Leah Solivan
General Partner, Fuel Capital · 3 appearances on the record.
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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.
30statements → 18claims → 8claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.9/5average certainty → 1.27/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
6 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 10 not checkable as stated how the 18 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
18 assertions · 2 opinions · 5 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 18 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 8 are resolved, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Leah argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Leah Solivan on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Leah Solivan said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Solivan: Evaluating new startup ideas depends on timing, technology, and TAM
“Having experience now as an investor and having talked to hundreds, if not thousands of entrepreneurs, I really think it comes down to three things. Timing, technology, And TAM, the three T's.”
Solivan: Public education is too slow and underfunded for venture capital
“From a venture investor standpoint, which is where my brain works you know, the industry is so fragmented it's slow, it's underfunded and there's not a lot of room, you know, to innovate.”
Solivan: Founders must pitch broad visions but execute on narrow wedges
“I think as a founder, you have so many ideas, you see all the possibilities, and really, you have to pitch all of those possibilities to kind of bring people in and inspire them and get the company off the ground, but when it comes down to execution and custom…”
Solivan: Facebook's social graph creates sufficient trust for peer-to-peer services
“And so I saw Facebook as a way to leverage the social graph to build trust between people. So if I could tell you that, You know, you need your dry cleaning picked up, and the person that was gonna pick up your dry cleaning was two degrees of separation from y…”
Solivan: Facebook Offered $15,000 for Equity to Join fbFund Incubator
“So we get the offer from Facebook to come out to do the incubator program. It's 15,000 dollars. And it's for a chunk of the company. It's like, you know, a few percentage points of the company.”
Solivan: Boston's DIY culture hindered TaskRabbit, requiring a San Francisco move
“I think the culture of Bostonians is a very do-it-yourself mentality. And so that was some friction for this type of service, and I felt like if we could just get to San Francisco, where, you know, it's the tech company capital of the world, like, this is the …”
Solivan: TaskRabbit Hired an External CEO Too Early to Scale
“I think when I look back, it was more about timing because the business was too early. To bring in someone that was a step away from the core vision, and the business still needed me to really drive the momentum forward. He was brought into scale. It was too e…”
Solivan: TaskRabbit would have abandoned direct booking without London pilot validation
“Thank God we launched that London product, because if we hadn't, we would have been completely overwhelmed by that vocal minority, and we could have pulled back. We could have completely decided not to move forward, just based on the feedback, because it was s…”
Solivan: Mashing up social, location, and mobile enabled new marketplace platforms
“I saw those three technologies, social, location, and mobile, and I, that was what was interesting to me at the time. It was like, I can mash up these three technologies and create a new platform that no one has launched before.”
Solivan: Did early TaskRabbit errands personally on a scooter
“I ended up being the one doing a lot of the early jobs. I had this little scooter that I rode around Boston, a Charlestown area, and I would do a lot of the early jobs myself, and so I would then get, like, first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be A task…”
Solivan: 2008 Crisis Flooded TaskRabbit With Laid-Off Professionals Seeking Errand Work
“It was overwhelming. And the, I mean, the skill sets, and the talent, and these people were educated, and they'd gone to college, they were pharmacists, they were lawyers, they were teachers, they were being laid off. And they were looking for new ways to make…”
Solivan: RunMyErrand closed a $50K angel tranche in March 2009
“And the investors say, let's start with 50 K. We'll give you 50 K. Let's see how you do. So we start with 50 K. That was March in 2009.”
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.”
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.”
Appearances (3)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Advice Line: Reaching New Customers | Oct 3, 2024 | 3m |
| Advice Line with Leah Solivan of Taskrabbit | Sep 12, 2024 | 11m |
| TaskRabbit: Leah Solivan | Jul 11, 2022 | 44m |