need to leap towards? And that's when we made the massive product switch in 2014 to be mobile first mobile centric and to really have this direct to consumer booking model. It was painful to do this product change and operational shift, but it was necessary because there was a whole other range behind us that we weren't even seeing when we were optimizing on that first mountain. Now here's the last lesson I want to leave with you and it's my favorite one. Winners don't win, they succeed. What do I mean by that? I think about winning as putting points on the board. It's about revenue, it's about achieving certain goals, but succeeding is more than that. Succeeding can include winning, can include results, but it also includes purpose, impact. Did you act with the right values in mind? Quick Story of a big corporation, a big company. It's a sales organization. This is a real story, although I won't name the name of the company. The management team decided that they really wanted to challenge the employee base to have very aggressive sales goals for the quarter. And they said, we want to increase sales by 30%. You guys need to perform by any means necessary. And so the teams then started looking halfway through the quarter at the results and they were like, we're not going to make it. We're not going to meet these aggressive goals. What do we do? What they decided to do was were start overcharging customers, start recommending work that was unnecessary so that they could pump up their numbers and achieve the goals. At the end of that quarter, the management team looked at the results and they said, hey, congratulations, you guys won. You guys are winners. You won for this quarter. You did exactly what we asked you to do, but it wasn't sustainable. Couple quarters keep going by and people start to realize that those teams weren't acting with the right values, they weren't having the right impact and the growth was not sustainable. I always knew very early on at TaskRabbit that we were going to be successful. I did not always know that we were going to win in the space, but I knew that we would succeed very early on. There was the story of a woman in San Francisco. She had a 20 year old son in Boston. We were only open in two markets at the time time. Unfortunately, her son was going through chemotherapy treatment at Mass General Hospital and was very sick. She couldn't fly out to Boston to be with him. And so she went on TaskRabbit. She asked someone to go to the hospital every day for a week to visit her son, to bring him some healthy food and a blanket and to sit with him for 30 minutes every single day and then call her afterwards and give her the report. The tasker that picked up that job in Boston was actually another mom. And the bond that these two moms formed across the country was incredible. And at that moment when we were only open in two cities, only a couple years into the company, I knew that we were going to be successful because we were redefining who you could rely on, who your neighbors were, and we were operating with impact that was beyond imaginable. So my favorite lesson is you can succeed without winning, and you can win but not succeed. So you got to decide what the most important value is to you. Thank you.

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