Toolkits for Urbanism: Streetlife Ventures' Laura Fox on Learning New Things, Refining Your Skills, and Solving for the Climate Crisis
By Julia Gamolina
Laura is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Streetlife Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund investing in urban climate solutions to transform sectors including mobility, buildings, energy, waste, and water. Previously, Laura was the General Manager of Citi Bike at Lyft and built it into a $100M ARR business and one of the country’s largest transportation systems, led diligence on urban climate tech companies at Sidewalk Labs, launched new mobility products with Boston Consulting Group’s digital ventures team, and advised Bloomberg Philanthropies on their urban investment strategy.
Laura also teaches MBA strategy courses at NYU Stern, and is on the board of Governors Island, which will be the test bed for climate innovation in NYC. She speaks on mobility, city, and climate topics globally, and is on ‘Transportation Power 100’ and ‘Top Women in Mobility’ lists. Fun fact: Laura’s friends call her ‘20 Questions’ since she loves getting to the heart of a good idea - and she’s given a TED Talk on the topic. In her interview, Laura talks about refining all kinds of skills to solve for the problems she most cares about, advising those just starting their careers to spend time paying attention to what you most enjoy.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years - where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
LF: I grew up on the southside of Chicago with a twin brother. My grandmother and great aunt played a lead role in raising us. My grandmother didn’t have much formal schooling, but was constantly curious, engaged us in asking questions about the world around us, and taught us to “travel” by reading about places and experiences very different than our own.
So when I wasn’t playing some kind of sport, I was reading or trying to learn about new people and places by asking questions — a trait further heightened as a golf caddie over summers and weekends for seven years, starting when I was twelve years old. As a caddie, I learned that I didn’t need to have anything in common with someone — and typically didn’t, as the people I had to caddie for were usually wealthy older men — to learn from their perspectives. Those experiences taught me to be comfortable saying “I don’t know” as a starting point to learning something new.
What did you learn about yourself in studying literature, and then getting your MBA?
A friend once joked that while her career path has been a straight path through the forest, mine has been the trees in the forest itself — grown around similar areas but from a number of different angles. I loved studying literature as a way to understand multiple perspectives on a single problem. I studied how “outsiders” (due to race, gender, economic class, etc.) in global cities negotiated their self identities and relationships to place and society.
I decided to get my MBA in order to gain a toolkit of “hard” skills, and went to NYU Stern because it was the only school that had an Urbanization Project embedded in the business school. While at Stern, I took all the finance, stats, modeling, and strategy classes that I could, and then worked with the Urbanization Project to apply them to cities around the world — including Mexico City, Ho Chi Minh City, Guatemala City, and Dubai. With each city, we worked on a project over the course of a semester, with two to four weeks on the ground in the “client” city itself.
The project in Mexico City was the most meaningful to me and my future career. With urbanists Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud as our mentors, our team (myself, David Baharestani, and Craig Johnson) developed a quantitative model — including scraping land use data, regulatory constraints, and private-market developer incentives — to understand how the city could increase its affordable housing supply. Mexico City changed its regulations (decreasing constraints to allow for more low- and middle-income private development) as a result of the work. It solidified my path towards bringing a more quantitative and financial toolkit to solving urban problems, and it brought friendships that have lasted since then.
Laura, her classmates Craig and David, and their advisors - urbanists Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud - taking break from advising the heads of Mexico City’s housing programs to enjoy the city.
Laura, her classmates Craig and David, and their advisors - urbanists Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud - taking break from advising the heads of Mexico City’s housing programs to enjoy the city.
Laura and her friend Grace on a crowded market street in Mumbai.
How did you get your start in working with the built environment?
When I lived in Chicago after undergrad, and outside of my day job, I worked with a number of neighborhood-based cultural organizations that created significant local economic development — from jobs to customers for local restaurants and businesses. I wrote countless editorials for local publications, and read every book and case study on the topic that I could.
Then at twenty-four, I moved to Qatar to work for their museums, which were seeking to create culturally-driven economic development at an urban and even national scale. I learned a lot during my time in Qatar — from collaboration with my Qatari colleagues, to local customs and traveling within the Middle East and Asia for the first time. But I also had a transformational moment in my career. As I walked the streets of Doha every day, there were no sidewalks, no public transit, and no affordable housing, plus there were frequent water and food access issues. I realized that I wanted to move down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to more core urban problems, like sustainability, transportation, and housing issues. This realization led me to work in Bangladesh on urban slum issues and then to attend NYU for business school.
Tell me how your work evolved, and you with it.
After business school, I worked at the Boston Consulting Group to both refine my “toolkit” of hard skills and to work directly on some of the urban issues that I cared about. For example, I built and launched urban mobility companies for OEMs with BCG’s digital ventures team, and consulted for the largest urban philanthropy on their investment strategy. On weekends, I also edited Alain Bertaud’s book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities to continue working through a range of problems and ideas related to transportation, housing, and sustainability.
I then brought these experiences to Sidewalk Labs to help lead the development of the Master Innovation and Development Plan for the city of Toronto — including diligence on a range of urban topics from housing and buildings, to mobility, digital infrastructure, sustainability and climate solutions, and more. My colleagues from Sidewalk are friends and urbanist soul mates, and I know that we’ll be having deep conversations on what makes cities better throughout our lives.
