Katharine Lau

Katharine Lau runs Stuf, a self-storage company built on a contrarian premise: the space you need is already inside the buildings around you. Instead of leasing land on the edge of town for a warehouse, Stuf partners with commercial real estate owners and converts the parts of their buildings that sit idle - basements, awkward floors, back-of-house rooms - into clean, tech-enabled storage a few blocks from where people live.

As co-founder and CEO, Lau spends her days at the intersection of two industries that rarely talk to each other: real estate and consumer technology. Landlords get a new revenue line from square footage that was earning nothing. Customers get a unit they can book from a phone, access without a clerk, and reach on foot. It is a two-sided pitch, and Lau is the person selling both sides.

Stuf now runs more than 20 locations across major U.S. metros, including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, and Seattle. The company has raised roughly $12.8 million, anchored by an $11 million Series A in 2023 led by Altos Ventures and Allegion Ventures. In 2022, Fast Company named Stuf one of the world's most innovative companies - unusual recognition for a category most founders consider unglamorous.

The starting point was ordinary. During the early pandemic lockdowns, Lau was spring cleaning and went looking for storage. What she found underwhelmed her: facilities far from her neighborhood, a buying process that meant in-person visits and paperwork, and spaces that felt, in her word, sketchy - particularly for women. She had expected an industry that had modernized. It hadn't.

What made the gap interesting was its size. Self-storage is a multibillion-dollar industry, and the share of U.S. households renting a unit had grown from roughly 8.9% in 2005 to 10.6% by 2020. Demand was steady and rising, but the experience had barely changed in decades. Lau had spent the lockdown "obsessed with figuring out how I could turn those vacant, unsellable spaces into a business that does good." She briefly explored a ghost-kitchen concept before the spring-cleaning moment reframed the whole thing. The empty commercial space and the overstuffed closet were two halves of the same problem.

Her background made her unusually suited to close that gap. Growing up, Lau spent her teenage years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, watching skylines redraw themselves in real time - an early education in how cities use space. She studied Hotel and Tourism Management at NYU, which is why hospitality language keeps surfacing when she describes Stuf. And she had spent years inside commercial real estate, first on the institutional side and then in proptech.

Before Stuf, Lau spent about four and a half years at Industrious, the shared-workspace company, where she was an early real estate hire and led supply growth. There she pioneered an asset- and liability-light expansion model - partnering with building owners rather than taking on heavy leases - the same structural idea she would later carry into storage. Earlier roles took her through PGIM Real Estate, L&L Holding Company, and Equinox, layering institutional real estate, development, and premium consumer experience.

The through-line reaches back further. Lau showed entrepreneurial instincts early, selling chocolates door-to-door in elementary school. Decades later, the instinct is the same; only the scale changed.

Ask Lau what makes a good leader and she keeps the answer to three words: "Humility, transparency, and motivational storytelling." Her management style leans on giving people room. "When you give people the space to grow, they generally do," she says - a line that turned out to be more than a platitude.

She tested it directly. Lau had her first child roughly 18 months into building Stuf, spending about as much time pregnant as she did building the company. While she was on maternity leave, Stuf posted its strongest quarterly results to date. She credits the outcome to delegation and systems-building rather than luck, and treats motherhood as a forcing function that made both non-negotiable.

Her three operating principles are equally plain: generously request and provide feedback, invest genuinely in the people and partners around you, and - her words - make it fun. She describes her own strengths as resourcefulness, organization, and creative problem-solving, and a habit of keeping what she calls "lightness and brightness" when things get stressful. Part of the mission, she has said, is proving that great companies can be built and run by women.

Stuf's model works because it aligns interests that used to be at odds. A landlord holding underused square footage gets a revenue share that can turn into a real partnership - some of Stuf's landlord relationships have evolved into investment. The customer gets a unit that is close, digital, and pleasant. At the first San Francisco location, Stuf hit 90% unit occupancy within three months, a sign the demand was real and local.

The impact shows up in individual stories, too. One Brooklyn member told the company that Stuf helped her save around $15,000, using an affordable unit instead of renting extra space to hold e-commerce inventory. For Lau, that is the point: storage as infrastructure that quietly makes urban life more workable, not a warehouse you visit twice a year and resent.

What she is building toward is a wholesale reset of the category. "We will reinvent a whole category and redefine the modern self-storage experience," she has said. It is a big claim in a slow-moving industry - which may be exactly why she took it on.

Stuf's earliest institutional support came from investors who bet on the founder before the footprint. The $1.8 million seed round was led by Harlem Capital Partners and Wilshire Lane Capital, and Lau has been pointed about what she looked for. "Investors are much more than the capital they offer," she says - a view shaped by rounds where the introductions, operating advice, and landlord relationships mattered as much as the check.

That framing carried into the 2023 Series A, where Altos Ventures and Allegion Ventures led an $11 million raise. Allegion in particular is a strategic fit: its parent company sits in the access and security business, adjacent to the digital locks and app-based entry that make an unstaffed Stuf location work. The money is going toward more locations and deeper technology, but the pattern Lau describes is consistent - each round has extended the same asset-light partnership model rather than replacing it.

The recognition has followed the growth. Beyond Fast Company's 2022 innovation list, Lau was named to Connect CRE's 2024 Next Gen Awards for the New York Tri-State region, a nod from the commercial real estate world she came up in. For a founder who spent years convincing landlords to see value in space they had written off, the acknowledgment from that industry lands as its own kind of proof point.