On this episode, Bryce sits down with Shruti Shah, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Silicon Valley Bank. Growing up as an adopted Jewish Indian American in Memphis, TN, Shruti has a unique perspective on people and community which is empowering but also exhausting. She discusses how access to opportunity and social capital is intertwined with community, how that has informed her career path, and her thoughts around success and failure, inclusivity and much more.
Shruti is currently working with an early stage practice team on strategic partnerships while also developing an idea for a new type of funding for startups. She was previously the co-founder and COO of Y Combinator backed Move Loot, an online full-service marketplace for buying and selling used furniture, where she led the national expansion and general business operations.
Over the course of three years, she and her co-founding team raised $22 million dollars to scale the business across the United States. Move Loot was featured in numerous publications including Forbes, TechCrunch, Bloomberg Business Week, CNN, TIME, Fortune and more.
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, through Teach for America, where she taught 2nd, 4th, and 5th grade at Graceland Park O’Donnell Heights Elementary Middle School.
Shruti earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science with a minor in Entrepreneurship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she earned her Master of Science in Education with a focus on Urban Education from Johns Hopkins University. Learn how Shruti has let her experiences shape the way she is using innovation to address the lack of access and opportunity in certain communities by listening to this episode of More Than Profit.
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