Before being hired to serve as CEO of Wag, a dogwalking startup that just received a $300,000,000 investment from Softbank, Hilary Schneider presided over Lifelock, a company whose fraudulent anti-fraud products cost it over $100,000,000 in fines, before Schneider convinced Symantec to buy it for an absurd $2.6 billion.
Wag is a "gig economy" dog-walking service that matches desperate, marginally employed people with pet owners.
The timing of the funding and Schneider's hiring were coincidental, and Wag started its search for a new CEO before starting discussions with Softbank, spokespeople for both SoftBank and Wag told Business Insider.With Schneider and the new funding in place, Wag plans to move on to bigger things. In the 100 US cities where Wag is available, its customers use it more frequently than Uber riders use the app-based taxi service, according to Schneider. Wag is betting that kind of customer loyalty and love will translate in other countries; the company plans a global expansion soon.
"In the US alone, the pet services marketplace is about $70 billion," Schneider said. "The US represents less than 40% of the global marketplace. It's a very large marketplace."
Dog-walking startup Wag got a whopping $300 million from SoftBank and hired a new CEO [Zoë Bernard/Business Insider]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: Tracy O, CC-BY-SA)
