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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

At that seed stage, it was 100% just an idea.

I would come in and I'd say, here's the beta that I do to 20 people, and here's how I think the business model will shape up,

and then probably talk to 30 angel investors who said no.

And when you're doing something that nobody else is doing, you are either the smartest or the stupidest person in the room.

From NPR, it's how I built this.

A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raaz, and on today's show, how Katrina Lake defied the investment world to build a tech company that transformed closed shopping online.

So every year it seems, there's always that one buzzword or idea that everyone in Silicon Valley seems to be talking about.

A couple years ago, it was cryptocurrency, recently it's been blockchain, but there's also a widely held idea in the tech world that the days of retail stores are numbered.

Now of course, this is a combination of wishful thinking and hyperbole, but there is something to it, especially with big retailers.

Macy's struggling, Bontan and Toys R Us have filed for bankruptcy, and in October of 2017,

Lord and Taylor sold its flagship building in Manhattan to WeWork, that amazing Italian Renaissance building on Fifth Avenue is now worth more as a WeWork than as a department store.

And the main reason why of course is that people just aren't going into big department stores. They're buying a lot more stuff online.

Now convenience is a major reason of course, but so is time. Time is increasingly limited, and that's where Katrina Lake's idea begins, because as she got older and busier with work,

she found that she had less time to go shopping for clothes, and only rich people could afford personal shoppers, so she thought, hey, why not figure out a way to make that more affordable and less time consuming?

And that was the genesis of StitchFix, an online personal shopping service.

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