05/19/2023

Chicago Booth grad helps underrepresented startup founders find success

Chicago Booth Grad

The first entrepreneur that Lily Xu, MBA’13, encountered was her late father, Bo, who owned a Chinese restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.

Watching him make strategic decisions and interact with customers sparked her interest in developing a business.

“He didn’t want to regret not taking enough risks in life,” says Xu, global program lead for the underrepresented founders startup team at Amazon Web Services. “He taught me that, emotionally, success and failure are two sides of the same coin, and they’re both necessary for personal growth and career development.”

Xu earned a bachelor’s degree in political economics at the University of California at Berkeley, but she remained intrigued by the idea of starting her own company. After spending several years as a brand consultant, she enrolled in the Full-Time MBA Program, hoping to increase her confidence and her business skills.

“Booth provided me with a strong foundation in business theory and practice in a variety of fields, including marketing, finance and leadership,” Xu says. “As a founder, you have to wear a lot of different hats—you have to be a visionary, a strategist, a salesperson, an accountant, and sometimes even a janitor. It gave me a holistic understanding of how different business units come together.”

She particularly enjoyed her Building the New Venture class, which incorporated games to introduce the element of chance that all founders must face.

Her lessons from Booth as well as her father prepared Xu for the ups and downs of founding her own beauty-technology startup. After graduation, Xu co-founded Dotfully, a community platform to help people exchange new and unopened cosmetics. While the business had strong initial growth, many potential investors that she approached were men, and they struggled to connect with the concept. She and her cofounder ultimately sold Dotfully to a large Chinese conglomerate.

Click here to read the full story.

This story was first published by UChicago News.

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