We were delighted to welcome Shruti Shah, Entrepreneur in Residence at Silicon Valley Bank and ex-Cofounder & COO of Move Loot. In this talk, Shruti shares the story of Move Loot, the YC-backed full-service marketplace for buying and selling furniture. ⚡️ In only 3 years, they raised $22M and expanded across the US, with the vision to reinvent how people sell their (big) stuff. Startups tend to pursue growth at all costs. But how do you grow at startup-speed when you're a customer-facing business, with physical bulgy items that need to move from point A to point B? The challenge was enormous, and eventually Move Loot had to shut down. In this talk, Shruti shares some of the learnings of: - Going from a crazy idea to a live business - Building a fully-integrated logistics platform - Raising a lot of money FAST, and growing a team - Pivoting, and what it’s like to shut down a company ** Shruti Shah is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Silicon Valley Bank where she is currently working with the early stage practice team on strategic partnerships. She was previously the co-founder and COO of Y Combinator backed Move Loot where she led national expansion and general business operations. Shruti was honored by Forbes as a 2016 30 Under 30 recipient in Retail and E-Commerce and the Aspen Institute as an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar in reimagining capitalism. Prior to co-founding Move Loot, Shruti worked for the New Schools Venture Seed Fund, a seed fund that invests in early-stage education technology companies, and she was also a public school teacher in Baltimore, Maryland through Teach for America, where she taught elementary school.