From $700 a Month to a $9B Giant: Building Life360 with Chris Hulls What happens when a founder ignores the “safe path,” bets on himself, and keeps going long after most people would’ve quit? In this episode of The Jess Larsen Show on Innovation & Leadership, Jess sits down with Chris Hulls — Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Life360, the world’s largest family safety platform with 90+ million monthly active users and a public valuation approaching $9 billion. Chris’s journey is anything but conventional. He went from growing up in a small farm town… to enlisting in the Air Force at 17… to almost becoming a dishwasher at the South Pole… to dropping out of Harvard Business School… to living in a friend’s closet on $700/month while building the first version of Life360. But the real story is what came next: —a category-defining pivot from disaster response to family location sharing, —launching on Android before anyone believed teens would ever have smartphones, —surviving seven slow years before meaningful traction, —and ultimately building a platform that detects car crashes, dispatches tens of thousands of ambulances a year, and has become a “social network for families.” Chris and Jess go deep into what it actually takes to scale from zero to multi-billion-dollar market cap: the messy pivots, the lucky breaks, the conviction bets, why too much “data-driven thinking” kills innovation, and why founders must learn to hold two opposing truths at once — relentless belief and complete surrender to the chaos. This is a conversation for founders, leaders, and anyone who wants to understand the real psychology behind building something massive from scratch.

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