Few people know that Vinted, a Lithuanian-founded secondhand clothes marketplace used by customers across 22 markets, was started by a woman.
Milda Mitkute, back then a 21-year-old student, had an idea to sell her clothes online in 2008. She turned that idea into a business, secured early investment and began entering new markets.
But when the company hit unicorn status in 2019, raised huge rounds from top global VCs (it’s so far landed a total of $532m from VCs like EQT Group, Lightspeed and Accel, most recently at a €3.5bn valuation), turned profitable and began preparing for an IPO — she was nowhere to be seen.
The reason for that is simple — and familiar for so many women who are struggling to combine motherhood and careers: in 2016, Mitkute decided to start a family and “reinvent herself” as a person.
Now, that “project”, as she calls it, is up, and she’s ready for new challenges, she tells Sifted. For the last six months she’s been working on her new edtech startup.
“When you have kids, you start to think about what you're gonna leave after you,” she says (as if a global unicorn wasn’t good enough).
From party project to a unicorn
Mitkute says that she’s already told the Vinted founding story “a hundred times” — she developed the idea during a 2am chat at a house party during summer between her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. That’s when she met Justas Janauskas, an old friend with technical experience, and told him that her new flat is too small for her many clothes, and there should be a tech marketplace where she could sell them online to other people.
Two weeks later, they already had a website.
“At the beginning, it was just a hobby project,” she says. “The first two or three years, it was just, I would say, volunteering — we didn't pay any money to ourselves. And even people who joined, like the moderators and so on, were all volunteers, we didn’t pay them money.”
She stresses that the (little) money that the venture made was spent on servers and that both herself and Janauskas were working full time elsewhere at that time.
Despite the limited income, the company — at that time called manodrabuziai.lt — decided to expand to other countries, like Germany and the Czech Republic, replicating the model which was already working in Lithuania.
Three years later, all stars aligned to turn the startup from a side-project into a real business. Mikute lost her job and, within a few months, an angel investor called Mantas Mikuckas came in to invest in the business — going on to become the third cofounder.
The company was operating in several countries now, but it still didn’t make money. “It would be fair to say that we were covering our expenses,” Mitkute says.
They wanted to go global — but they knew that they needed to improve the product first. “It didn’t look very professional,” she says. “[But] it was very enthusiastic and was very needed.”
Fashion thing
In the startup’s early years, Mitkute was dealing with a bit of everything — as every early-stage founder does. In time, she was leaning towards her areas of expertise: marketing, branding, entering new markets and expansion.
She says she never felt discriminated against as a female founder: “It's a fashion thing,” she says, stressing that often it’s men who often lack understanding and confidence in the sector. “I remember Mantas came to me and said ‘Tell me, why do people buy here?’ He was missing the point. He said: ‘I see the numbers but I don't get it.”
Mitkute was also involved in investors’ relations — even though, as she says, at the beginning the company didn’t have to actively fundraise; its first big backers, like Accel and Insight Partners, came to them first.
Fundraising wasn’t the company’s top priority early on, she says. “We wanted to create a good product that members love. Our direction was: we do what we do. And if there's funding, they will hear about us, from members, from the media, from somewhere,” she says. “It’s the opposite direction of how the industry works.”
She also says that, from the beginning, she knew that the timing for Vinted was about right.
“The numbers were going pretty fast — it showed that people were super ready,” she tells Sifted. “The audience, the [new] generation, were pretty tech savvy. They didn't have those attachments, like our parents: secondhand, seriously, does that mean that you have no money? Older generations had this stigma. Younger, they didn’t.”
'Project kids'
Mitkute worked for Vinted for eight years: she was the first cofounder to leave in 2016, when she was about to have her first baby (now none of the three cofounders actively work in the business; they all keep their shares, while Mikuckas and Janauskas stay on the board). She never came back from maternity leave — and later had three other children, all boys.
“It was a very difficult question. It was a difficult choice,” she says now about leaving.
She said that at the beginning, she never thought about having kids. “I thought: I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I fulfil myself in doing Vinted,” she says, citing the company’s constant growth, ambitious projects and challenges. “But you know what? Actual life happens."
