Bobbie: Laura Modi & Her Mentor

I think I felt disappointed by everything. I felt disappointed in myself. I felt disappointed in the pharmaceutical companies that own this industry. Disappointed in my own friends and family who didn't sit me down and go, oh, by the way, your boobs may not work. And that sort of disappointment leads to what is ultimately this feeling of like, am I alone? Why is it 11 p.m. and I have a fever and I'm crying in a pharmacy making a really big decision.

Welcome to Leap Forward, a show about founders and the people who believed in them before anyone else. I'm David Rusenko. About 10 years ago, Laura Modi was at Airbnb running hospitality when she had her first baby and quickly ran into the struggle she wasn't expecting. Like a lot of moms do, she turned to formula, which felt difficult, and not just because the formulas on the shelf weren't the kind of product she wanted to feed her baby. So she started her own company, one that would become the fastest-growing infant formula company since the 1980s. You might think Laura's experiences at Airbnb wouldn't be relevant here, but they actually were. Especially a few pivotal ideas from her former boss, the hospitality legend Chip Conley.

We were like yin and yang. I understood the hospitality world in an analog kind of way, and she understood the tech world, and we translated for each other.

In this episode, Laura built Bobby not just into a fast-growing startup, but into a deeper social movement. And now, Laura Modi. Laura, thanks for being on the podcast. Excited to dive in.

Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, David.

So why don't we start with young Laura? Where did you grow up?

Oh gosh, young Laura. Okay, bring it back. I grew up in the West of Ireland. I am the eldest of five from a large Irish Catholic family, uh, very large. We're from a very small village in the west of Ireland. Um, we would call it a town. Maybe over here in the US, they'd call it a village. And my dad is one of 13, of which many of his family, who then went on to have also very big family, they all stayed within the same town. So um it's always going to be home.

Must have been chaos around the house, you know, with everyone running around. Do you have any you know memories growing up?

Yeah, it was survival of the fittest from day one. And I just sort of remember the feeling of like all raising each other. You know, I have four kids myself now, and I still sort of carry that belief through, which is the more kids you have, they're there for each other. And it's not just, I mean, you hear raise and it's this feeling of care. It wasn't. It was you're raising each other through holding each other accountable, through competition, through setting examples, through role modeling. Being part of a big family just meant um, I don't know, you're just enriched in so many different ways in the way that you're brought up.

When you were younger, like what did you think you were going to be when you grew up, so to speak?

Oh gosh, it constantly changed, I guess. Our family business, which is a fourth generation group of manufacturers, clothing manufacturers, we make PPE clothing. Really, really sexy stuff, you know, hard hats and high-viz jackets. And, you know, there was a lot of other smaller enterprises that the family, you know, started small and many of them are big, but it's uh enterprises in the hospitality industry, or, you know, making Irish sweaters and being around a lot of entrepreneurs and watching, you know, not just the men, but also the women uh lean into it. I think there was always an ounce of me that knew it would either be within the family business or that within my own blood and DNA, there was that entrepreneurial spirit.

Do you have any memories of going to the factory when you were young or you know, anything like that?

Gosh, yes. Probably my most visual memory was watching my dad through the journey and watching him coming home from work, seeing the visible weeks of stress or lows that he he carried, but then also the highs and the moments where the business hit uh, you know, an inflection point, and that inflection point really took off. And maybe this is also a very Irish perspective. I never glorified it. I never grew up acknowledging that, like, holy shit, he was he was a real freaking badass.

When did you decide to move to the US?

So I completed college in Dublin and I was leaving college on the on right at the birth of the recession of 08. I was debating every direction I should take and decided, you know, for a long shot, I was going to apply for a job at Google over in California. And I got the job. And it was, I mean, it was just it was an incredible feeling of knowing that this was a new door, it was a new opportunity to not just see like a new country and a new culture, but to leave maybe an industry that I always thought I would see myself in post-college, which was getting deep into manufacturing and the family business, and joining what was the tech boom. So I found myself in California and thought I would stay a year and then make my way home.

