Mariam Naficy on Lessons From The Dot Com Days and Knowing When To Blitzscale | Blitzscaling 07

This is session seven of Technology Enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue and Chris Yeh. This class features Reid Hoffman interviewing Mariam Nafisi, the founder and CEO of Minted.com and the founder and co CEO of Eve.com this podcast has been produced by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, class notes, slides and videos, please visit greylock.com it is my.

Great privilege and honor to have Maryam with us today. She's a serial entrepreneur. She's done this multiple times successfully. She is also experienced in both the first Internet boom and whatever we call.

The current boomer, the endless things boom.

And has been on various lists, Fortune, most powerful women entrepreneurs, et cetera, et cetera, blah lists. But one of the part of the design of this was, as you noted last week, we actually had something of a notion that one of the ways that even small startups can actually blitz scale and scale very quickly is, is through the deployment of communities. And it's one of the things that Merriam has done very successfully within the commercial realm. And so we thought that that was another part of the interesting arc, especially when you're dealing with the essentially the tribe stage of what kinds of things could be very relevant. So why don't we just very quickly touch on kind of the first business eve.eve.com. yes, exactly. What got you into it? How many employees did you get to? What was a little bit of the kind of the story of the first Internet boom? And what lessons did you learn from it that you carried forward?

So I was on the Stanford campus in the basement of the Stanford, the GSB building on a payphone, believe it or not, no cell phone. So I was actually using the payphone and I was calling a best friend of mine in New York and saying, come out with me. There's venture capital money available. I've been through banking, I've been through consulting. There's no way I'm going to progress through these ranks. I've got to work for myself. I'm not interviewing for any jobs. So come start a business with me. She was my roommate while we were in banking together, Varsha Rao, and she said, I'll come out there, I'll leave McKinsey, I'll move in to your tiny little apartment and sleep on your couch. But only if we start what I want to start, which is this online cosmetics business. And I wanted to do online market research. I love market research and data and surveys and stuff. But I said, sure, I use cosmetics. How hard can it be, I don't know anything about it. We might as well start. So that was a very different time. It was 98. We went out and raised in the first year and a half, $26 million. We were 20. I think I was 28. 20. Yeah, 28. And we built it really fast because it was really a land grant mentality. It was, who's gonna get mind share in the consumer's mind first as the first online cosmetics destination. And it was a very simple business now that I think about it, because you, well, you had to go convince all the brands to give you distribution, put it in a warehouse, pick and pack it and make sure all consumers understood that you were the destination for online cosmetics. And we grew it very rapidly. 120 people, six months. I think we hired the entire executive team in six months and 120 people. And all of a sudden we're in the middle of on Market street with this fancy office and they're like a 10 person board. Bill Gross from Idealab, a bunch of other people. And then all of a sudden Sephora LVMH approached us to buy us within, I think before we even launched. They wanted to get us out of there because they were trying to launch Sephora in the US So they were really concerned about us. So they tried to buy us before we launched. We said, look, we're just trying to launch this business. So they literally tried to buy us the month before we launched, then the month after we launched and finally in December tried again. And we thought, okay, well, at this point we're just nine months into it. We're rising a Series D. Okay, this is the craziness of the environment. And we noticed that it was starting to get a little harder. This is early 2000, so this is about a year after we launched. We spent about a year building. It was, we launched early 2000. They say we want to buy you. And we thought, okay, it's getting a little harder to raise a Series D. People are starting to ask about profitability and yeah, fancy that. So we thought maybe we should seriously talk to them. We start going down the path. They want to buy us for $88 million. I thought, this is pretty good, we should sell the company because we need to be under the aegis of a bigger player and get the dedicated distribution rights from brands. Varsha agreed. But then Idealab stepped forward and said, not sure about this valuation of 88 million. We just told Goldman Sachs, you're worth 300 million. I all of a sudden, I guess as a very presumptuous 28 year old said, well, if you don't like the price, then you should pay more. And then that's what happened. We sold it to idealab for over $100 million in cash in April 2000. And two weeks later the NASDAQ plunged and I got my first gray hair. Seriously started getting gray hair about that time because the merger had not been approved yet. And there was all kinds of things that happened during that process. Needless to say, the deal stuck together. We managed to hold the deal together. I stayed on with the acquirer with Idealab. We bunched a whole bunch of IdeaLab companies into Eve.com and then finally we resold it to Sephora in October 2000. So we sold it twice in about six months, something like that. So that's part one. That's the first entrepreneurial experience.

