fortune.com – Entrepreneurs have a tendency to paint past failures as necessary steps toward their inevitable success. In many a Silicon Valley narrative, each misguided venture, bad decision or management mistake is rebranded a “lesson” on the path to that eventual multimillion–dollar valuation.
Leura Fine is hoping she can avoid the catastrophic and build a successful business on her first try. She already has the multimillion-dollar valuation down: her company Laurel & Wolf, an online platform that connects interior designers with consumers, has raised $25.5 million in VC funding and is reportedly valued at more than $100 million.
As Fine tells it, becoming a tech CEO happened almost by accident. Like so many entrepreneurial journeys, it started with a nagging frustration — namely, why interior design services remained exorbitantly expensive. Having worked at a big design studio in Los Angeles where “the average budget for a space was $3 million” and then at her own practice, Fine’s clients were safely in the so-called 1%. She liked the job, but wished the client pool was larger and more diverse (as did many of her designer friends, who were competing for jobs from this same, small pool). The Internet had leveled the barrier of entry to so many other fields — why not interior design?
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