Leah Solivan
General Partner, Fuel Capital. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutivehost@labunleashed ↗LinkedIn ↗fuelcapital.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
She is the founder and former CEO of TaskRabbit, an early gig-economy marketplace acquired by IKEA in 2017. Today, she is a venture capital investor backing early-stage startups through Fuel Capital and Precedent.vc.
2shows
4appearances
48statements
10resolved
8supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
Everything Leah Solivan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tim Ferriss became RunMyErrand advisor and made introductions to Floodgate and Baseline
“And I asked him to be an advisor. And on the spot, he says yes. And he says, and I want to introduce you to my good friends that are investors, Ann Miraco at Floodgate, and Steve Anderson at Baseline Ventures.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit averaged $150 task sizes with a 20% to 30% commission
“You know, the main revenue stream was the commissions, and the average task size at that time was about a 150 dollars.
And so it, the number, the numbers worked.
We took anywhere between 20 and 30% of a task, and that was, you know, net profit to us.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit users averaged one post monthly, limiting scale
“And so the lever in the model was always this repeat usage metric. Like if you could get someone to post two tasks a month or one time a week,
That was the huge lever in the model that, like, really made all the numbers work.
But on average, people were postin…”
Solivan: TaskRabbit was burning probably over $1M monthly in 2012
“I mean, at that point, I think we were burning probably over a million dollars a month.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit's direct booking model doubled metrics in London pilot
“Thank God we launched this new product in London, because we saw it work. We saw the mobile product work, this on-demand booking platform. It worked. The metrics doubled, the repeat usage, and we're like, ok, this works.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit had 1 million users and 60,000 taskers during direct-booking pivot
“Now we need to take a million people in the US and 60,000 taskers that are on the platform, and we need to transition them to a completely new way of working.”
Solivan: IKEA furniture assembly was consistently TaskRabbit's top task
“Literally since day one, Ikea Furniture Assembly was always in, yeah, I mean, it was always in the top five tasks, and it, number one, all the time.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit stayed in Boston for nearly two years before San Francisco launch
“We were this tiny company in Boston for, you know, almost two years before we even opened the San Francisco market.”
London was TaskRabbit's fourth-largest and IKEA's largest global market
“And at that point, we were live in London, internationally. London was our fourth largest market. It happened to be IKEA's first largest market in the world.”
Difficult board dynamics shaped Leah Solivan's non-imposing VC operating style
“I had a very complicated board dynamic at different points in my TaskRabbit journey, and I was always super sensitive to the imposition that an investor can have on a founder, and I always wanted to be that investor That was going to be really helpful and was …”
TaskRabbit operated as RunMyErrand.com for its first 18 months
“And I typed in the domain name runmyeran.com, and it was available on GoDaddy for six 99, so I bought it. And then for the first 18 months that we existed, we ran under that name.”
Leah Solivan built TaskRabbit's first version in six to eight weeks
“It took six to eight weeks to get something built that I felt like was ready for people to use. And then I said, okay, I need to find people that are gonna do the jobs. And so I went on Craigslist, put it out, put out an ad for someone to run errands.”
Solivan: TaskRabbit Launched Initial Beta With 30 Handpicked Taskers
“I started with 30 taskers that I handpicked.”
Solivan: IKEA preserved the TaskRabbit brand and standalone marketplace
“They haven't absorbed the brand into their own, and they continue to do all the other jobs and tasks that TaskRabbit usually does.”
Leah Solivan disengages from problems others can solve just as well
“I only like to work on problems that I feel like I can uniquely solve. And if I feel like there's someone else who can also do it and do it just as well, like, I become very disengaged and very bored and uninterested in working on it”
Solivan: Bought RunMyErrand.com on GoDaddy for $6.99 on the spot
“I typed into my iPhone into GoDaddy, runmyerrant.com, and the domain name was available for six 99. So I bought it on the spot,”
Solivan: First pivotal advisor reached for TaskRabbit was Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith
“The first person that was sort of pivotal that I reached out to was Scott Griffith, who was running Zipcar.”
Solivan onboarded the first 30 RunMyErrand runners via in-person interviews
“Yeah, I met everyone face-to-face to start, because I was terrified that, you know, there was going to be a trust and safety issue early on. And so I met them all at Zumi's Coffee Shop, thirty-minute interviews, and I brought on 30 of them to start the site.”
Solivan: Cashed out $27,000 IBM pension to fund RunMyErrand
“So I had 27,000 dollars in my IBM pension program that, you know, we could withdraw with a penalty because it was your retirement. But I was like, whatever, let's just withdraw this money. And so I gave myself like six months to make something happen.”
Solivan: Boston Was Only TaskRabbit's Tenth-Largest Market at Scale
“Even at scale with TaskRabbit, Boston was like number 10 market. For us.”
Solivan: Received a two out of ten on first fbFund pitch
“So day one, they get us to stand up, introduce ourselves to And give our 32nd pitch. And they, it's like 20 companies. And then we get rated on how well we did on day one. Out of 10. I got like a two.”
Shasta Ventures offered TaskRabbit a $5 million Series A term sheet
“And so then they put together a five million dollar term sheet.”
TaskRabbit Raised $18M Series B Led by Lightspeed
“And it was the largest round that we raised. It ended up being eighteen million dollars led by Lightspeed.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Leah'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 | General Partner, Fuel Capital | 3 | 30 | 75% 6/8 | full record on How I Built This → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | General Partner, Fuel Capital | 1 | 18 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Masters of Scale → |