And before we move on. So one is, if you were to call yourself your current self sitting here, you were able to talk to your younger self, just starting.

I wish I could.

Yes. What are the key things you would tell yourself about how to run that race differently or what to emphasize and what to detract?

I would have tried to think a little bit longer term because when the company, so Ideal had ran into issues where it couldn't go out, it was about to go public, Goldman was trying to take them out, then the market fell apart, so they couldn't go public, so they wanted to shut us down. And they said, mariam, can you sell the business again for us? So I turned around, picked up the phone, called lvmh. But in retrospect, there was something else I could have done, which is taken the money out of my pocket and bought it for a tenth of what I had been paid, essentially. And I could have bought the whole thing back. Two million uniques a month in traffic already after one year. But when you are, I would say to myself, when you're young and you're going through all of a sudden the Great Depression, you have this tendency to become conservative. And when everything starts falling apart around you, every single day there's a company going under and the entire world is imploding, it's hard to have the historical context. And maybe if I'd been a better study student of history, I would have realized that the Internet was indeed not over and it was not time to leave town. But I would have bought it back myself. That's what I would have done.

Yeah, but there was two years of winter, maybe even three, three or four, that would have Been a very bold choice.

It would have been a bold choice. And I was severely in debt. When I graduated from the business school, I was able to pay off my debts. Nobody in my family came from a business background. So for me this was like the sale was a big triumph and it put me in a very different place in life. So I had a hard time thinking I'll put my cash back in again now. So I did get a little conservative and I've been fighting that ever since.

So one thing you would have done is say as opposed to selling at Sephora, actually in fact a belief in the Internet and the macro counter being contrarian, I would have actually bought it back and built from it because actually, in fact the asset was a unique asset that actually someone could make something of.

Totally. I would have tried to figure out and now I know how to make businesses profitable. I did not know for sure then how to do it, but I learned it afterwards going to a bigger company. I went into a bigger company for a couple years to really learn how to make to run a P and L and now realize I could have probably done it with. Because we were already doing about 10 million in sales on an annual run rate in their first year. So it's a lot of what ifs and could haves, should haves. But I mean, I think the idea is to be a little bit less conservative when you're. I would have been a little less conservative.

And what about other lessons like financing pattern, hiring patterns. Yeah, go to market patterns. Yeah, anything of those. From the. From the.

So one thing was I didn't like the size of the board being so large at the beginning. And all the board members, some of them didn't get along that well. So it was, you know, I spent about 25.

It's probably code for terribly right.

No comment. So there were board members who didn't agree. There were two board members from the series B fighting over one board seat all the time, trying to like kind of gain favors with us to try to give them the board seat. Then we spent about 20% of our time managing the board, which I thought was wasted time. I just thought I need to focus all my time right now on building this company. I work till 10 o' clock every night in the office. I mean I don't have time to spare to manage the board and getting someone a pashmina scarf, et cetera. It's a long story, but it's a very long story. So I thought, okay, small board, maybe back away from VC financing quite so. And it was very much. But on the other hand, I got to see what a lot of capital buys you. The best PR firm, the best executives, the best headhunters. I could see. I learned on somebody else's dime, really. And that's what made it possible to do Minted in a completely different way, which is I raised 11 million for seven years of operation and brought it to break even. And that was a very. And for a commerce company that makes things. And so that was a very, very different capital and financing strategy. And I would not have, I don't think, been able to do that had I. And also known how to scale now, because now we're going into the big. We've raised the big capital, raised 90 million now for Minted, and we're definitely in the range of, like, you know, hiring the more expensive executives and all that. And I wouldn't have seen how to do it had I not done it the first time with Eve. So it's a little.

You know, I may come back and ask you a couple more questions about Eve, but because that is actually literally, you've. Softball. You've literally teed up. What was the next question after Eve? Let's do that now. Which is, you know, one of the key things that has kind of been a theme throughout the quarter for the students is choosing when to blitzscale. It isn't like success equals blitzscale. Failure equals not blitzcale. You know, part of what we did in the very beginning when we were portraying LinkedIn, is we said, look, it was a very long period where we're just getting it right before we actually did that. And actually making that decision about when do you pour on the gas and then how do you do it is actually one of the really key things.

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about the first part of Minted, which is, okay, let me be capital efficient. Let me raise $7 million. 11 or whatever.

11, yeah.

And go for seven years, go through that, and then now is the time. And this is the reason.

