Katrina Lake
Founder & Executive Chairperson, Stitch Fix. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@kmlake ↗stitchfix.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Katrina Lake founded the fashion subscription and styling service Stitch Fix in 2011 while attending Harvard Business School. In 2017, she led the company through its initial public offering, becoming the youngest woman at the time to take a company public.
2shows
3appearances
47statements
10resolved
9supported
0contradicted
90%fully supported
35said about them ↓ Everything Katrina Lake said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Katrina Lake: Disproportionate Capital Gives Male Founders More Chances to Succeed
“Raising hundreds of millions of dollars, like it's such a huge advantage. And like, I think it was really hard to watch a lot of, you know, like mostly male founders, many who are bombastic and, you know, have these big visions. And I felt like my vision was b…”
Lake: Informal VC settings like Tahoe hot tubs structurally exclude female founders
“I live up in Tahoe, and like, you know, entrepreneurs, they come to me, and like, they come and hang out with me in Tahoe, and they like, drink beers in my hot tub, and like, I get to know them and their businesses, and like, you know, there's part of that tha…”
Katrina Lake: Growth Is Most Important if Unit Economics Work
“Growth is almost always going to be most important, predicated on the fact that, you know, this is a healthy business and one where the math works.”
Lake: 94% of VCs are men who lack passion for women's apparel
“94% of venture investors are men, and probably the majority of men don't feel passionate about dressing women.”
Katrina Lake: Imposter Syndrome Is Caused by Exclusionary Tech Environments
“Historically people have talked about imposter syndrome as being Something that individuals deal with, like that you or I are wrangling with, but actually this is something that like the environment is creating. Like the technology ecosystem is, is excluding p…”
Katrina Lake: Silicon Valley Decision-Makers and VCs Are Far Too Homogeneous
“They are far, far, far too homogeneous. We need much greater representation in decision makers and boardrooms and, you know, people who are the ones making decisions at VC funds. We need much, much greater diversity and representation.”
Lake: Curated apparel delivery beats spending evenings with 30 browser tabs
“If you could, instead of going to a mall all day, or instead of spending, you know, your entire evening with 30 browser tabs open to try to compare and contrast different jeans you want to buy, if you could get a box sent to you that had Two pairs of jeans, or…”
Lake: Venture capitalists want portfolio companies to be a zero or a billion
“Like they want billion dollar businesses and they would either rather, they want you to be a zero or a billion and everything in the middle is not that attractive.”
Lake: VC structural unfairness requires increasing women in venture leadership roles
“And I think the, there are elements of it that just feel structurally unfair that I don't think get solved unless you change the proportion of men and women that are in leadership roles in venture capital.”
Katrina Lake: Traditional Retail and Early E-Commerce Failed at Apparel Discovery
“The store's world is broken for obvious reasons of just putting every single skew on the floor and expecting people to sift through it. But what was interesting was just, you know, kind of e-commerce and online and all of the kind of new technology to me still…”
Katrina Lake: Stitch Fix Has Sold $6B in Clothing Sight Unseen
“Stitch Fix to date, we have sold six billion dollars of clothes sight unseen.”
Stitch Fix Turns Inventory Six Times Yearly Versus Retail Average of Four
“Even today, we turn our inventory over six times a year, where, you know, a lot of traditional retail turns at something more like four.”
Katrina Lake: Customer LTV Is the Best North Star Metric
“Really focusing on what is the lifetime value of a customer and what are all the ways that you can increase and improve that? Like, I think that is, I mean, it's just the best North star.”