It sounds like the tech side attracted you to Google. Like what did you do at Google when you joined?

I was landed on the Google finance team where I was leading a mix of product and ops. And it wasn't the day-to-day job that I think floored me. It was looking around at a culture that everything they did and everything they touched, every word that came out of an employee's mouth was about progress. It was about innovation. It was the future of what anyone looking in at America knew about America. And that sort of hope and that feeling of you can do anything, you can be anything, was felt in my job every single day. And that then just becomes a bug. It's contagious and you want, you want to keep doing it. Uh, but Silicon Valley uh was and is really the the mecca of just feeling that inspiration on a daily basis.

So you work at Google for a while, you spent some time there, and then you decide to move to Airbnb. I think it was pretty small at the time, right? When you when you joined? Yeah. What inspired you to leave the big company and then join a startup?

So I had to go to New York for a Google finance trip and everything was booked. And I had a friend, a colleague turn to me and say, You should book an Arabed and breakfast. It's this new company, and you can just book an apartment. I go onto this website, I book myself a little apartment in Soho in New York, and I called my friends in Dublin and I was like, guys, you're never gonna believe this. I've just rented a full two-bedroom apartment in Soho. I'm gonna be working there all week. You should fly in. So I had like several friends fly in from Ireland, and we lived what felt like a local New York week. I got to come home from work, I got to open the door to my own apartment, I got to make dinner. And every night that week, while I was going into work downtown and I was coming back to my apartment, the concept of what Airbnb was doing to disrupt, or in many ways, just reinvent the idea of hospitality. And, you know, traditional Irish. I grew up around BBs. Every second person had a B. So um, this isn't reinventing, it's getting back to what we used to do. It's connecting community and people to a business model that in many ways has become sort of lonely and transactional and standardized. And that was so freaking unique to me. And it was after I left that trip, I was like, I have to work for this company. So I stalked them down. I found someone, reached out and said, I want a job, and I'll take whatever it takes, and you don't even need to give me a title. And they hired me and I jumped in to lead operations in multiple different capacities and throughout the years, probably wore 10 to 15 different hats.

How big was the company when you joined?

Um a few dozen.

Wow. Yeah. So we also talked to Chip Conley. Tell me a little bit about Chip. Like who who is he and and why did you choose to include him in this episode?

Chip is so yummy. He was such a formative part of my own development and my own leadership thinking and capacity and just how I view the world, honestly. So I was at Airbnb. Chip was a fireside chat speaker one day, and he came in and he gives the most eloquent talk about hospitality and connection and community and what it means to build an experience for people in the hospitality world. And he left that, and there were several people. Brian, the the CEO and founder, who was just deeply besotted with them as well, and said, we need him to be contributing to the future of how we think about Airbnb as a hospitality business.

Um, ready to jump in? Yep, let's do it. Awesome. Well, Chip, for people who aren't familiar, could you just briefly introduce yourself?

Sure. Uh my name's Chip Conley, and I started a boutique hotel company in San Francisco when I was 26 years old in the mid-1980s, called Joie de Vives, means Joy of Life in French. Uh, grew it to 52 boutique hotels around California and uh 3,500 employees. In my late 40s, I didn't want to do it anymore. And um by 50, I'd sold it. And then at 52, I was asked by Brian Chesky to come in and be the modern elder of Airbnb. It was a little tech company startup that wanted to be a hospitality company when it grew up.

And do you remember a first impression or any kind of like early memories from when you first started working with Laura?

Yeah, I just remember her cheerfulness. I loved her. I loved her Irish accent, I loved her curiosity, but also her wisdom at a young age. You know, she could come across as very fluent in tech, but there was that sort of Irish poet underneath the surface. And we were like yin and yang. I understood the the hospitality world in an analog kind of way, and she understood the tech world. And we translated for each other.

It seems like you and Chip kind of, you know, at least initially approached problems from kind of a different angle. You know, was there any kind of moment that that kind of became obvious? Like, oh wow, we have these two different perspectives.

It was early days, and I remember being in a room. Remember, Chip was like probably 20 years older than the average person in the company as well. And we're in a room, there's a roadmap up on the screen, and the word product kept coming up. Like, we gotta fix the product. What about this and the product? Who's addressing that in the product? What about this feature? Chip's dead silent, dead silent. He's taking notes furiously and not on his laptop, you know, analog and writing them down. And then afterwards he pulls me aside. And I remember that look on his face being like, I just, I hope you don't mind me asking, they keep talking about the product, and we gotta fix the product. And we're asking about the product. He's like, Well, what are they talking about? It's like the product pulled up the website, this is the product, and he was like, Isn't the product people staying in their homes? Isn't the product the host? And holy shit, he's right. He's absolutely right. No person in their mind is coming to airbedandbreakfast.com to just house hop. What they're doing is they're coming here to find an experience by which they will show up, which they will enjoy, they will spend time with a host. That host ultimately is the person that needs to be trained, equipped, accountable to deliver on the ultimate experience. The host is the product. And it was one of the most wise reflections, and it was an example of curiosity. Because in that moment, again, I'm I'm, you know, in my 20s and I'm watching this wise elder come forward with what felt like a very simplistic and yet obvious question. And that one curiosity shifted how we think about the business.

As a guy who didn't understand what the word product meant in this context, I helped her to see that at the end of the day, if someone's giving a review or if someone's talking to their friends about their terrible experience, maybe 10% of the time it's because they don't like the app, they don't like the software. 90% of the time, it is actually because of their interaction with the host or their experience of the listing or their expectations not being managed. I mean, when I joined, you know, I just said over and over again, disappointment equals expectations mass reality. How are we improving reality and how are we also managing expectations properly? I don't want a 65-year-old couple walking up a four-story staircase and not having known about it. We need to matchmake better.

You said, Chip, you know, change the way that you thought about the product. What did you do differently at Airbnb, you know, with that insight?

There was this fundamental belief that if you can recognize and also hold accountable hosts for their job, you then create this beautiful intrinsic motivation to want to host more and do better. So for me in Chip, it was motivating two million hosts. That's a very different way to look at it.

What I said is we need to have a carrot and a stick. And the carrot is going to be the superhost program. And what we're going to do is get clear on what are the five qualifications that hosts have to accomplish in order to be a superhost. And you have to get all five. And then at the same time, I said, okay, if we are going to encourage like exceptional quality hosts, we actually have to start draining the swamp. We're getting rid of the listings and the hosts who are not good. And we need to give them a process. We need to educate them along the way. Now that would put me at big odds with the product team because when I joined Airbnb, it was all about growth. It was all about growth. And I came in and said, like, hey, the best way for us to grow in the long run is quality. Quality will lead to growth.

There's one more thing I want to cover Airbnb before moving over to Bobby. Um, it's where Chip told us we were talking about some of the kind of more defining moments. And um we have a clip to play here from Chip.

You know, the Airbnb opened Paris when we were there. And it was when the, you know, in 2015 when the huge terrorist attacks happened on the same weekend. And two-thirds of the way through our Airbnb Open Festival, we had to shut down and figure out where are, I don't remember how many people, I think we had 6,000 hosts. Where are they? Where are our 800 employees who were there, like trying to make sure that they were not dead or hurt or think? I mean, this was that was painful.

I mean, that sounds absolutely terrifying. What was it like to have to manage through that?

Ooh, PTSD thinking through that again. It was um, it was terrifying. And we put people first. When you're in a position where you're thinking about your people as the asset, you do what is natural and you protect your critical asset. And that was we locked ourselves down in an Airbnb and we made one phone call after another to work through thousands of hosts to make sure that they were secure and that they were safe. And fortunately, um, every person who was there at that event uh were all safe.

And then a year later, Chip said you had basically the opposite experience. You hosted the Airbnb Open in LA, you had 20,000 people, and then we have just a clip of how he described that.

It was one of the highlights of my professional career in terms of just how well it went to the point where when I saw Brian in the office a day after we closed it down, he said to me, Chip, I'm speechless. I I don't think we could ever do any better than that.

You know, community is at the heart of any successful legacy brand and company. And there is, there's no way to describe a feeling when you know you've you've reached it. And community is not a physical digital asset. It's not just coming together with an event. The event was was part of the building of it. But the way I felt at the end of the LA Open was it exists. We've done it, and it will live on, maybe not in an event structure, but the community does live on.

More after the break. And now, back to the episode. So let's move over to Bobby now. Where does Bobby begin?

Well, actually, when I got up on stage in Paris for the Airbnb Open there, I also sort of came out with my pregnancy. I'll never forget being on stage and I had my first, I showed my first bump. And then for the next year, I have a baby. I am a leader in a fast-growing company. I love my career. I have defined myself by every move I had made in life. But motherhood was a wake-up call to how broken the system is, how lied to I felt by the world around what it meant to become a mother in today's world. I was somewhat of a perfectionist in the way that I approached my life and my career. And if I wanted to do something, I went after it. And it, you know, you put the hard work in, a little sprinkle of luck, and it would happen. Breastfeeding was not that for me. And for a load of different reasons, including an infection, I had to turn to infant formula. And I remember that feeling of I am doing, I am doing God's work. I am doing what the human body is meant to be doing, but feeding her a product that felt like the complete antithesis of breast milk. So when the world is telling me that breast is best, then obviously that is what I wanted to do. And I think I realized that sometimes what is best was not that. And that was the first real feeling I had for something that I personally felt was an industry and a product that just felt so broken. It so desperately needed a new story, a new brand.

There is so much emotion tied up into it. You know, I witnessed from the sidelines, but our first child had tongue tie, and it was just a very difficult process. You sort of went through that. At what point did you think this could be the idea for a company?

It was a solid year of reading late-night Reddit threads and going deep into the interw to understand the nutritional standards. Why is it broken? Why do the same players own the market over 40 years? Why do we feel disappointed? Why is the conversation not changing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And what I have come to learn during that research process was it just hadn't evolved. Science had evolved, consumer tastes and likings had evolved. The knowledge of certain ingredients that you would feed yourself or not feed yourself or for your child have evolved. And yet the same formulas on shelf had not. And what it meant to be a company that spoke to and created community and education for people, they had not evolved. The business person in me was also looking at a market, going, this is also a great opportunity. And I really felt that there was a market gap for a better for you infant formula. Oh, and the real the real moment was I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant for the second time. And I turned to my husband and I was like, I'm not having another baby with the same formulas on shelf. It was the reason to say I'm gonna go do this full time.

Do you remember the first person that you told that you were gonna start the company?

Yeah, actually. It was a group of my friends in Ireland and we were in a pub in Cork. I actually remember exactly where I was standing. I remember the drink I was holding. I remember like, whew, it's all gonna come out. Besides my husband, who thought I was cuckoo, I just need to say it out loud and get around. Reaction.

What did you tell them like at that moment?

I mean, it was I want to start a powder milk business in the US. And here's all of the reasons why. And when you state that 90% of the industry is owned by two pharmaceutical companies, which technically it's a food we're feeding babies, but it's treated like a medical product. And it's sitting in the middle aisle of a pharmacy. And remember, they're comparing it as well to what they see in the EU, which is it is sort of treated as a food. It's not so stigmatized. So I think when being able to articulate will feel broken about this particular market, yeah, they they totally got it.

Do you remember the first time that she told you she was starting a company or that you heard she was starting Bobby?

To be honest with you, it was such a surprise in terms of the product she'd chosen. I mean, I mean, I got it on a personal level in terms of her personal story that I got immediately. And I I had every confidence in the world that she'd be successful. But what I was sort of surprised by is I just sort of felt like it was such a, it was so different than anything she'd done before, especially the fact it's so consumer driven. But when she finally sort of showed me a little bit more about the her point of view, why there's a niche in the market that was missing and what that opportunity was, then I was convinced.

What was it specifically that you're like, this is the next generation? This is what we want to do differently.

I would break it up into three things. The product, the formulation, the nutritional standards that were set here in the US, they hadn't been changed really since the late 1980s, which meant most US formulas reflected what was an old nutritional set. Compared to the EU, the nutritional standards were higher. And I was like, there's no reason we can't meet EU nutritional standards. And also, by the way, make it here in the US. And then on the business model side, going to a pharmacy when you run out and picking it up also felt outdated. And the opportunity to be really a platform business where you could join Bobby and that subscription is showing up to your doorstep, that we can help you understand how much you need, that in times of a shortage, that you have a guarantee that you're not gonna run out. And then the third big pillar would be around the conversation. You can change culture with a really good product. You can change culture with a really, really powerful message. We are now a group of fiery advocates in the business who are looking at all of the things that surround parenthood and saying, we can change this too. So product, business model, and an advocacy.

So you decide to start the company. You go out to start raising money. I think if I have this right, you're you're now pregnant with your second child.

Yeah.

You know, how are those reactions?

All but one fundraise. I was pregnant for all fundraising. Yes. The very first fundraise, I mean, in many ways, it's it's always the hardest. You're going in on the back of a vision and a concept and a hope and a dream, and you feel like you're constantly on show. And that itself is hard because you're being judged. But what made it sort of doubly hard was that I'm also eight months pregnant. You can imagine the visual. What they see is a tired, soon-to-be mother, wanting to raise millions of dollars for in many ways what people probably saw was like a passion project. I need to prove to them that I am standing in front of them as an educated entrepreneur who can see a gap in the market. But that sometimes visual is hard to get past, um, just given my physical state at the time.

And so you start to develop and test the product. I mean, it's obviously pretty high stakes. What was that process like to kind of ship that very first product?

Uh, years. Took years. Um, and it was finding a US supply chain, finding farmers and a dairy supplier that we felt really good with. We have a phrase which is that we are test obsessed. Every single person in this business is obsessed with every ounce of it because they feed it to their own babies. They think about the responsibility of feeding it to other people's babies. That representation has allowed us to make very, very thoughtful decisions, sometimes painful for the business, but always the right move.

Yeah, talk to me about some of those painful decisions.

Yeah. Uh you probably remember this. The infant formula shortage of 2022. The infant formula shortage was when there was a company who essentially was feeding close to 30 or 40 percent of US babies under one facility, and that facility needed to close its doors. It created a mass shortage in the country. So what happened was we saw this huge spike in our growth, but we were depleting inventory faster than our ability to make more and replenish it. And we basically sat down and we had a look at supply and demand. And my head of growth said to me, Laura, you've got about 24 hours to make a decision. If you're gonna keep growing with new customers, we risk not being able to serve our existing subscriber base. So that guarantee in this business model would be jeopardized. For anyone in a fast-growing company, are you really gonna turn off all of your marketing, programming, turn off your website, and in many ways create some distrust for now all of a sudden not being able to grow your company? A lot of conversations with investors. And I went to bed that night and I did not go to bed as the CEO of a formula company. I went to bed as a mother who, if I had signed up for a brand who made a commitment to me that they were going to keep feeding my baby and I had that guarantee, I don't know what my trust would feel like if one day they just weren't able to serve that promise. And uh decided the next day to just turn off our growth engine, shut down the website, and made it very clear that our priority was for those babies that were already on Bobby.

I mean, clearly it's working well. You know, I think it was in 2020 that you became the fastest growing formula brand in the US since the 1980s, which is totally crazy. 21. Was there ever, I mean, what have you ever had one of those moments where you just sort of like it just all hits you? Um, like we're doing something right here.

One of the most visceral ones was being in a cafe, actually with my chief brand officer, Kim Chapel, and we had this fabulous woman sitting next to us lean in, and she goes, she goes, sorry, I just need to ask, do you work for a formula company? And we were like, Yeah. And she's like, Is it Bobby? And her eyes lit up, our eyes lit up. And immediately she goes into telling her story what her feeding journey was like, how challenging it was, how she tried four or five different formulas and they didn't work for her baby. She found Bobby, she's obsessed with it. It wasn't just a moment of someone in the wild being able to recognize the brand of the company, it was that she felt, and this is really important underscore, she felt enough confidence, confidence to turn around to strangers in a cafe and share a vulnerable story of her feeding journey. Like just if more people felt confidence to turn to a stranger in life, to feel less alone, then we've done our job. That was a real it was a real beauty.

More after the break. And we're back. I mean, again, that's like the next level of responsibility. So talk me through that decision.

A CEO's greatest responsibility is to have foresight and to constantly be able to know where to bring the company. It's like raising your children. After the infant formula shortage and navigating what was one supply chain woe after another, not being able to get enough product, but then frankly, also not feeling in control. And when you're feeding a child, when you're making a product that is so sensitive, like infant formula, feeling disconnected from the end-to-end production just didn't settle well with me. And we were getting to a place where we had scaled large enough that now I felt actually my responsibility have now changed. And when I speak to a parent and a mother, I want to be able to give them confidence that I'm losing sleep over this. So they don't have to. And once you go through a national shortage on your own product, you realize that anything is on the table. And the only way to de-risk and to eliminate an existential threat is to say, I need to make mass investments in our time and in our capital and in the belief to say, yeah, I don't ever want to be in that again.

What was the process like to go buy a factory? I mean, did you have 10 options you were looking at? Like what was that like?

No, there was one. He was the godfather of formula in many ways. He had started one of the most renowned and highest quality toddler formulas almost 25 years before this. And he's a purist. And I followed him into his manufacturing facility and I saw him pick stuff off the floor as he walked past it. I saw him pat his employees on the back. And I knew that he had the vision and culture for what Bobby represents. And, you know, it took some courting and uh was very fortunate to get the keys.

So in 2024, I think you got Bobby on the shelves at Target. Yes. And, you know, in a lot of ways, you've you've now made the product for like the version of you that was buying at Walgreens. I mean, what does it feel like to walk through those aisles and see your product on the shelves?

I remember my time at San Francisco and sort of early days in product exploration. Whole Foods was my mecca. I would go to Whole Foods and I would just that dream of like, could you imagine? Could you imagine a day that you could have a physical product sitting on a shelf at Whole Foods? And we are now the number one formula at Whole Foods by a landslide. Wow. And it is, I think it's also sort of very reflective to the sort of customer and culture and values that even what it meant walking those aisles at the time and saying, this is the thing I want to do. This is the place I want to emulate. And yes, I mean it's all of it. Seeing it on shelf at Target's incredible. We recently launched into Costco just from a regional perspective. And that also felt like a different milestone. Like getting into Costco felt like now we're in a place that is offered to, you know, all Americans. And also we're the first and only organic formula. And there isn't one store that I go into that I don't immediately beeline myself over to the formula aisle and just stand there even years later and stare in awe and just admire what has been done.

Earlier this season on the podcast, we talked to Nate at Airbnb. And, you know, one of the things that really strikes me talking to you is some of the similarities between Airbnb and Bobby and some of the kind of threads that go through that. Airbnb also responded to this need for a connection. And then they created this social movement despite this cultural resistance of, you know, it it's it's tough to stay with strangers. There's also a huge focus on community at Airbnb, a huge focus on creating trust. I mean, in many ways, it strikes me that you've taken a lot of those things and built them into an infant formula company.

