Leah Busque Solivan on starting TaskRabbit: "I decided I was going to have enough confidence in myself to figure it out."

Leah Busque Solivan is not who’d you picture as an entrepreneur. She’s from Boston, and went to a tiny college in Virginia. She graduated in 2001, when no one was starting companies. And, she’s an introverted programmer who was always quite comfortable in her cubicle.

But she was also a problem-solver, and eight years into cubicle life, she came up with a solution to one of her own: one snowy evening in Cambridge, she needed dog food. And there was no way to have it delivered.

Leah started TaskRabbit, the online marketplace where people get help with small jobs like cleaning, or building furniture. She helped build it into a multi-million-dollar business, and then in 2017, Ikea bought it.

Now as an investor, she specializes in identifying other good startup founders and ideas. Through her own experience, and by getting to know and fund many other entrepreneurs, she’s gotten very good at telling the difference between a cool idea and a promising business. And she’s learned that an MBA isn’t as important to a company’s success as drive, persistence and knowing who to ask for help.

You can download the episode to hear about it. Then, please, share your own thoughts and tag them #HelloMonday so I can jump into the conversation.

Here are some highlights….

On personality: "I’m an introvert. I'm a fake extrovert... put me, you know, in a cube for 10 hours a day and tell me to go code this project and I'm like happy as a clam."

On programming: "I saw C ++ programming as another language. The fact that I could learn a language that would help me realize these ideas I had in my head was mind-blowing to me."

On starting a business with no business background: "I remember having this conversation with myself one day and I just said, you know what? This is not rocket science. You're gonna figure it out.  I just decided that I was going to have enough confidence in myself to figure out whatever I needed to figure out and then surround myself with as many smart people as possible."

On what makes an idea worth pursuing: " I think the key lies in how passionate you are about that idea. Lots of people had the idea for task rabbit before I had it, but it was my passion behind the opportunity I saw and what I was building that actually allowed me to execute that idea."

I want to hear from you...

One of my favorite parts of that interview was when Leah said that her eight years at TaskRabbit set her up for her dream job. She didn’t know it at the time, but letting go of her biggest project gave way to something even better. 

It’s hard to walk away from jobs that you love, or have loved. Jobs to which your very sense of identity is tied! So I want to hear from you all on this. Did you have to let go of something to discover something even better? If so, drop us a line at [email protected], or post on LinkedIn, using the hashtag hello-monday. 

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