Sarah Paiji Yoo — Blueland CEO on Harvard, Hiring & Sustainability
Sarah Paiji Yoo is the CEO & co-founder of Blueland, a sustainable cleaning & home essentials brand on a mission to eliminate single-use plastics from our homes. She attended Harvard for her undergrad and MBA, worked at McKinsey out of college and then in private equity, then founded her first startup, a mobile shopping platform called Snapette, after business school. Snapette went on to be featured in NYTimes, Oprah, Today Show, Forbes, TechCrunch, WWD, Glamour and was named one of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. Snapette was backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs including Accel Partners and Forerunner Ventures and was sold after three years.
Sarah went on to become a founding partner of LAUNCH, a venture studio that has incubated leading DTC brands like M. Gemi, Follain, and Rockets of Awesome. While on maternity leave she learned about the microplastics in our water supplies and was inspired to start Blueland in 2019.
Blueland is a sustainability-driven brand that has been featured in NYTimes, WSJ, Vogue, and The Today Show as well as on Shark Tank. They've raised $35M to date from investors including Prelude Growth Partners as well as celebrity investors like Justin Timberlake and Adrien Grenier.
In this conversation we discuss:
- Sarah's background including what she got out of her MBA experience
- Why she decided to start Blueland
- How her cultural upbringing impacted how she thinks about family, motherhood & success
- How she navigates being the face of her brand
- Her top tip for hiring great talent that she's learned from being a serial entrepreneur
- The main advice she'd give to early stage founders
For more info:
Blueland (website)
Blueland TikTok & Instagram
Sarah's Instagram
