Sandra Oh Lin
Founder & CEO, KiwiCo · 2 appearances on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@sandraohlin ↗LinkedIn ↗kiwico.com ↗
Sandra Oh Lin is the founder and CEO of KiwiCo, a company delivering hands-on STEAM project kits for children. Trained as a chemical engineer, she previously held product and management roles at Procter & Gamble, PayPal, and eBay.
23statements → 12claims → 5claims resolved → 40%fully supported → 3.87/5average certainty → 1.22/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
2 supported 3 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 11 assertions · 3 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 7 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 Sandra argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Oh Lin: KiwiCo's founding team included YouTube's first engineer and PayPal co-founder
“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”
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 Sandra Oh Lin on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Sandra Oh Lin said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Sandra Oh Lin: Male seed VCs deferred to their wives on KiwiCo
“I mean, I think we did, I don't know, somewhere between 30 to 40 different meetings with Different folks. And even though they could see it or they would ask their wives what they thought of the concept we weren't necessarily kind of securing the funding until…”
Sandra Oh Lin: VCs pattern-match, creating fundraising friction for female 'mompreneurs'
“I do think, especially for early stage investing, there is an element of pattern matching for investors, and there is a little bit of a lens where I was a, you know a mompreneur.”
KiwiCo accepted a preemptive $5M Series A round instead of waiting for higher valuation
“What ended up happening is that we had a number of potential investors reach out to us, and we decided to do a preemptive Series A raise, and it was debated. At the time, like, should we do this or should we wait and potentially try to go for a higher valuatio…”
Sandra Oh Lin: Some families will permanently shift to homeschooling post-pandemic
“I imagine to a certain extent that some people will actually choose to continue to homeschool their children, so there actually may be a shift there.”
Oh Lin: KiwiCo's founding team included YouTube's first engineer and PayPal co-founder
“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”
Lin: Early online ads failed because kids' subscription box search demand did not exist
“Then we started doing some online advertising, but in the beginning it really did not work that well because people weren't looking for kids subscription boxes or even necessarily science projects online at that point.”
KiwiCo's multi-line launch drove 10x subscription growth in three months
“The subscriptions that we saw a Acquired over those first three months across those lines was 10 X what we had seen for Kiwi crate originally.”
KiwiCo shipped over 20M crates in the four years after hitting 1M
“In 2015, after we made the shift and we launched these three additional lines, we ended up shipping out our one millionth crate. But then over the next four years, we shipped out more than twenty million crates.”
KiwiCo reached its first month of profitability in 2016
“So if you look at that launch at the end of 2014, and you look at our first month of profit The ability in 2016, there's kind of this direct line from that.”
Multi-product subscriptions improve unit economics by amortizing shipping across multi-child households
“And because now we had an expanded offering, we saw a number of shipments going out with more than one crate. And we positioned shipping as free for the consumer, but obviously shipping is not Free to us. And so the fact that we were able to then amortize ship…”
Lin: KiwiCo Raised Only Just Over $10M in Total Equity Financing
“We basically ended up in a position where we didn't have to raise any more money and so I think for a company like ours, it's pretty unusual to have only raised a little bit over ten million dollars in equity financing but we got to a place where we could be s…”
Sandra Oh Lin: KiwiCo has shipped over 50 million crates
“You know, we've shipped out over fifty million crates at this point because that message actually does resonate.”
Oh Lin: KiwiCo aspires to become a household brand like Lego
“I think when I'm posed that question, I think more about kind of wanting to become a household brand. I really admire companies like a Lego, for example, and what they've been able to do with the brick.”
KiwiCo shipped its second 10M crates in just 18 months
“So I think you had mentioned, Guy, kind of in the beginning that we shipped out over twenty million crates now. And so if you look at kind of the first ten million crates We hit that mark actually in January, 2019. And then in the next like 18 months or so, we…”
Lin: Product testing with children requires direct observation over verbal feedback
“Depending on the age of the kid, it's not so much that they're going to tell you what's going on. You actually have to observe what's going on.”
Lin: eBay's fashion division was a $2 billion business
“Yeah, it was about a two billion dollar business and I was the general manager for the fashion business.”
Lin: Playdates Began as a Way to Amortize Craft Prep Time
“I started pulling together different materials and different ideas, and I found that it was taking quite a bit of time. And so I was like, okay, I need to amortize. My time, I started to invite my friends, their kids over for playdates, and they would make and…”
Oh Lin: KiwiCo initially sourced all items domestically due to low volume
“In the beginning, we knew. That we did not have the volume to be able to go out to suppliers. And so we were literally sourcing each individual item and sourcing that domestically to start.”
KiwiCo brings kids into its offices four to eight times weekly for testing
“In every office that we've had, we have a sizable room, and four to eight times a week kids are coming in to test the products at various stages.”
Lin: KiwiCo crates are intentionally not gender- or racially-specific
“When we create our crates, we believe that it's really important that they're universal and that they are not gender specific or racially specific. We're very, very intentional about that.”
KiwiCo crashed its own website launching a COVID-19 learning resource hub
“And so when we actually launched that resource hub, we actually crashed her site. We sent out the email announcing it and demonstrating that there was quite a bit of a need there.”
KiwiCo validated its market through living room focus groups and national surveys
“So early on, I was very, very interested in talking to consumers. So I did qualitative focus groups in my living room and my friend's living rooms also did surveys actually got thousands of responses across the U S because they also recognize that I live in a …”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| KiwiCo: Sandra Oh Lin | Dec 25, 2023 | 29m |
| How I Built Resilience: Sandra Oh Lin of KiwiCo | Sep 5, 2020 | 12m |