Okay. Well, I thought that I had some lifestyle considerations. So in the beginning, I had just had my second child, so I wanted to really control the pace myself the second. So I. What Eve bought me was credibility and being able to make investors a return. And with that, I had a lot of choices, career choices, and I could afford a lot of support. For example, I could have a family. I could basically have everything. I could have my family and have a career, and that was really great. So I think getting out of the gates early with taking a risk really paid off for me and I would encourage people to think about that early. But so basically, you know, I guess with, with, with minted, I wanted to basically control the pace. I was worried about people getting in the way of the strategy when the strategy wasn't quite solidified. So when I raised angel financing, people weren't quite necessarily on board with crowdsourcing 100% among our angels, they were thinking crowdsourcing sounds interesting, but maybe crowdsourcing is nothing. You know, who knows what crowdsourcing is going to do? So sign up all these brands. Go with a brand strategy. Sign up. It was a Web 1.0 strategy of building distribution rights with existing stationary brands. Believe it or not, that we did, in addition to trying to build the crowdsourcing mechanism. And so I wanted to have the flexibility to really change the model quite dramatically without having to take 10 people with me around on those strategic meanderings. So that was another thing.

Third, there was to keep the team small for agility.

Agility. Agility and communication is everything, right? So if you have to communicate to 10 board members versus one or two, it's just a completely different proposition. And I really believe in keeping people updated along the way so there are no surprises. So I really try to bring people along. Third, there wasn't a lot of competition. Nobody was talking about crowdsourcing really and nobody was talking about stationery. So I didn't really have to worry. It wasn't the Eve.com situation where we were in this like land grab where the minute we launched, four other VC backed firms launched, companies launched behind us into the cosmetics market. There was, I mean, I know you guys probably don't remember this, but there was gloss.com and I don't know lots of companies names I don't even remember now five of us all launched and we were the first by a month, maybe a month and a half and then there were four behind us. So that was an example of trying to grab mindshare in consumers minds as this is the number one first destination for cosmetics online and spending money to make sure everybody knew that. Right? Minted it was like, nope, no one was circling at all. So I could take my time. So I had the luxury of no competition. So those were some of the decisions when we finally started to. I think your question is, well, what then made us finally do it? Well, we always imagine it was actually.

A little bit about also your idea for starting it because as a formerly serious successful entrepreneur, you're not gonna start Something. Unless you think it can be big in that big thing. You think, okay, we're gonna go run tight for a while. But my due plan to get big. So it wasn't like, no, no, no or plan. Yes, there is like, look, I'd like to have some control over my life, but if it's just gonna be like, if it had been a lifestyle business for you, you would have been like, no, no, thanks. I'm trying to do something. So what was the thinking about, oh, this one actually, in fact, will have that kind of lengthy ramp. Was there certain hypotheses you wanted to test?

Yeah, well. So I've been a lifelong shopper. I'll admit it right now. When I wasn't doing my homework at school, I was always in the mall, and my parents would always criticize me for it. And then I would go there and think, geez, you know, first this brand is hot, then this brand is not. You know, And I actually really, for example, respect Mickey Drexler at Gap as being. Well, he used to be at Gap, now J. Crew as this great merchant. But even he can have a bad couple of years. So what I really wanted to do was figure out a way to build a retail brand that would last forever, that would be fresh forever. And the way I thought you could do that is by completely removing the risk associated with a couple people choosing the merchandise. Because what if those couple people are wrong? And what if they have a bad year? So the hypothesis was, and I'm still completely obsessed with this hypothesis because I'm trying to see how far I can take it, is if you turn all the decisions over to the crowd and you let people submit and curate, you will be potentially fresh forever. And it was a complete hypothesis. And I thought I would start in stationary, which Peter Fenton, one of our backers now says, I brought a gun to a knife fight because we figured out how to do crowdsourcing of design, and we brought it to the stationery business. You know, it's a broader market, and the stationary market is a $10 billion market. It's not that large, But I did it because I wanted to start in a small place where I could have very little competition, really revolutionize design completely. And then I love the unit economics. High average transaction value, high margins, inherent virality of the product, which we can talk about in the marketing thing. Inherent virality. Huge, huge repeat factor. Great customers that repeat with you if you're loyal. So once you get them, you can sell them other things they repeat with you. You've built something. So I started there, but then with this hypothesis that we would build just a stationary retailer that was crowdsourced and see if we could do something big with that market. But then in 2011, 12 realized that we weren't a stationary retailer at all. We had built a community of independent creatives who were not stationary designers at all. And I can talk more about that, but that's when I realized we would take the capital and that's when the scaling of the capital started.

Got it.

Yeah.