“The rapid growth of cities in an ever-warming world is the biggest challenge we face.”
I grew up in Toronto, so I especially appreciate this. When we first connected, you were at Lyft! Tell me about this.
Right, I then led Citi Bike at Lyft for four years, and it was the most meaningful role of my career to date. It’s exceptionally rare to work on something where you have an impact on cities and climate in such a tangible way, every day. Not to mention, with a product that you and millions of others love, and use to get from point A to B for trips ranging from commutes to meeting friends or going on a simple urban joyride.
Over that time, we doubled the size of the service area, and built Citi Bike into a $100M ARR business and one of the US’s largest transportation systems. The “intangibles” were some of the most rewarding too. When I joined Citi Bike, friends joked that it was a “sweaty white man thing.” As the first female General Manager of the system, I focused on diversity as a business strategy. As a result, more than 40% of Citi Bike riders are now female, and more than 50% identify as a person of color. I recently reflected on other big lessons from that time here.
How did you then get to your new fund, Streetlife Ventures.
I co-founded Streetlife Ventures with Sonam Velani earlier this year, as the rapid growth of cities in an ever-warming world is the biggest challenge we face. More than half of humanity lives in cities today, and 70% of emissions come from cities. These numbers will continue to move up and to the right as an estimated 2.5 billion people move to cities over the next three decades.
We’ve long mentored and advised a range of startups in this space, and it’s been our “life’s work” in terms of our careers. We focus on bringing problem-solving, practical solutions, and optimism to problems and concerns that we often hear from friends and communities to the broader news media — like, “What can I do to avoid taking my kids to school on flooded streets,” to “Is running out of clean drinking water inevitable,” “Will we have to wear masks every day in the future due to bad air quality,” and “Are orange skies our future?”
Laura cycling on a Citi Bike on a protected bike lane in NYC.
What are the next steps and what is the impact that you’re aiming for?
We’re raising a $30M fund to invest at this intersection of cities and climate, in B2B startups within mobility and logistics, buildings, energy, adaptive infrastructure, and waste & water sectors. Solving challenges in these sectors is critical to solving climate change, and it will also be the greatest economic challenge (and opportunity) of our generation — with $5 trillion in new spending estimated annually. It’s a perfect example of returns and impact overlapping.
At Streetlife, we partner with everyone from real estate owners, OEMs, infrastructure companies, financiers, and city asset holders (like NYCEDC and the Brooklyn Navy Yard) to develop approaches to pilot and scale these technologies so that we can have a greater impact, faster. I love that our work at Streetlife Ventures focuses on big, difficult problems — but ones where the positive impacts are seen in our streets, neighborhoods, and the places that we call home.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?
I’ve long worked in largely male-dominated industries, though the contrast is most stark in the venture capital industry. In the US, female- and minority-owned firms combined oversee only 1.4% of all assets under management — despite data that these same funds outperform their peers. When you’re fundraising in that environment, it can seem like the deck is stacked against you — and I’ve known some female fund managers to bring male interns to important investor meetings, just to subvert that bias. To combat that, we not only focus on our theses in these spaces and the career experiences that have brought us to this moment, but we continuously refine our skills through exceptional fellowship programs that support diverse emerging managers like Recast Capital and Catalyze.
“A career trajectory is process and not an end state...everyone needs to create their own life compass.”
What are you most excited about right now?
Professionally, I’m excited by the inspiring entrepreneurs, investors, and limited partners that I get to work with daily. It’s a community of builders, believers, and dreamers — where pain points and problems mean opportunities to do something better, for businesses, cities, and people.
More personally, I’m continuously energized and excited by my husband Anthony, from working on creative projects at home, to exploring new neighborhoods in NYC, to traveling around the world together. People don’t talk enough about the importance of a spouse as a supportive life partner, on the good days and the bad — and I can’t believe how lucky I got there.
Who are you admiring now and why?
Peers have been the most critical part of my career, by far. Having relationships at work — and long after a single role — where you can problem solve and be vulnerable is critical. I love the culture of support and admiration that these relationships have created, and I admire the choices that my colleagues have made, whether to continue to accelerate their career and go through discomfort as they grow in certain roles or industries, or to acknowledge that building a family or financial freedom are more important to them and structuring their work lives around that truth.
Laura, her husband Anthony, and their beagle-basset mix Bagel.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission?
My core mission is to improve quality of life in cities in a sustainable way — from a climate, financial, and equity perspective. I love the autonomy and independence of shaping that mission at Streetlife Ventures with my co-founder Sonam Velani.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career?
I had my only career crisis at the age of twenty-two, as I was worried about finding a career — not just a job — that combined my interests, skills, and passions. At one point, I sent LinkedIn messages to about fifty people who I thought did incredible work in Chicago. About four kind souls responded and agreed to meet. For one of the meetings, I had fifteen minutes with a senior leader at the Chicago Community Trust, and I think my first question to her was a flustered, “How have you figured it all out?”
She burst out laughing, and explained that a career trajectory is process and not an end state, and that everyone needs to create their own life compass. My time with her was a turning point for me and it allowed me to approach next steps with curiosity and playfulness, as opposed to the expectation of having a decade-long plan for myself. When I talk to folks starting their career, I encourage that same mindset — and to spend time figuring out what they enjoy instead.