The dog toy was supposed to be the business. Raad Mobrem and his fellow students had gone to the trouble of making it, finding pet shops and asking people to buy it. A durable flying disc seemed a perfectly respectable answer to an entrepreneurship assignment. It could even double as a bowl. Few classroom projects are so accommodating to their customers’ lunch.
The complication arrived after the sale. Orders needed processing. Inventory needed tracking. The small company needed software that suited its size and its wallet. Building that software would eventually take Mobrem from pet products to an acquisition by Intuit. He has publicly put the price at about $30 million.
Today he is the cofounder and CEO of Intro, which sells appointments with people who might help you solve a problem. The distance between a dog disc and a video call looks considerable. Follow the work, though, and the route becomes rather practical: find a difficulty, ask questions, make something useful, notice who else wants it.
A classroom assignment with teeth
In 2009, Mobrem was a mechanical-engineering student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His Dura Doggie collaborators were Chase McElroy and Jonathan Luna Rivera, both business-economics students. Their entrepreneurship class required a venture presentation. They manufactured a product.
McElroy brought the idea for a tough disc. The team researched the pet market, talked to shop owners and dog owners, and divided the work. Mobrem took sales and marketing. It was an early opportunity to discover the distinction between liking an idea and persuading somebody to stock it.
There is something appealingly inconvenient about a physical product. You cannot revise a pile of rubber discs with a software update. Making the thing commits you to particulars: material, price, delivery, a customer who may have opinions. Their project acquired those particulars while they were still attending classes.
The business also supplied a less photogenic education. Taking an order is pleasant; entering the same information across different systems becomes less charming with repetition. The team’s internal fix began attracting attention from other sellers.
The customers wanted the back office
At trade shows, neighbouring exhibitors noticed the young pet-products sellers using iPads to manage orders. They wanted the software. Mobrem initially resisted sharing it, intent on keeping his attention on the existing business. The demand kept returning.
He also went looking beyond the pet industry, talking to exhibitors about their order-processing problems. Those conversations helped establish that the frustration travelled. In October 2011, Mobrem and Frank Jones launched Lettuce. Their internal tool had earned a business of its own.
The name offered a small verbal convenience: “let us” do it for you. After the spelling difficulties of Dura Doggie, an ordinary vegetable had certain attractions. Software could be complicated enough without making the customer negotiate the company’s name.
Lettuce entered the Launchpad LA accelerator and developed its product for businesses selling physical goods. Intuit acquired the company in 2014. Mobrem subsequently helped lead product for QuickBooks Online, bringing experience with the untidy work behind a small seller’s transactions.
The transaction was an outcome. The more transferable part of the story happened earlier: people outside his company had repeatedly asked for something built inside it. That is unusually direct feedback. Customers were pointing at the opportunity while the founders were still busy selling something else.
A useful stranger, fifteen minutes at a time
Mobrem’s interest in advice reaches further back. He grew up in Santa Barbara in a Persian family. His father worked in aerospace engineering; his mother ran jewelry stores. He has described learning to make connections without a large family network ready to supply them.
At eighteen, walking with a friend, he encountered Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s. His friend identified Orfalea. Mobrem approached him and asked about entrepreneurship. Orfalea gave him time, and a conversation lasting around fifteen minutes became a durable reference point.
“I felt like he believed in me.”
Raad Mobrem, on his first conversation with Paul Orfalea
The detail matters because information and encouragement do different work. A young person can read about starting a company and still wonder whether the invitation extends to him. Mobrem’s account places weight on being taken seriously by someone who had already built one.
Orfalea remained a mentor. Years later, his name appeared among Intro’s investors. The early conversation therefore sits inside the company’s history as a continuing relationship. The teenager asking questions eventually had a business that asked other experienced people to make room for questions too.
The chapter with a to-do list
There was another product between Lettuce and Intro. Mobrem and developer Spencer Shulem created WeDo, a collaborative task app. Its public launch in July 2016 followed a $1 million angel raise. Tasks, reminders and messaging shared a home, with families, roommates and wedding parties among the users Mobrem described.
It is an easily overlooked chapter beside an acquisition. Yet it fits his attention to how people coordinate ordinary work. A shared task can lose its owner somewhere between the conversation and the calendar. WeDo tried to keep those pieces together.
That same year, Mobrem published an essay urging would-be founders to begin with a problem they understood personally. He argued for investigating something that affects people repeatedly, so that the solution has a reason to become a habit.
“When building a business, until you improve the lives of your customers, you cannot improve your own.”
Raad Mobrem, 2016
The argument had the benefit of an example already attached. Lettuce began with work his own business needed to do. Selling relief from a familiar irritation gave the product a concrete purpose. A founder could spend a considerable time looking fashionable and still learn less than a recurring administrative nuisance will teach.
An introduction with a booking button
Intro grew from a different personal frustration. While working on his home in 2020, Mobrem wanted quick advice from an interior designer. Video conversations had become familiar. An experienced person could look at a project remotely; reaching that person remained the awkward part.
He cofounded Intro with Tim Watson. The marketplace lets customers discover experts and book live video consultations, while experts choose their prices and availability. Scheduling and payment belong to the product as much as the call itself. Good intentions are easier to act on when the calendar cooperates.
Photo courtesy of brand / Modern Luxury.
In October 2021, Intro announced a $10 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Seven Seven Six and individual investors participating. Its early public roster crossed industries, including designer Nate Berkus and fashion entrepreneur Rachel Zoe alongside business founders.
By July 2022, Mobrem said the platform had facilitated more than 10,000 consultations. Home design had become one of its popular categories. That is a useful reminder of the original domestic question: a company associated with startup advice also grew around people wanting help with the places they lived.
Access has a price here, and an appointment creates an opportunity for advice rather than a promised outcome. The interesting ambition is more specific: take a conversation that previously depended on an introduction, and make it possible to arrange. The usefulness still depends on the question and the person answering it.
The founder still takes the support shift
Mobrem also participates as an expert. His Intro page offers advice on startups, fundraising, product, design and growth. Alongside paid sessions and ongoing plans, it lists a free startup community. The page says a quarter of his proceeds will go to Baby2Baby.
He has publicly described taking a customer-service shift once a month. In one exchange, customer Dan Go’s initial expert match had fallen short. Mobrem asked about his goals and offered to find other advisers. Go then offered him guidance on social media. The person selling access became the person receiving help.
This is a revealing little reversal. A marketplace can display an impressive professional history and still need to discover what a customer actually wants. Staying close enough to hear a disappointing experience gives the founder a less polished view of the product. Occasionally it also gets him a useful conversation of his own.
A question bigger than a screen
In August 2026, Mobrem’s design interests appeared in a public setting. He shared conceptual renderings of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade as a park-like space, with greenery, seating and shops around the edges. An alternative image accommodated emergency-vehicle access. These were ideas for discussion, rather than an announced construction project.
The proposal makes an apt final turn in this particular career. A dog toy exposed a problem with orders. A home project exposed a problem with introductions. A shopping street prompted a question about why people would want to spend time there. In each case, the useful starting point was something close enough to notice.
Mobrem’s work keeps returning to the person on the other side of the transaction: the shopkeeper processing an order, the customer with a room to rethink, the founder unsure whom to ask. His own next conversation is available to book. One imagines he will arrive with a few questions too.
Keep the conversation going
Meet the work, read the earlier chapters, or hear him talk it through.