Create your own personal board of directors. Try to surround yourself with people you can lean on and people you can look to for advice.What advice do you have for people who are transitioning perhaps into a completely new career or industry? I want to be that person for entrepreneurs who are just getting started and help them build amazing companies that are going to change the world. When I think about my early stage investors… to this day they are still the three people I call for advice. As an early stage fund we’re looking at companies who are trying to raise a seed round of funding (under 2M) as well as participating in rounds with a syndicate. And I love thinking about what are the new emerging technologies, and what’s happening right now in AI, VR, and Blockchain. I’ll be looking at a lot of consumer marketplaces but because of my deep technical background as well as because I love infrastructure stuff. With my operational experience and background at TaskRabbit I’m definitely drawn to consumer marketplaces, no surprise. Trying to stay ahead of that and recognize where those opportunities are is very exciting! What kind of companies are you excited and interested in investing in as you take on this new role? But how you deliver that changes based on the market, emerging tech and the consumer mindset and their expectations. The concept and the mission of connecting people in a neighborhood to live more efficiently to share services has always remained the same. Then 5 years in I realized oh no this needs to be a mobile centric, mobile first on-demand booking system and if I were to build it today it would be on an AI voice platform (through Alexa or Google Home).
I built an E-bay like auction model marketplace. If I were to start TaskRabbit today it would be a very different company from when I started 10 years ago. I think there are so many interesting things happening in on-demand right now. Where do you see the future of the on-demand economy going? What shift do you see coming? TaskRabbit was actually acquired by Ikea. This was in late 2007 right around the time the first iPhone came out, before the app store, location based sharing, or mobile technology was even a thing.įour months later Leah had built the first version of the app and launched in the Boston area.įrom stay-at-home moms in Boston who were able to create extra income to a handyman named Mark who went from being an employee to building out his entire business on TaskRabbit all the way to President Obama posting a task on the platform.Īlmost a decade later TaskRabbit has changed the lives of thousands of Taskers who have been able to operate their own business thanks to the platform.Įarly in her career Leah was once told by a college that she was “ too ambitious.” She used that ambition to drive everything in her career that ultimately lead to what would become the sharing economy marketplace.įun fact. They geeked out over an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online you could go, say you needed dog-food, name the price you were willing to pay, and have it delivered to you?” And TaskRabbit was born. She came up with the idea one evening when her and her husband were headed to dinner and realized they were out of dog food. She transitioned from CEO and Founder to Chairwoman of the Board and is now an Investor in early stage technologies at Fuel Capital. TaskRabbit went on to raise 50 million dollars and expand to over 60,000+ Taskers around the world.
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She worked at IBM hacking away at code for over 8 years before she decided to jump into what would eventually become TaskRabbit.
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This time for our Transformative Storytelling Series, i t was a special treat to have Leah Busque, the founder of TaskRabbit as our guest who discussed the future of the sharing economy, how she dealt with each shift in her career/company, and the types of companies she’d like to invest in moving forward.įrom software engineer to founder to investor Leah’s story is a unique one. According to Statistica, there was 44.8 million adults using sharing economy services such as Airbnb or Uber in the United States in 2016 and the number of users to increase to 86.5 million by 2021. The sharing economy has no signs of slowing down.
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