The nearly $5 trillion global e-commerce market provides ample opportunities for tools and services that facilitate the often complicated, multi-carrier shipping process, including the creation of shipping labels that make e-commerce possible.
Shippo is one such company. Founded in 2013 by CEO Laura Behrens Wu and President Simon Kreuz, the San Francisco-based company provides an API, web interface to help businesses generate shipping labels, as well as support for address validation, multi-carrier support, API tracking, batch label creation, discounts and international shipping. It integrates with e-commerce platforms like eBay, Amazon and Shopify and aggregates its customers’ packages through their own account with carriers to get discounted rates, which they then pass onto customers.
Shippo Founder and CEO Laura Behrens Wu.
After moving to San Francisco from Germany to intern at a start-up LendUp, Behrens Wu was inspired enough to think about whether she could start a business herself. She recruited fellow intern Kreuz to join her. “I reached out to my co-founder, Simon, and he’s the more technical one between the two of us. So, we started brainstorming about what we could be building, and couldn’t really come up with anything world changing or groundbreaking. And then we said, ‘Okay, let’s just build an online store. Let’s just get started building something, and we’ll figure it out later. And that was our first step into just building something together,” says Behrens Wu
While they were still working at the time, they began building their online store. And that’s when they first encountered the shipping problem. They started getting orders and having to ship their products. But shipping turned out to be a huge challenge that seemed to overtake the joy of running their online store.
“Given that we were bootstrapping the business and owning the inventory ourselves, shipping required us to go on this journey to USPS standing in line. It’s not the most fun place to get advice from people working there either. That was our first foray into shipping. And we did it kind of poorly. And it was very onerous and time consuming. So, I started looking into what other tools are out there like what Stripe had done for payments or Shopify for storefronts. These are all really complex problems that they’re solving. Is there anything like that for shipping? And we couldn’t find anything that we loved. And the founder I worked for who had become a bit of a mentor at that time, was telling me, ‘Build something that’s a painkiller, not a vitamin.’ And we just realised that, yeah, shipping is a real pain point. So that was the moment where we said, ‘okay, let’s just shut that store down. And we’re going to start figuring out how to make shipping better for online stores.’ And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve been on a journey to make it easier for SMBs to ship,” says Behrens Wu.
Today, Shippo is helping over 120,000, mostly small and medium sized business customers facilitate their e-commerce shipping. With over 300 employees, the company is expanding into Europe and Australia, as well as adding offices in North America.
As a result, the company has raised $154.3 million in financing to date with its latest $50 million E Round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the company at $1 billion. Additional investors include Uncork Capital, Empede Capital, Union Square Ventures and others.
Behrens Wu grew up in Germany to a German father and Taiwanese mother and also lived in China for a period of her life. Her father discouraged the idea of being an entrepreneur because he experienced his own father being an entrepreneur, always working and traveling. “My dad deliberately said he wanted to have a nine to five job and be back for dinner every night. And he did that. And it was really enjoyable. So, I never really thought that being an entrepreneur was something that’s desirable or something that I wanted it to do,” Says Behrens Wu.
After spending time in China, she came back to Germany, but felt it was too restrictive in terms of culture and was looking for something different. After graduating from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, she had the opportunity to move to San Francisco. “I got this internship in San Francisco, almost by pure luck. I met a start-up founder at a Y Combinator event in Zurich and he volunteered to forward my resume to the YC mailing list. I got a whole lot of interviews and then able was able to get a job,” says Behrens Wu.
In short order, she went from intern at a start-up to starting her own online store, which later led to the co-founding of Shippo. While the business grew and became successful, she would have to face the challenges of transitioning from the ‘do-it-all’ founder to the CEO of a mid-sized company valued at $1 billion with several hundred employees around the world. “I’m having a much better time being CEO now, compared to years ago. I think it comes with personal development and working with a CEO Coach. I have been working on this for a few years now. Managing people is not a natural skill, it has to be a learned. And they don’t teach that to you in school or college. When you’re the CEO, you have to start managing people pretty soon and you kind of learn by trial and error. And the first errors are really painful. But once you go through that, it gets it gets easier. And then more recently, I now have a team of executives around me who are incredible to work with and from whom I learn so much from every day,” Says Behrens Wu.
As for the future? “Shipping is powering commerce on the internet and we want to make this a global business. I think the other part is, we’re still very early with making sure that with scale comes the data and analytics that can make our product smarter and more intuitive, but also more predictive for our customers. And we’re still pretty early in that stage. But we’re excited to go down that route,” concludes Behrens Wu.
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