Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Strippers in Los Angeles are unionizing, Senate Democrats are reintroducing a paid family leave bill, and the founder of LTK says solving her own problem made for great business. Happy Thursday!
-Nothing to lose. Like many entrepreneurs, Amber Venz Box founded her company LTK, last valued at $2 billion, by trying to fix a problem in her own life.
Twelve years ago, the then 23-year-old was working as a personal shopper in Dallas, Texas, earning commission on sales of boutique apparel. To market her services, she posted her styled outfits on her website, complete with product recommendations. But she soon learned that the strategy was essentially giving her services away for free. "I had cut myself out of my own business," Venz Box, LTK's cofounder and president, told editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram at Fortune's MPW Next Gen on Tuesday.
To reclaim her business, Venz Box's then-boyfriend (and now-husband), an engineer, developed clickable links to products that she could embed on her blog. When visitors clicked the links and purchased an item, Venz Box earned an affiliate commission.
And so marked the humble beginnings of the influencer marketing platform that would go on to become a unicorn.
“I was my first customer. I was living at home eating my dad's cereal and I was highly motivated," Venz Box said. "People always say, 'oh, did you risk it all?' I was like, 'I risked $236.' That's what was in my bank account.”
Today, LTK "[helps] creators to monetize their content," Venz Box said. It works with more than 150,000 creators and partners with more than 5,000 brands. In 2022, it sold more than $3.6 billion worth of goods. The company has 750 team members in 11 offices around the world. After a $300 million investment from SoftBank Vision Fund in November 2021, the company was valued at $2 billion.
Venz Box considers her founding story and close relationship to the purpose of the company key to LTK’s continued success.
“LTK started with a mission that was very personal to me and to our friends, and it's still very much so is. I think that passion in the soul of our business is so important,” she said. “I tell our team members—all 750 of them—this is not a mission statement that's on the wall. We're not secretly running some other business. We only make money when our creators make money.”
And some of those creators—more than 90% of whom are women—are making a lot of money. "We have over 200 women who are now millionaires through the LTK platform," Venz Box said. "We are putting entrepreneurs in business."
Kinsey Crowley (she/her)
kinsey.crowley@fortune.com
@kinseycrowley
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