Babylist’s $1B Test: Why Jenn Hyman Replaces Natalie Gordon
Most founders cling to the CEO chair until the business forces them out. Natalie Gordon handed Babylist over at roughly $1 billion in revenue — before the market got the chance.
Most founders cling to the CEO chair until the business forces them out. Natalie Gordon has done the opposite: after 15 years building Babylist, she handed the chief executive job to Jennifer Hyman on September 9, with the business tracking toward $1 billion in 2026 revenue.
That is either unusually disciplined succession planning or an exceptionally expensive way to find out whether a founder can really let go. My money is on the first one.
The handover is the story — not the job title
Babylist began as a universal registry. Gordon founded it in 2011, two weeks before giving birth to her first child, after deciding the traditional baby-shopping experience was too fragmented and too ordinary for a life change that is neither.
Fifteen years later, this is no cute niche website. Babylist reported more than $750 million in 2025 revenue, up 45% year on year, and its eighth consecutive profitable year. It says nearly 40% of first-time US parents use the platform. More than 10 million people made purchases through it in 2025.
That is the sort of scale at which the old founder playbook starts breaking down.
A founder can get a company from zero to meaningful with instinct, stubbornness and a willingness to make decisions before the spreadsheet is complete. But getting from a very good business to a durable category-defining one takes a different operating system: deeper functional leadership, repeatable capital allocation, more institutional discipline and the courage to say no to opportunities that sound exciting but dilute the machine.
Gordon is moving to executive chair. Hyman, the co-founder and former chief executive of Rent the Runway, takes over as Babylist’s second CEO. Hyman joined Babylist’s board in January, so this is not some parachuted-in professional manager who needs six months to locate the good coffee and understand the business.
That detail matters. Founders should not wait for a succession process until they are exhausted, sick of the job or being quietly pushed by investors. By then, everybody is negotiating under pressure and pretending it is strategic.
Gordon appears to have done the sensible thing: build a business worth handing over, get the successor close enough to inspect the culture and the numbers, then make the change while the company has momentum. That is adult behaviour. Rare stuff in founder-land.
Jennifer Hyman is not being hired to preserve the furniture
Hyman has already built and led a consumer category from scratch. Rent the Runway helped make fashion rental mainstream, went public in 2021 and generated about $330 million in revenue last year. She stepped down from that business earlier in 2026.
The relevance is not that she has been a CEO before. Plenty of former CEOs are walking LinkedIn posts with a driver.
The relevance is that Hyman understands the ugly middle of a consumer company: teaching customers a new habit, selling a story before the market agrees, scaling operations when the glossy brand campaign is not enough, and dealing with the cost of being public. She has also said one attraction of Babylist is returning to a private company, where management can spend more time on innovation than the theatre of earnings preparation.
That last point will annoy the public-markets crowd, but she is right. Public-company discipline can be useful. Public-company bureaucracy is often just a tax on attention.
Babylist now has enough evidence that its customer relationship can stretch beyond gift registries. It has Babylist Health, which helps parents access insurance-covered products such as breast pumps and was approaching $100 million in revenue. It has moved into financial products with Babylist Money and its Early Investor offering. It operates a showroom in Los Angeles and has been expanding its physical footprint, including a New York opening planned for September.
The company sees a $235 billion US baby-and-kids market. Fine. Every pitch deck has a massive market slide. What matters is whether Babylist can earn permission to matter in a parent’s life after the baby shower ends.
Hyman’s assignment is to turn a high-trust transaction platform into a lasting family platform — across health, money, advice, commerce and community — without becoming a random pile of adjacent products.
That is a much harder job than increasing registry conversion by a few points.
The overlooked advantage: parents are not a cheap audience
Most consumer founders talk about “community” when they mean a mailing list they have not figured out how to monetise.
Babylist has something better: a customer arriving at a high-stakes moment, making expensive decisions quickly, asking for guidance and bringing friends and family into the transaction. Families spend an average of $28,000 in a baby’s first year, according to Babylist’s figures. More than 80% of that spending is considered essential.
That makes trust the business model.
If Babylist helps a parent choose a car seat, secure an insurance-covered breast pump, organise contributions to a child’s investment account and find genuinely useful guidance, the company is not merely selling stuff. It is reducing decision fatigue at a moment when customers are vulnerable to it.
That is powerful. It is also dangerous.
The quickest way to destroy that advantage is to treat parents like an audience segment rather than people whose time, money and anxiety are already under pressure. A badly matched financial product, a dodgy sponsored recommendation or an aggressive cross-sell can burn trust faster than a mediocre quarter burns investor goodwill.
This is where Hyman’s consumer experience should help. The winning version of Babylist is not a supermarket with content glued to the side. It is a decision engine that happens to transact.
The contrarian bit: founder succession is often better before the IPO
The standard founder mythology says a great founder must stay in charge until the company is public, enormous or both. Nonsense.
Sometimes the best thing a founder can do is recognise that the next phase requires a different appetite. Gordon has not disappeared. As executive chair, she remains positioned to influence long-term strategy and governance; reporting around the transition suggests she will focus particularly on the company’s AI strategy.
But she has separated stewardship from daily operating control.
That can be a brilliant split if both people understand the boundary. The executive chair owns the long horizon, protects the culture and challenges the CEO. The CEO owns decisions, people, priorities and results. The minute the chair begins re-litigating every operating call, you have two CEOs and a very expensive group chat.
Hyman and Gordon have an unusually good setup for avoiding that trap. They are both founders. Neither needs to pretend the job is easy. Hyman knows what it means to live inside a company for nearly two decades; Gordon knows the business better than anybody. Respect is not sufficient, but it is a far better starting point than insecurity.
There is another practical benefit. If Babylist does pursue an IPO as early as 2027, as Bloomberg has reported it is considering, this gives Hyman time to build credibility with the team, sharpen the operating plan and make the company more than a founder story before bankers start polishing slides.
The market does not reward a founder merely for being a founder. It rewards a business that can keep performing when one person is not in every meeting.
What this means for you
If you run a company, do not wait until succession becomes an emergency. Start with three blunt questions.
First: What part of the business only works because I personally touch it? If the answer includes sales, hiring, product decisions, customer escalations and culture, you do not have leverage. You have a well-paid job with a cap table.
Second: Who can tell me the truth without needing my approval? Hyman spent months on Babylist’s board before becoming CEO. That gave both sides a real look at the relationship. Build that kind of exposure before making a senior hire, not after the press release.
Third: Am I holding the role because I am still the best person for the next job, or because I cannot imagine life without the title? Be honest. The business can usually tell before you can.
For investors, the lesson is just as clear. Do not automatically panic when a founder steps aside. Look at the timing, the successor’s operating fit, whether the founder remains constructively involved and whether the business is strong enough to absorb the change. A planned handover during growth is often a green flag, not a red one.
Babylist’s real test begins now. A $1 billion business does not need more storytelling. It needs ruthless prioritisation, protection of customer trust and leaders mature enough not to fight over whose name is on the door.
That is the hard part of building something big: eventually, the company has to become bigger than the person who started it.