Claudia Laurie and the business of coming back

Claudia Laurie went into fashion expecting creativity. One summer, she found herself in the back of Calvin Klein’s men’s underwear closet, checking product codes and discounts. There were spreadsheets. There were more spreadsheets. The distance between imagining clothes and administering their sale had become rather difficult to overlook.

She had arrived at the internship eager for a taste of the industry she loved. What caught her attention was how much work still depended on manual processes. Prices, promotions, merchandise: an entire commercial operation offered opportunities for software, provided someone cared enough about the shop to understand the problem.

Years later, Laurie would co-found Prive, a subscription billing and monetization business acquired by Recurly in 2025. In September 2026, she announced a product role at OpenAI, working on billing, monetization and revenue experiences. The employers have changed. Her interest in how a business turns a first transaction into an ongoing relationship has proved unusually portable.

There is a temptation to tell that career as an orderly march into technology. Laurie’s route is more interesting with the detours left in. Fashion gave her something to investigate. Computer science gave her another way to investigate it. The underwear closet deserves a small place in the company history.

A shop before the software

Born in Australia and raised in New York after moving to the United States as a child, Laurie had been making and selling things long before Prive. She has recalled designing clothes for toys and selling them to friends. At Harvard, she put the retail experiment on a different footing with Bell Apparel, selling collegiate clothing through Shopify.

Bell Apparel meant finding a manufacturer and building a storefront. It also meant encountering the practical limits of a small merchant’s software. A founder can have ideas about what customers might want next and still lack the tools to test them. Selling the first sweater teaches one lesson; persuading someone to buy again teaches another.

Her mother, a Chinese immigrant who built a business in the United States, was an early example of taking a commercial risk. Laurie has described that example as an influence on her own decision to leave an established technology company and start something. Entrepreneurship was already a recognizable activity in the family, rather than an occupation invented by a pitch deck.

Her academic interests wandered productively through economics, art history, architecture and computer science. She graduated from Harvard in 2018. On campus, she helped produce the Identities Fashion Show and served on the board of HackHarvard. The combination is pleasingly literal: one activity concerned what people wore, the other what people could build.

Ten new hires, two future founders

After college, Laurie joined Uber’s associate product manager program. Alex Craciun was in the same cohort of ten. They did not need to work on the same team to become friends. Outside work they painted together and discussed an online art gallery, an early reminder that a co-founder relationship can begin somewhere other than a conference room.

Uber offered an education in marketplaces. Pricing and incentives could change behavior across a large system; memberships could give customers reasons to keep using it. Laurie worked on the marketplace side, where supply, demand and the price of a ride were closely connected. Commercial decisions could be examined, tested and revised.

The contrast with retail stayed with her. Independent brands were expected to cultivate loyalty while operating with far fewer technical resources. Laurie and Craciun began talking to merchants about what they needed. The eventual company would carry some of that marketplace thinking into the storefronts of businesses selling physical goods.

Their original thinking included pricing and discounting intelligence. Repeated customer conversations pushed subscriptions toward the center. Merchants wanted recurring revenue and better ways to manage the customer relationships behind it. For Laurie, listening changed what the company would build. That is an unromantic founding detail, and a useful one: the customer had editing rights.

The second order is a product problem

Prive was founded in 2021. Its early public financing announcement described a $1.7 million pre-seed round led by Xfund and Bling Capital, with Defy Partners, Halogen Ventures, Base Case Capital and senior Uber executives participating. The company was selling subscription infrastructure to direct-to-consumer brands, including businesses operating in the Shopify ecosystem.

For a merchant, recurring orders can make revenue more predictable. For the person receiving a box, predictability can become an annoyance if the contents or timing stop making sense. Prive’s proposition put flexibility into that relationship: subscriptions should accommodate how people actually buy, use and replenish products.

Imagine a cupboard filling faster than its owner can empty it. This is an illustration, rather than a Prive customer story, but it captures the design problem. Software that lets someone change an order or manage a subscription addresses an ordinary household decision. Billing sits behind that decision, quietly determining how pleasant or tiresome it becomes.

Laurie’s emphasis was on giving merchants capabilities they could use without assembling their own engineering department. The work connected a brand’s business model to the shopper’s experience. A checkout can be polished and a subscription still be awkward. The relationship continues after the button has been pressed.

There was a parallel challenge in getting the company financed. Some early investors were skeptical of founders without long software engineering careers. Xfund was receptive to Laurie’s broader background. That detail matters in a career built from adjacent interests: the experiences that make a founder harder to classify can also explain why she notices a problem.

A microphone with an open door

Alongside the software company, Laurie built another venture around conversations. She and Madison McIlwain met as product managers in San Francisco in 2018 and launched The Room Podcast in 2020. One would bring a founder’s experience to the interviews, the other an investor’s perspective. Their friendship preceded the format.

The premise was access. Early career decisions and company building generate questions that a polished company announcement rarely answers. Laurie and McIlwain wanted to make those earlier, messier chapters available to people who did not already have an invitation to the relevant room. A microphone was a practical way to extend the guest list.

Guests have included Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff and Ciara. In 2024, the pair were recognized on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in Media. Spotify had named the show among its top five percent most shared podcasts globally in 2022. The recognition belonged to a project developed alongside their other work.

The conversations could also become connections. Laurie met Halogen Ventures’ Jesse Draper through an appearance on the show before Draper invested in Prive. That overlap gives the podcast a lived connection to the company’s story. Asking someone how she built a business can be the beginning of a relationship, with consequences neither person scheduled into the recording.

The decision after the funding decision

By 2025, Laurie and Craciun faced a choice about Prive’s next stage. They had raised more than $5 million over the company’s first four years. Continuing independently would require more resources. An acquisition offered another route to a larger business, provided the combination served the product and the people using it.

They spoke with potential buyers that had previously expressed interest. Recurly’s purchase brought Prive’s customers, products and twelve employees into a broader subscription business. The terms were undisclosed. Laurie and Craciun stayed involved as advisers, and both also returned to operating roles elsewhere.

The announcement arrived on May 7, 2025. Prive became Recurly Commerce, extending Recurly’s offering into Shopify and physical goods subscriptions. The integration advisory arrangement was explicit in the announcement. A founder’s title had changed, while the software and customer relationships had work ahead of them.

An exit makes an attractive full stop in a biography. Here it works better as a comma. In a later account of her 2025, Laurie said Prive had reached profitability at the start of the year. She also described beginning angel investing and advising startups, investing with Bling Capital, and returning to product work at Uber. Several kinds of work continued beyond the sale.

The question travels

At Uber again, Laurie worked on ads and offers products. Then came OpenAI. Her September 2026 announcement placed her on the Financial Engineering team, with a remit spanning billing, monetization and revenue experiences. The new role follows the same commercial questions into a different kind of product business.

Her description of that move connected the work directly to Prive and Uber. Across those settings, a product has to deliver something customers value, and the business has to decide how to charge for it. Those decisions are visible in the experience people have of paying, subscribing and coming back.

“Simplicity and flexibility are key for sustainable subscriptions.”

Claudia Laurie, 2022

Laurie has also spoken about sharing lessons with women considering entrepreneurship. The Room gives that interest an ongoing outlet. Its interviews let her ask questions as someone who has now built a company, sought investors, sold the business and returned to a product team. The earlier questions have acquired some practical company.

The career has room for both the shopkeeper and the systems thinker. Bell Apparel made the merchant’s problems personal. Uber showed how a marketplace could study behavior. Prive brought those interests together; the podcast kept the conversation open. Through each move, Laurie has returned to the work behind the sale. A customer comes back. Someone has made that possible.