ExtraMile by HiTechNectar brings together industry leaders and innovators to discuss emerging technologies, transformative strategies, and market trends. We are committed to making high-value, expert-led insights available to audiences around the world.
In the latest Q&A session, we are delighted to feature Laura Behrens Wu, the Co-Founder and CEO of Shippo, a leading shipping technology platform. The firm offers a web application and developer-friendly API, connecting businesses with a global network of carriers in real time. The platform has been a crucial one for businesses of all sizes that require shipping capabilities on a global level.
In the discussion, Laura will shed light on her strategic decision-making, alongside Shipppo’s milestone of scaling to 200 million annual shipments, the compliance challenges of cross-border logistics, the success story of Shippo MCP, e-commerce trends, and more.
Accompany us and understand how global shipping activities work and how Shippo is leading in this regard.
Welcome, Laura; we are pleased to have you with us today!
Q1. Name one strategic choice you made because of your MBA that you still use as a Founder. How do you implement it for concrete results?
Laura. One of the most valuable lessons from my MBA came from deciding to leave it. I dropped out because Shippo was gaining momentum, and I realized the opportunity in front of me was more valuable than finishing the degree. That experience taught me to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. Just because you’ve invested time, money, or effort into something doesn’t mean it’s still the right path.
As a founder, I try to apply that mindset constantly. We regularly ask ourselves whether we’d make the same decision today if we were starting from scratch. Whether it’s a product investment, a go-to-market strategy, or an internal process, we’re willing to change direction when the data tells us there’s a better opportunity. Some of our biggest wins have come from recognizing when to double down on what was working instead of continuing with a plan simply because we’d already invested in it.
Q2. What is the hardest people decision you made as CEO? How did you measure the impact of the decision and validate it?
Laura. One of the hardest leadership decisions isn’t something we made once. It’s something we recommit to over and over. Shippo has always been a remote-first company, and there are plenty of moments when it feels like bringing everyone into an office would make solving a problem easier. It probably would, at least in the short term.
The challenge is building a company where remote isn’t an exception. It’s the default. That requires being intentional about how you communicate, document decisions, onboard new employees, interview candidates, and create opportunities for people to build relationships. You can’t rely on hallway conversations to keep everyone aligned.
We validate that decision by looking at outcomes rather than proximity. Are teams moving quickly? Are people engaged? Can we attract and retain exceptional talent regardless of geography? The answer has consistently been yes. Remote-first has allowed us to build a stronger, more diverse team while maintaining the culture and execution we set out to create. It takes more intentionality than being in one office, but for us it’s been well worth the investment.
Q3. Share one solid Shippo MCP use case that creates immediate ROI for customers. What KPI do you use to track Shippo MCP’s success rate?
Laura. The use case I keep coming back to is WISMO, the “where is my order?” question. For most merchants this is the single biggest driver of support tickets, and every one of them costs time and money. With Shippo MCP, an AI agent can pull tracking status, spot a missed or delayed delivery, and draft the response to the customer automatically. We’re seeing both retailers and platform customers experiment with conversational rate shopping, automated returns, surfacing shipping insights, and automating WISMO responses, and WISMO is where the ROI shows up fastest because you can measure it in tickets that never needed a human.
On KPIs, we look at adoption and repeat usage first: how many customers are connecting agents to Shippo MCP and coming back, and how many shipping actions (rates, labels, returns, tracking lookups) run through it. For customers, the number that matters is time saved per shipment and support tickets deflected.
Q4. What systems or architectural decisions allow Shippo to scale to 200M+ shipments annually without performance trade-offs?
Laura. The most important decision was made early: we built Shippo API-first. Everything, including our own app interface, runs on the same APIs we give customers. That forces discipline. If the API isn’t fast and reliable, nothing is.
The second decision was to treat the carrier layer as an abstraction. We normalize dozens of carriers behind one interface, so when a carrier’s systems slow down or fail, we can degrade gracefully or route around it instead of passing the problem to merchants. Peak season is the real test. Shipping is one of the most seasonal businesses there is, so we design for Q4 load all year, with heavy asynchronous processing for high-volume operations like batch label creation, and we invest continuously in monitoring so we find issues before customers do. Scale isn’t one clever decision, it’s twelve years of boring, disciplined ones.
Q5. Cross-border logistics often trigger regulatory and compliance bottlenecks. What internal process or early-warning system does Shippo use to prevent recurring compliance risks?
Laura. We try to move compliance from something merchants react to into something the platform handles by default. That means building requirements directly into the product: address validation, customs declarations, duties and tax fields, and the right documentation generated at label time, so a merchant can’t easily get it wrong.
Behind that, the pace of regulatory change is real. De minimis changes and tariff shifts over the past couple of years have been a good example. Our approach is to stay close to the carriers and monitor regulatory changes as a standing discipline, not a fire drill, and then ship product updates before deadlines hit so our merchants are compliant without having to become customs experts. The early-warning system is really the combination of carrier relationships, a team watching the regulatory calendar, and a product that encodes the rules.
Q6. What should an operational playbook for SMBs include that can be implemented to cut shipping costs or reduce returns friction?
Laura. Start with the basics, because that’s where the money is. First, never default to one carrier. Rate shop every shipment across carriers and service levels. For most SMBs that alone is a meaningful saving per label. Second, validate addresses before anything ships. Failed deliveries and address correction fees are pure waste. Third, look at your packaging. Dimensional weight quietly inflates costs, and right-sizing boxes is one of the fastest fixes there is.
On the customer side, set expectations early. 75% of shoppers say putting an estimated delivery date on the product page or in the cart positively influences their decision to buy. By showing accurate delivery estimates at checkout reduces both cart abandonment and WISMO tickets. And on returns, make the process self-serve with a branded portal and pre-generated labels. Friction in returns doesn’t stop returns, it just stops repeat purchases. None of this requires enterprise budgets. That’s the whole point of Shippo: giving small merchants the same shipping capabilities the giants have.
Q7. What is one painful lesson from building Shippo that reshaped how you scale startups today?
Laura. One lesson I learned the hard way is that you have to build your next growth channel long before you need it. It’s very easy to keep investing in the channel that’s working today because the results are predictable. The problem is that by the time you realize it’s slowing down, you’ve already lost valuable time.
Now I think about growth as a portfolio. We always have our proven channels, but we’re also continuously experimenting with new ones, even when the existing ones are performing well. Most experiments won’t become meaningful businesses, but a few will, and those are what carry you through the next phase of growth.
That’s changed how I think about scaling companies. Sustainable growth isn’t about finding one great channel. It’s about constantly creating options before you need them.
Q8. Name one e-commerce trend you believe is overrated and one underrated innovation that will redefine marketplaces. How do you think organizations will embrace them?
Laura. Overrated: the speed arms race. The assumption that every order needs to arrive same-day or next-day. What consumers actually want is certainty. They’ll happily wait four days if you tell them four days and deliver on it. Chasing speed at any cost destroys margins for merchants who can’t play Amazon’s game, and it usually isn’t what wins the customer anyway.
Underrated: agentic commerce, and more specifically the infrastructure behind it. Everyone is focused on chatbots on the front end, but the real shift is that AI agents are becoming buyers, operators, and support reps. The businesses that will lead are the ones designing experiences and systems that AI can understand and act on. That’s why we built Shippo MCP. I think adoption will follow the same path as APIs did: developers and platforms first, then it quietly becomes the default way shipping operations get done, and merchants won’t think about it any more than they think about the API calls behind their checkout today.
Explore Our Other Insightful Interviews:
