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 In This Episode You’ll Hear About:

• [00:03:26] How Stephen’s passion for skiing made him accident-prone and pushed him into a traditional career path.

• [00:10:11] How the overwhelming desire to fall asleep at his bank job made Stephen realize it wasn’t for him.

• [00:13:17] Stephen’s first business venture, the ‘true start’ of his career, and his journey into investing.

• [00:18:21] How being part of investment inspired Stephen to apply to business school and his experience of it.

• [00:20:49] Meeting his Burrow co-founder, the start of their innovative furniture company, and Burrow’s unprecedented fundraising success.

• [00:27:35] Their gross margin challenges and ‘faking it’ to get factories to work with them.

• [00:37:55] Burrow’s milestones, how COVID-19 affected them both positively and negatively, and their ‘secret sauce’ to success.

• [00:37:55] What’s next for Burrow and why Stephen loves doing customer research the most.

• [00:47:46] The importance of having a coach as an entrepreneur and Stephen’s straightforward leadership style.

 To Find Out More:

Burrow

Stephen Kuhl on LinkedIn

Stephen Kuhl on X

Stephen Kuhl on Instagram

Lee Greene on LinkedIn

Stairway to CEO

Stairway to CEO on Instagram

 Quotes:

“If I didn’t care about the product that the company sold, it didn’t really matter what work I was doing.” [0:15:55]

“I – wanted to make more money so I went into investing.” [0:17:19]

“You know what’s better than investing in consumer companies? Working at [those] companies!”  [0:18:57]

“By second year [of college] I think half of my class [thought] I dropped out because I was living in New York [working on Burrow].” [0:26:52]

“You sort of just have to pretend that something is really good even though you’re not there yet.” [0:31:56]

“The fake it till you make it thing is real!” [0:32:19]

“Luck is huge, right? I think most people don’t give enough credit into how much luck plays into [success].” [0:33:11]

“If you bought furniture in 2020/2021, most companies were quoting you like six months to a year to deliver it – and for most [things] we pretty quickly got [delivery] back down to one to two weeks.” [0:43:04]

“We’re just scratching the surface with new products!”  [0:44:34]

“Give clear feedback, set clear direction, check in with people frequently, and then – you definitely need to empower people and accept that they won’t do things like you would do [them] but as long as the outcome is similar, you should not care.”   [0:50:07]