Earlier than Jennifer Fleiss joined the boards of Yale Ventures, luxurious behemoth Lanvin and photograph service Shutterfly, she was a Harvard Enterprise College graduate trying to start out an organization with classmate Jennifer Hyman. The yr was 2009, and the 2 aimed to show customers to lease designer clothes through subscriptions to a brand new ecommerce firm they referred to as Hire the Runway.
Fleiss acknowledges the numerous psychological well being hurdles she confronted all through her tenure on the New York-based firm’s helm, and says that the connection she shares with cofounder Hyman was important to serving to her persevere.
“The idea that you’re not in this alone because your cofounder implicitly cares just as much as you do…that’s what kept me afloat in a very sane way amidst losing my mom and having three kids while being at Rent the Runway,” Fleiss stated Tuesday in dialog with Bonobos and Pie founder Andy Dunn at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech convention.
Fleiss, who’s now a companion at enterprise capital fund Initialized Capital and the cofounder of scooter suitcase model Roll Rider (alongside her three youngsters), grew Hire the Runway into one of the well-funded shopper manufacturers of 2010s. After launching the corporate, which lets ladies lease outfits, clothes, and formalwear made by high-fashion manufacturers and have it delivered to their door, Hyman and Fleiss raised almost $700 million in enterprise capital funding. They then grew the corporate to 1,000-plus staff earlier than a 2021 IPO, by which the corporate started buying and selling at a $1.7 billion valuation.
The 2 cofounders applied biweekly check-ins with one another, the place they have been “forced to sit down” and chat about their relationship–whether or not they “had something to talk about or not.” Fleiss, who had a $12 million stake within the firm on the time of its IPO, per Forbes, credit this structured accountability for her success and the energy of her partnership with CEO Hyman: “There was some hard stuff that came up and some funny stuff that came up.”
Although Fleiss transitioned to Hire the Runway’s board in 2017 and took a job because the CEO of Walmart non-public purchasing subsidiary JetBlack (which was shuttered in 2020), she says that she nonetheless talks with Hyman every day. Fleiss notes that a few of that is business-related, however a lot of it’s “life-related.”
“In the course of Rent the Runway, what I feel the most proud of is my relationship with Jen [Hyman],” stated Fleiss, acknowledging the difficulties the enterprise confronted amid the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for formal outfits all however disappeared. (Round this time the corporate reported internet losses of greater than $150 million for 2 consecutive years).
Fleiss displays on her 16 years constructing Hire the Runway with Hyman: “There were so many hard and special moments. Like a spouse–no one lives through that with you in the same way.”
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