Katrina Lake: Personal Trust Lets Leaders Act Without Explaining Every Detail
“To be able to build that trust of people feeling like they know me as a human helps when I can't share every single detail around why we decided to make a decision, or when I can't bring people along on every single detail after why, and being able to have tha…”
Katrina Lake: Stitch Fix Reached $1 Billion in Revenue in Five Years
“We went, you know, from zero to a billion in five years or something”
Stanford's stereotypical founder culture deterred Katrina Lake from pursuing entrepreneurship
“The people who are the entrepreneur types at Stanford were very different than kind of how I saw myself, and so it took a really long time, I think, for me to realize that entrepreneurship would be a good path And I think there's a lot of other people out ther…”
Stitch Fix raised under $50M to build a billion-dollar business
“We raised less than fifty million dollars. The business is now over a billion dollars, and so you know, I think our, the amount of capital that we raised was actually very modest relative to you know, where, where we'd end up, but in the early days, yes, we di…”
Fundraising was never Katrina Lake's strength as a startup founder
“Fundraising is not my towering strength. It's just, it's not the thing that helped me to be a good entrepreneur. You know, I probably wasn't very good at it then. I don't know that I'm terribly good at it now. You know, capital wasn't necessarily one of those …”
Katrina Lake wants to be a great CEO, not a 'female CEO'
“I think there are times when, you know, it can be like, oh, she's a great female CEO. I'm like, I just want to be a great CEO. Like, I don't need the female part of it. I just want to be a great CEO. And so that part can irritate me because, you know, I think …”
Katrina Lake tracked female executives in Google Sheets during business school
“There are many more female CEOs out there. When I was writing my business school essay, like, I remember I was, like, I had Google spreadsheets of, like, women executives, and I was pathing, how did they get there? And, I mean, you know, there were very few wo…”
Lake found pairing data scientists and stylists outperformed like-minded teams
“One of the epiphanies with Stitch Fix was that to be able to have two people in a room that had very different perspectives on how to solve a problem ended up with better outcomes than two people who thought the same way. For example, when we have data scienti…”
Lake warns employees must outgrow nostalgia for early-stage chaos to scale
“I think this is practical for me as CEO, but I think it's also practical for anybody who's employed at a company that's growing, where, you know, I think there are people who say, like, I love the early stages, running out of toner and, you know, crazy running…”
Lake: Startup founders are just unqualified, normal people with ideas
“I probably met over a hundred entrepreneurs in the time that I was there. And the most important learning, actually, was that all of these people were just, like, super unqualified, normal people with lots of ideas, just like I was.”
The other half of the tape: Katrina Lake's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 18 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 21Rebecca Kaden 3Harry Stebbings 3Nikhil Basu Trivedi 2Iman Abuzeid 1Eurie Kim 1Anu Duggal 1
Statements about Katrina Lake, by other people (3)
Stitch Fix Reached Cash Flow Positivity in 3 Years on $42M Raised
“Prior to their IPO in 2017, Katrina raised just forty two million dollars in venture funding, from some of the very best in venture, including Bill Gurley at Benchmark and Steve Anderson at Baseline, and in just six years, Katrina took the company from foundin…”
Kaden: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake is exceptional at team building
“An entrepreneur who's fantastic at that, even though she's not in our portfolio is Katrina Lake at Stitch Fix. I've learned a lot from watching her. She just has hired an incredible team to execute there.”
Ma: Why she studies Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake's public earnings calls
“I do listen to Katrina's earnings calls because there's so few female CEO leaders who do them that to hear her do it, In a way that is both strong, but uniquely different to the way many men do it is, is a learning opportunity for me.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 21
20VC 11
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
2021 8 mentions in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Birchbox: Katia Beauchamp
- 20VC: Biggest Lessons from Working with John Doerr, How Founders Can Have Discussions of Vulnerability with Their Board and Investors & Marrying Another Founder; The Pros, Cons and Ways To Make it Succeed with Alyson Friedensohn, Co-Founder & CEO @ Modern
- 20VC: Why Most Founders Do Not Structure Their Fundraise Correctly, The Pros Of Having An MBA As A Startup Founder & How To Manage The Psychology Of Being CEO and Overcome Self Doubt with Iman Abuzeid, Founder & CEO @ Incredible Health
- Dell Computers: Michael Dell (2018)
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 10 mentions in 9 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: 3 Core Considerations When Investing In Physical Product Co's, Are We In A Direct-To-Consumer Bubble & Why Many Sub $100m Funds Are Moving Earlier and Earlier with Nick Brown, Managing Partner @ Imaginary
- 20VC: Top 3 Considerations When Evaluating Consumer Businesses Today | 700 Meetings, 70 LPs, 2 Years, What It Takes To Raise a First Time Fund| The Power of The Female Network In Action Today with Anu Duggal, Founding Partner @ Female Founders Fund
- ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd
- Steve Madden: Steve Madden
- Panera Bread/Au Bon Pain: Ron Shaich
- Dermalogica: Jane Wurwand (2016)
- Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine
- Dell Computers: Michael Dell
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2018 →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Katrina's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & Executive Chairperson, Stitch Fix | 2 | 32 | 100% 6/6 | full record on How I Built This → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Executive Chairperson, Stitch Fix | 1 | 15 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |