Bobbie: Laura Modi & Her Mentor

0:00I 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 11pm and I have a fever and I'm crying at a pharmacy making a really big decision?

0:34Welcome to Leap Forward, a show about founders and the people who believed in them before anyone else. I'm David Rasenko. 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.

1:14We 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, how Laura built Bobby, not just into a fast-growing startup, but into a deeper social movement. And now, Laura Modi.

1:39Laura, 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?

1:48Laura Modi: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, very large. We're from a very small village in the west of Ireland. 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 it's always going to be home. It must have been chaos around the house, you know, with everyone running around. Do you have any memories growing up? Yeah, it was survival of the fittest from day one.

2:29And 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, 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're going to be when you grew up, so to speak?

3:12Oh 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-vis 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 enterprises in the hospitality industry or, you know, making Irish sweaters and being around a load of entrepreneurs and watching, you know, not just the men, but also the women 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.

4:01Do you have any memories of going to the factory when you were young or anything like that? Oh my 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 carried, but then also the highs and the moments where the business hit 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 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

4:54Laura Modi: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.

5:37It sounds like the tech side attracted you to Google. Like what did you do at Google when you joined?

5:42Laura Modi: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.

6:29But Silicon Valley was and is really 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, 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 turned to me and say, you should book an air bed and breakfast. It's this new company and you can just book an apartment. I go onto this website, I booked myself a little apartment in Soho in New York.

7:09And I called my friends in Dublin and I was like, guys, you're never going to believe this. I've just rented a full two bedroom apartment

7:16Laura Modi:in Soho. I'm going to 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 B &Bs, every second person had a B &B. So this isn't reinventing, it's getting back to what we used to do.

8:04It's connecting community and people to a business model that in many ways has become sort of lonely and transactional and standardized. And that, that was so freaking unique to me.

8:16Laura Modi: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? A few dozen. Wow. Yeah. So we also talked to Chip Conley. Tell me a little bit about Chip. Like who is he and why did you choose to include him in this episode? Chip is so yummy.

8:56Laura Modi: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 was several people. Brian, 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.

9:41Ready to jump in? Yep, let's do it. Awesome. Well, Chip, for people who aren't familiar, could you just briefly introduce yourself? Sure. My name is 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 Vivre, means joy of life in French, grew it to 52 boutique hotels around California and 3 ,500 employees. In my late 40s, I didn't want to do it anymore. And 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.

10:24And 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.

11:05You know, was there any kind of moment that that kind of became obvious? Like, oh, wow, we have these two different perspectives.

11:10Laura Modi:It was early days. And I remember being in a room. I 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 got to fix the product. What about this in 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 hope you don't mind me asking.

11:44Laura Modi:They keep talking about the product and we've got to fix the product. And we're asking 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.

12:29Laura Modi: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 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.

13:1390 % 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 minus 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, changed the way that you thought about the product. What did you do differently at Airbnb, you know, with that insight.

13:51There 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 and Chip, it was motivating 2 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 super host 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 super host. And you have to get all five. And then at the same time, I said, okay, if we are going to encourage exceptional quality hosts, we actually have to start draining the swamp or getting rid of the listings and the hosts who are not good.

14:37And 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. It's where Chip told us we're talking about some of the kind of more defining moments. And we have a clip to play here from Chip. You know, the Airbnb opened in Paris when we were there. And And it was in 2015 when the huge terrorist attacks happened on the same weekend.

15:18And 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 are there trying to make sure that they were not dead or hurt? I mean, this was painful. I mean, that sounds absolutely terrifying. What was it like to have to manage through that?

15:43Laura Modi:Ooh, PTSD thinking through that again. It was, 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, every person who was there at that event 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.

16:31It 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 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 reached it. And community is not a physical digital asset. It's not just coming together with an event. The event was part of the building of it. But the way I felt at the end of the LA Open was it exists.

17:16We've done it. And it will live on, maybe not in an event structure, but the community does live on. More after the break.

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18:13So let's move over to Bobby now. Where does Bobby begin?

18:17Laura Modi: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 you know you put the hard work in a little sprinkle of luck and it would happen.

19:12Laura Modi: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.

20:04It 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 interweb 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.

20:42Laura Modi: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.

21:22Oh, and the real

21:24Laura Modi: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 going to go do this full time. Do you remember the first person that you told that you were going to 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 going to come out. Besides my husband who thought I was cuckoo, I just need to say it out loud and get a reaction.

22:00What did you tell them like at that moment? I mean, it was, I want to, I want to start a powdered 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 what felt broken about this particular market, yeah, they totally got it.

22:43Do 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 got it on a personal level in terms of her personal story that I got immediately. And 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 so different than anything she'd done before, especially the fact that 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, and what that opportunity was, then I was convinced.