Laura Behrens Wu had made selling things on the internet look reasonably straightforward. There were tools for the store and tools for taking the money. Then an order arrived, and somebody had to get the purchase into the customer’s hands. Her solution involved walking to a nearby post office. E-commerce, having arranged its digital affairs, had politely handed her a physical chore.
She and Simon Kreuz had been trying to start an online store. Shipping soon demanded more attention than they expected. They investigated carrier software and found integrations that felt cumbersome beside the building blocks they had used elsewhere. There was a business opportunity inside this inconvenience, although it came with very little glamour. A shipping label is rarely mistaken for a muse.
The store was easy. The parcel was the problem.
Laura’s later account of those beginnings includes a question she and Simon asked each other: could they spend the next ten or twenty years working on shipping? At first, both had doubts. Working with smaller businesses changed that. The inefficiencies were numerous, and the consequences were tangible. Every awkward step took time from someone trying to sell something.
Shippo, founded in 2013, grew from that encounter with the merchant’s side of commerce. It connects businesses to shipping carriers through an API and a dashboard. Rates, labels and tracking belong to the same operation, even when the systems behind them do not. Laura’s work became making that operation easier to manage. The attraction was increasingly specific: useful software for people with orders waiting.
The premise carries a certain democratic ambition. A small retailer competes for customers accustomed to sophisticated delivery services. Its owner may also be the person answering questions and packing boxes. Shippo aims to make shipping capabilities available without requiring the merchant to acquire the scale of a retail giant first. There is plenty of enterprise vocabulary surrounding this proposition. The parcel keeps it honest.
A summer with no return ticket in the plan
Laura’s route to San Francisco began with a chance meeting in Zurich. A Y Combinator founder offered to circulate her résumé. Interview opportunities followed, and she took a summer internship at LendUp. Silicon Valley had previously reached her through reading about it; suddenly she could work inside a young company and see how decisions were made.
What appealed to her was responsibility. She remembered an internship environment with a clear growth target and freedom to work out how to reach it. That was an inviting combination for someone early in her career. A temporary stay became a reason to reconsider graduate studies in Switzerland. She left the program and stayed to build.
She had already grown up in Germany, China, Ecuador and Cairo before studying in Switzerland. Moving between places was part of her biography long before moving packages became her business. The sequence is striking without needing to turn childhood into a prediction. Living internationally does not automatically produce a logistics founder. In Laura’s case, an internship and an actual merchant problem supplied the decisive turns.
Rejection, entered in rows and columns
Getting the company funded brought a different kind of repetitive work. Laura pitched 125 investors for the seed round. Ten invested; 115 declined. She kept a spreadsheet recording the conversations, how far each progressed and the feedback. It was a practical record of a process that can otherwise dissolve into a collection of bruising memories.
She has described the early pitches as weak, the next stretch as practice, and later conversations as evidence that she was often approaching the wrong prospective investors. Improvement had two parts: explain the company more clearly, and find people whose interests fit it. A polished explanation still needs an appropriate listener. Repeating a pitch indiscriminately can make a founder very fluent at talking to the wrong room.
The distinction between an investor’s reaction and a customer’s reaction mattered to her. Customers were using the product and finding value in it. That gave her a reason to question the rejections rather than treating them as a final verdict. Her persistence had evidence behind it. The spreadsheet helped her learn how to carry that evidence into a conversation.
The customer who left, then came back
The early product also needed revision. Laura described an initial rate-comparison website inspired by flight-search services. Shipping customers, however, might need hundreds of labels. A sequence of individual clicks quickly became an unsuitable answer. An API could serve that volume, but using one required developers. Larger businesses had those developers and also wanted proof that a young supplier could be trusted.
Shippo built a dashboard on top of its API and connected to Shopify. Smaller merchants could start using the software without commissioning their own integration. Orders began arriving organically. The product had gained a practical entrance. For Laura, this was a recognizable moment of product-market fit: people could discover the service, use it and return.
