Parents are always looking for ways that playtime can turn into a creative and educational opportunity. But for a lot of parents, engineering playful, educational projects just isn’t in the cards.
KiwiCo, co-founded by Sandra Lin, is a subscription company that provides STEM-based educational toys to help children learn during fun times. Lin joined the TechCrunch podcast Found to talk with Becca and Dom about the building of that company and how she’s managed to steadily grow it since it first launched more than a decade ago.
The company wants to “encourage kids to exercise their creativity, exercise their critical thinking skills, and hopefully see themselves as people who can envision something and make that a reality,” Lin told Found. “We’ve delivered over 50 million crates.”
Lin worked at PayPal and Procter and Gamble before launching KiwiCo. As a mother, she made sure her children had a hands-on playtime experience and would invite other moms and their kids to come too. “One of the moms was like, ‘You should start a business around this,” Lin recalled. “And my first thought was like, ‘Wow, this could be a really, really fun business to work on.”
Looking back, though it wasn’t clear that her previous tech experience would lend so well to the company she built, there were signs that fate would lead her here. “It kind of comes full circle, and I think it’s really fascinating to think about it that way because it’s definitely not what I had intended.”
The company went on to raise millions in venture dollars but has since turned to funding its own growth. “It’s not that we won’t raise money again at some point, we might,” Lin said. “I think we are lucky and that we can decide what that time actually is.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, she spoke about how she and her team go into designing educational toys, as well as how she balances her work life and her professional life. She also made a surprising announcement about a new product the company is launching which you can learn more about in this latest Found episode.