Laura Modi wasn't looking for a reason to quit her job as she walked the aisles of her local pharmacy at 3 a.m. — she just wanted to find something to calm her crying newborn.
Instead, hidden between a rack of magazines and discounted bottles of sunscreen, she found a multi-million dollar business idea: organic baby formula.
It was 2016, and Modi had given birth to her daughter just five days earlier. The Airbnb exec wasn't producing enough milk to breastfeed her newborn, and she was baffled by the fact that many of the baby formulas available in San Francisco, where she lived at the time, had corn syrup or palm oil among their first ingredients.
"I was exhausted and resentful that I failed at breastfeeding and had to resort to a second-best option, a formula with ingredients I wouldn't want to consume myself," Modi, now 38, recalls.
What's more, it was the opposite experience Modi expected to have as a new mom. "I anticipated joy, coupled with a bit of exhaustion and exhilaration through it all," she says. "I never once thought I would be feeling this immense disappointment and sadness over feeding my child."
That same year, Modi dove headfirst into a research rabbit hole, studying the ins and outs of the baby formula industry, and was shocked to find that the nutritional standards of formula had not been significantly updated since the 1980s. The global infant-formula market is expected to be valued at over $100 billion by 2032.
In 2017, when Modi's daughter turned one, she decided to quit her job as Airbnb's head of hospitality and set out to create a baby formula with cleaner ingredients.
Today, Modi is a mother of three and the co-founder and CEO of Bobbie, a company that sells FDA-approved infant formula that's made with organic milk — and doesn't contain fillers, corn syrup, antibiotics, palm oil or maltodextrin, a white, starchy preservative.
To date, Bobbie has raised over $140 million. A single 14-ounce can of formula costs $25.99, and is sold on Bobbie's website and Target stores throughout the U.S. as well as Target.com.
In 2022, Bobbie's revenue topped $84 million, despite last year's nationwide shortage of baby formula, which was triggered by supply chain issues and the discovery of the life-threatening pathogen cronobacter in powdered formulas.
When the formula shortage hit in early 2022, Bobbie closed its subscription service to new customers for about eight months — a difficult decision that Modi says allowed the company to "continually and reliably" serve its existing customers.
Below, Modi discusses how she found the confidence to leave her tech job, what it's like to have a baby while running a company, and where she sees the future of the formula industry heading.
What working at Airbnb and Google taught her about entrepreneurship:
If you want to work in tech, you have to get comfortable taking risks and betting on yourself. I remember leaving Google in 2011 to join Airbnb, and it was a hard decision because the company was so tiny at the time. Leaving something like Google, which was a very secure, well-established place to work for a company that may not survive was bold.
I remember so many people at that time looking at me cross-eyed and questioning what I was doing, and it ended up being a very wonderful experience. It's been the same with starting Bobbie.
It felt like the right time to start my own business because I had spent a solid 12-18 months preparing for it. By the time I sent in my resignation, all I had to do was finish a draft of my business plan. When you're disrupting an industry, I believe you need a mix of confidence and conviction, coupled with a bit of naiveté and boldness.
But the biggest lesson I took from working at Airbnb and Google is the power of culture. Both companies had very, very defined cultures that permeated everything from the work ethic to the benefits they offered.
I saw firsthand the power of creating and nurturing a strong culture, and what it means to have people come in and do a job that they love. When you love your job, you do it better than anyone else. I've tried to honor those same principles as we build Bobbie's culture.
How she found joy in being underestimated:
I went out to raise my first round of funding for Bobbie when I was seven and a half months pregnant with my second child. I remember taking meetings with over 60 different investors with a heavy bump and sounding like an extremely fiery, passionate mom in all of my presentations.
Sometimes it felt like my professional experience and ability to execute a plan with Bobbie was clouded by the fact that I was visibly pregnant. Some investors dismissed Bobbie as a mom's personal passion project instead of a legitimate business opportunity.
Women are often underestimated, and I've now come to realize it's probably our greatest asset.
When expectations start and remain very low, you have an opportunity to surprise people — and that provides an opening to show people that their first impression wasn't generous. It can challenge the way they think. I think there's some joy in proving people wrong.
Something beautiful has happened throughout my career, especially with Bobbie: I have had many male friends or business partners come to me and openly admit that they were surprised to see Bobbie get this far.
Why she believes the next infant formula crisis could be just 'one bacteria away'
The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity facing the formula industry is that new and different products are being developed at a faster rate than ever before.
And yet there are still few manufacturers and not enough available products on shelves — that remains the crisis that we have not solved as a nation. We're in a better place than we were last year, but sadly we are still one bacteria away from another shortage happening again.
But this crisis is also an opportunity to finally reform this industry. Two years ago, very few people could articulate how the infant formula industry was structured. Now, way more people care about where baby formula actually comes from.
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