Built in Seattle with Adam Schoenfeld Adam Schoenfeld

After a long career as a VP at Microsoft in the 80s and 90s, Laura Jennings had a big vision for eCommerce. After founding Knack, her masterplan didn't play out exactly as designed. She was working out of a basement, shipping boxes, and learning how to sell merchandise with little experience. Her principles remained, but she updated her strategy after watching and listening. She created a culture that responds to mistakes by asking "what are we going to do about it?" instead of "who is at fault?"
Now Knack is a growing profitable business and Laura is still looking forward.

No technical co-founder, no domain expertise, and entering a market that nobody believed would buy tech. Julian didn't look so hot to VCs. Everyone said to pivot. Fast forward to 2021 and Logixboard was growing 30% M/M, raised a $13M series A led by RedPoint, and Julian's vision for freight forwarding software is coming true. Julian's story isn't a blind confidence in the face of doubt. It's about how to listen selectively and build conviction based on market understanding.

Being a founder wasn't in Jessica's plan. After 15 years of climbing the ladder and checking off her goals, she was looking for a new definition of success. Instead of writing a new life plan, she starting opening to possibilities and "winging it" at times. She dug into her own problems and frustrations when getting child care for her young kids. Many iterations later she founded LegUp (legup.care) to fix the childcare enrollment process for providers and families.

Gordon co-founded Outreach in 2013. Now a multi-billion, 1000+ employee company, he's reached rare air. But he's starting again with Spot.xyz... all the way back to the ground flood. That means writing code, recruiting, and establishing a culture from the ground-up. Why would he do it again? Hear his founder lessons on this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast.

Laura Clise didn't intent to be an entrepreneur. She spent most of her career running corporate social responsibility programs at bigger companies as a self-described "intrapeneur." But she saw the need for Intentionalist after developing a strong point of view about the power of consumer spending choices. While Laura's mission is about social change, she specifically decided to take a business-driven approach to the problem. She's now growing her marketplace that helps consumers spend with intention and gives small businesses a platform to tell their story.

Katie was SVP at Zillow where she had an 11-year career building their data-driven PR and brand strategy. Now she's Founding Partner at KMG (kingstonmarketing.group).
Her story goes from small town Illinois to journalism and ends up landing her in Seattle's tech scene in Zillow's early day. She goes behind the scenes on principles for great PR, the "patience game," lessons from scaling Zillow's brand, and how to demystify marketing and PR in startups.