Another early lesson arrived when a growing customer stopped shipping through Shippo. The loss exposed how much the company depended on that account and disrupted its fundraising plans. Laura later won the customer back after a personal conversation. The episode sharpened her attention to account management. Acquiring a customer starts a relationship; growth can alter what that customer needs before a supplier notices.
A CEO, drawn in stick figures
One investor meeting produced a particularly durable souvenir. At Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr asked Laura to draw a picture of her team. She considered whether this might be a subtle test of personality and began with a stick-figure version of herself, complete with a dress and a smile. The room’s amusement revealed the simpler request: an organizational chart.
The story is funny because her interpretation was so elaborate and the desired answer so ordinary. A young founder facing experienced investors can find significance in every gesture. Sometimes a pen is merely an invitation to explain who reports to whom. Laura told the story herself, making the misunderstanding available to other founders who might recognize the feeling.
Learning to lead also meant reconsidering what she thought a CEO ought to sound like. She has described the adjustment from a more factual German manner to Silicon Valley’s emphatic language of conquest. Trying to resemble famous founders imposed another set of expectations. Her eventual preference was to make realistic commitments, exceed them where possible, and speak openly with trusted people when something was difficult.
That preference gives her public reflections an appealing texture. A company can require ambition without requiring its founder to narrate every ordinary day as a triumph. Her approach allows preparation, doubt and an occasional embarrassing drawing into the account. The resulting picture of leadership is easier to recognize at human scale.
A billion-dollar company still has labels to print
In June 2021, Shippo announced $50 million in new funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine leading the deal. Both had been involved since the company’s 2017 Series B. The announcement also marked 100,000 customers shipping through Shippo.
A valuation supplies a conspicuous headline, but it tells only part of the working story. Investment buys room to build; merchants continue judging the service by what happens to their shipments. The financial milestone belongs to a particular date. Laura’s job continues after the announcement, with decisions about people, products and the reliability of software that other businesses use.
Recognition accumulated along the way. The University of St. Gallen named her its Founder of the Year in 2015. She and Simon appeared together in Forbes’ 2017 Enterprise Technology 30 Under 30 list. In 2021, she joined Inc.’s Female Founders 100. Those honors span the graduate program she left, the business she built and the leadership role she kept learning.
“Every day I am running the largest company that I have ever worked at.”Laura Behrens Wu, 2021
The tabs stay open
Asked what drives her, Laura has emphasized the compressed learning that comes with founding a company. Her measure of personal success includes being around people who can teach her something. The answer helps explain why an internship could redirect her plans so quickly: the opportunity to learn while contributing was itself a reason to stay.
Outside Shippo, she is a seed-stage angel investor. Her personal site lists investments including Optimism, Metronome, Alt, Arcade, Canix and Fabric. It also acknowledges startups that failed. That small addition makes the portfolio feel less like a victory display and more like participation in a risky business.
The site offers two further details: she loves cats and keeping browser tabs open. Its title announces that she is not a cat. Alongside a career spent connecting digital systems to physical deliveries, this is a pleasingly modest personal introduction. She has written publicly about entrepreneurship and commerce too, extending the conversation beyond her own company’s product announcements.
The question waiting at the other end
Shippo’s December 2025 launch of MCP introduced another way into its shipping infrastructure: merchants could describe tasks in natural language and have software carry out workflows. The ambition connects to the dashboard built earlier in the company’s life. Each interface reduces some of the effort required to use the systems underneath.
In August 2026, Laura discussed automation for the familiar customer question about an order’s whereabouts. An agent could retrieve tracking information, identify a delay and draft a response. She also emphasized delivery certainty over pursuing speed at any cost. Earlier that year, she had observed merchants putting the cheapest shipping option ahead of the fastest.
These are practical priorities for a founder whose business began when a sale created a chore. The original store could look professional online; fulfilling the order required another kind of competence. Laura has spent the years since working on that handoff. Beyond the funding rounds and the founder stories, somebody is still waiting for a parcel. The software has a job to do.