She started to see her friends having babies, and her and her husband decided to reconsider their previous decision. She says she already knew she wouldn’t stop at having one child, describing her ambitions to build a family in a similar way to how you might talk about scaling a fast-growing startup.
“I said: if I leave Vinted, I don't want to leave for one or two kids, because I want to make it count and have three, four, five kids. And then close the project.”
But apart from having kids, she also says that the early days of running Vinted took a toll on her personal life.
“Those eight years were so intense. You never read books, you don't have time to go to theatres, festivals… If you have some free time, you just go to sleep,” she explains. “So, I was thinking: ‘For how long do I want to do this?’ I was thinking that maybe it’s time for a change. It’s a complex of everything, but for me, that was a very hard decision.”
Today, she says the long maternity leave gave her an opportunity to reinvent herself.
“I was very happy to find another me,” she says. And she doesn’t mean herself as a mother. “I was always afraid of that reputation of becoming a mother. That this is like ‘bye, bye’ to you as a person and it means that you always just talk about your kids and you forget about yourself, about your hobbies, about reading books, about studying different interesting things… I promised myself to try not to be like that.”
From the first pregnancy, she had help from a babysitter and her parents — so she could do other things.
“I could study — I got three master degrees during that time. I also became an investor. I invested in some startups, so I'm a board member in some of them. So, I have plenty of activities,” she says. “It's like a different me, different angles of myself. I’m not only Vinted, I’m much more.”
Working moms
Now, as her fourth, and probably last, maternity leave stint is coming to an end, she sees a lot of positives from the time she spent away from her work as a founder. “Sometimes I was like: ‘Oh wow, I could never afford that — to read a book, and to just sit and drink coffee for two hours and just relax.’”
At the same time, she firmly believes that it is possible to combine motherhood with a leadership role. She just says that her decision to have four kids in a row, combined with very difficult pregnancies, made it much more difficult.
“It depends on the person, how ambitious you are, how much energy you have. Everyone has different tolerance to unknown, to intensity,” she says. “I have quite a few examples of ladies being the leaders of companies [and mothers]. Maybe they don't have time to read books, they don't have that extra time. But it's a choice.”
She also adds that mothers coming back from maternity leave often gain new skills that are valuable in business.
“You are forced to reinvent yourself, to reinvent your schedule or techniques of how you work… You learn to be more productive, because you realise that you have just six hours, I don't have time for doing things that are not worthy. I need to learn to delegate,” she says, adding that when mothers are away, they often get another perspective on their work.
“The first six months for me, after very intense work, were mind blowing: ‘Oh my god, I finally see a helicopter view.’ Because when you're in such intense work, you don't often have the time to think from above. For me, it was like a gift.”
“You're growing as a person, you're growing as an expert, even though you're not a hands-on person within a company. But somehow it helps you to reflect what you've done, what you would have done differently. What would you like to do a bit more or like what you would like to do now?”
What’s next
Now, as "project kids" is over, she can now focus on a new venture. For the last six months, she’s been working on a new startup — an edtech to help children learn maths.
For the last couple of years, she’s been on the board of Junior Achievement, a global NGO that teaches financial literacy to school kids.
“That's why I was a lot in touch with public schools. Public schools in big cities, they’re nice. But the more you go out, you see the lack of teachers, the lack of motivation from teachers,” she says. “Especially in Lithuania, we have very bad mathematics results. Each third person doesn't pass the exam.”
So, she’s working on a tool that would help teachers engage children with maths. They’re already working on creating a second prototype, testing it out in Lithuania now, but the goal is, of course, to go global.
She’s currently her own “key investor” and, for now, she’s not looking for any external funding — mostly because she doesn’t want to feel pressure from anyone.
“I still have lots of responsibilities: Junior Achievement board member, I like to invest, I like to mentor school kids and students to do businesses. Of course, there’s family. I have also other priorities. That's why I’m funding myself,” she says.
“Otherwise, I would need to commit — so I pay for my freedom.”
