Meet Brynn Putnam. The CEO and founder secured $3 million in venture capital to fund her tech-based fitness company MIRROR on the same day that she gave birth to her son. In the summer of 2020, Putnam sold MIRROR for $500 million to Lululemon. The pandemic has been good for business. MIRROR ads are plastered across New York’s subway, airing on TV and clogging up social media channels. But selling a company for half a billion dollars is just a small part of her story and frankly, not even the most interesting. There are three numbers to watch out for in this story. $15,000: The amount Brynn had in her savings when she quit ballet. $3 million: Her first outside investment. $500 million: The amount she sold MIRROR for in 2020. Here’s how Brynn Putnam built a company worth half a billion dollars in just two years.
“I always felt like working out at home and you were sacrificing quality for convenience,” Putnam tells CNBC Make It. “You were putting a big bike or a treadmill into your small in your apartment, or you were searching for content on YouTube and watching it on a tiny phone while you tried to awkwardly workout.”
So Putnam did something about it. She created the Mirror, a “nearly invisible” smart, tech-connected mirror that allows users to stream workouts and fitness classes from home while watching themselves work out. All for $1,495 for the equipment and $39 a month to access the content.
Pitching to investors while 9 months pregnant
By the time Putnam was pitching investors on Mirror, she was nine months pregnant.
“It was very nerve-wracking to be a single female founder with no technical skills, presenting a prototype that looks beautiful but was really not functional while very pregnant,” she says. (Putnam’s husband, an engineer, made the prototype.)
Some investors and entrepreneurs suggested that Putnam find a co-founder, one who was male and had technical experience, and recommended that she wait until after her pregnancy to fundraise.
“You sort of learn very quickly who are the investors who understood the vision and those who definitely do not,” she says.
Putnam didn’t budge: “I felt really strongly that we had a really great product and that the market was ripe for the opportunity,” she says. “I didn’t want to miss my chance with my first business.”
Looking back, she says that she “dodged bullets” by losing some of those investors. “If we had brought those partners around the table, we would never have had the freedom to build the company that we built today,” she says.
Pumping and scaling
On the day Putnam’s son George was born, she signed her first round of seed funding, which was $3 million from First Round Capital, right from the hospital. Within two weeks, she returned to work, breast pump in hand.
Mirror’s first round of funding went toward designing and developing a functioning prototype (with hardware, software and content) that could then move into mass production and launch, Putnam says.
Two years after closing the first fundraising round, Mirror launched in 2018. In Mirror’s second year of business, it did $150 million in revenue with a team of 125 people. By 2019, Mirror raised a total of $72 million in outside investment.
In September. Lululemon bought the company for half a billion dollars in cash, which has allowed Mirror to scale “much faster with much greater certainty,” Putnam says. “I think Lululemon and Mirror together is a case where one plus one equals five. So the the upside potential for both companies is really limitless.”
Both her babies are growing up.
“There are so many times when you’re making choices between your baby and your business as a mom and a founder that are heart-wrenching,” Putnam says. “It’s been important for me to remind myself that my son will hopefully one day wake up and look at me and be proud of what I built, and feel inspired that he can build anything that he wants to build too.”
Originally written: CNBC