100%. Yes, there's a lot of similarities. And my gosh, did I very much learn community at scale at Airbnb? Um they have a phrase while we were there, which was do things that don't scale. And it was a beautiful way to be able to say, I have an idea. Here's something I want to go pilot. So you get insights, you get real deep insights to go, there's something magical here. But then once that magic is identified, you get to scale it. And scale not from a growth perspective. For us, we look at it from how many mouths have we fed? How many parents have we given peace of mind to, or favorite metric, how many people have shed a tear for knowing that we have saved them through one of the hardest times. And sort of shifting even your metric understanding to one that is not transactional and growth focused or revenue focused, but actually one of serving and serving people and serving community. You wake up every day just with a greater purpose, right? Like it's it's the greatest duty and honor.

You know, at Airbnb, Chip said that the product was the host. How do you think about the product at Bobby and where do you want to take that?

Our product is our product, and I'm I'm cautioning on two things here because at the end of the day, we are feeding babies the soul nutrition. There is an undeniability that our physical milk, our product, needs to be the world's best. We spend every day in the way that we think, in the way that we develop, thinking about our customers first. If we are not here to change culture, we are not doing our job. I'll also say our team has taken that so seriously that we have meetings all of the time that have nothing to do with our industry, sometimes nothing to do with our customer, but there's an injustice or there is something that we feel with the platform we have and the voice that we have and the passion we have, actually, we actually could change this. I do believe that if we were not selling our core product being a high-quality milk, I think most people would think we were like a nonprofit advocacy arm.

What has stood out to you about how she's decided to build the company? Maybe, maybe some things are similar to Airbnb, maybe some things are different.

What she's gotten really good at is being able to not react. The challenge for entrepreneurs is you need to be agile and be able to move quickly without being a pinball in the pinball machine. Brian Chesky, I'll admit, was in the first year or two I was there, he was very much a pinball on the pinball machine. I like to say that he was the skipper of a ship, but he kept turning the wheel back and forth. And so everybody was seasick. Uh and that was not exactly what you want to do with a company growing quickly. What I think Laura's done a great job of is learning that when she's hit some roadblocks along the way, whether it's related to regulation or competitive kinds of things or consumer issues, she's been able to like take it in, think about what's the wisest thing to do, but then decisively move forward when she's ready to move forward. That is the skill of a wise leader.

Where do you see Bobby going five or 10 years from now?

I see us continuing doing what we're doing. But in a much bigger and deeper way, reaching more customers, feeding more babies. But we are working on an extremely hard product, big hard problems. And I have no interest running away from that and trying to do 110 things right now. I just want to do what we do very well and continue doing it for more people.

At the end of the day, what is it that really drives you every morning, you know, to get out of bed and continue working on what you're working? And do you see that changing?

What sort of fuels me every day is just knowing that I get to feed babies. And that peace of mind that we get to give parents, um, it's both a responsibility, but it's also an honor. And I read sometimes we have this Slack thread right now, and it's called Love Letters. I send a newsletter, usually asks some questions, taps into the community, asks them how they're doing. And there is not one newsletter that we send that doesn't come back with hundreds of responses. And these are not short, thanks for the newsletter, I got a question, route me to CX. None of them. They are detailed love letters. It goes into their feeding journey. It talks about their love and obsession and how besotted they are with the company or the brand. There's usually an ask to want to play a role. Sometimes I have a back and forth. I try and respond to all of them. More recently, we did what is it, a voice note. And our customers are literally just sending voice notes over to us. And I can hear the baby's voices in the background. You can hear the hustle and bustle in the kitchen. But I do find myself waking up in the morning, making a cup of coffee and opening up this Slack channel and just like randomly landing on a love letter and reading it. Um, you know, it's sort of like a shot in the arm for the day, and it's really powerful.

Well, Laura, thanks for doing this.

It's been amazing. I loved the conversation. Thank you.

I'd also love to hear your feedback on the episode and who you want to hear from next. Just shoot us a text at 415-915-3050 to get in touch. This episode was produced by Kim Naterfame Petersa. Craig Ellie is our engineer. Reese Laudano made our cover art. Music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Lansberg of Wonderly. I'm Dave Rusenko, and this is the Leap Forward Podcast. See you next episode.