And the theory of the scale capital to scale the business was.

We needed. Oh, okay. It is that we could no longer do the cheap thing of having a couple of us do all the executive jobs if we really wanted to grow ourselves into several hundred million, several billion dollar company and address different markets.

So if you were advancing the burn rate, were you advancing the burn rate on building the organization? Were you advancing the burn rate on recruiting a bunch of new people within the design community?

I see. It was all people inside the company. We were a very product driven company. We spend very little on marketing. And so it was all building engineering, building an executive team out to run the different groups, different departments. I was basically before that, basically playing maybe four or five VP roles myself. Same with my co founder who I recruited right out of Stanford. So I recruited a co founder who is about seven to 10 years younger than me right out of the GSB and we each split all the VP roles up in the beginning. That's how we got to cash flow break even in 2012, basically because we didn't hire a lot of expensive executives. But then we realized that wasn't going to scale scale to a larger business or to more vertical. So we went from art. Sorry, we went from stationery into art. We sell wall art now, wall art, prints. We started in 2012. We launched fabrics by the Yard last year and this year we moved into home decor. So we now sell home decor like pillows, lampshades, et cetera, et cetera, made on demand for you out of all these crowdsourced designs. So we moved progressively into more and more verticals.

And so let's think a little bit about that move. Let's expose a little bit about the move in vertical. That's part of like there's two parts of the scaling thesis that you exemplified. One part of it is, okay, how do we really build up the employees in order to capture a much larger market opportunity and to do that at some speed in order to occupy, to get the critical mass, et cetera.

Right.

Second part of it is let's also deploy, like sometimes it's software developers on an iOS platform or something else or. But let's deploy a community to also add a lot of value into the ecosystem. So when you're making a decision to go, okay, so we were stationary. Oh, and in case you guys missed that, the word that is obviously way overused in Silicon Valley, but is disrupt in terms of disrupting the stationary business. And also it's kind of the classic zero to one thesis of like, okay, let's tackle something that we know we can. We don't know. We have a very good bet of killing. And then once we have that, then we can actually in fact broaden up. How did your thinking go to now is the time. These are the verticals. We're going to do it as a multiple vertical strategy. And how did that all play in the community?

Right. So we did what we thought were small experiments and we ran everything at Minted is a competition. You run competitions. People enter the competitions from all over the world. There are no qualifications needed. All you do is upload a jpeg. That's it. And then if you win, you give us the original file, we sell it, you make a great commission and everyone is happy. And a upfront cash prize that you get to keep. And people vote, and everyone is invited to vote. When we decided to move into art, we decided to just try one art challenge. And I decided to take the furthest away thing, the most challenging thing I could possibly do, just to kind of see, can the community produce art that people want to put on their walls? Because that's very different from producing a piece of stationery. However, the supply chain is about the same. I can use the same supply chain because I didn't mention to you that we make everything too. So once we source the file, we have all these integrated partnerships and we send out files to the printers and the printers drop ship. So I could leverage the same supply chain back end. Right. But go very far to see how far we could stretch the community. The same community. It worked. Within three months, we had West Elm calling us, a retailer owned by Williams Sonoma, to say, we want your art in all of our stores. That was the first sign it was working, was when the people in the know start calling you and saying, we need this content. Because ultimately Minted is a content destination. We make content. We just happen to monetize it by selling it in physical form to you. We're going to sell it in digital form starting about a week from now. We're going to launch digital invitations. So we'll be competing with Paperless Post and Evite in about a week.

Is that okay to be on video camera or is that confidential?

It's fine.

Or we could delay this video.

Sure, sure.

Be delayed by about a week.

Perfect. So that's about it.

So don't tweet that. Thank you.

Yeah, so we're gonna, you know, we're agnostic, actually about whether we monetize the content either physically or digitally. We don't really care. In the end, it's like whatever you wanna do to create, bring style and design to your life is great with us. So. But the point is that we went far. It worked. We started getting. And the indicators, when you're very. You have no traffic, for example. Trying to decide whether something is working or not working in a consumer business can be very challenging. So I didn't tell you that we almost folded the company in the first month of our existence because there were no sales whatsoever for the first month. And then. It's a long.

Actually, I didn't know that. Let's go into that.

You want to.

Okay. Yes, please.

Okay. So the first month we launched, we had zero sales. Very different from Eve.com where immediately people started streaming and buying makeup from us. Like in kind of a surprising fashion. No sales, Not a single one, maybe week. Number six. We had one sale, one transaction. And what the transaction was was nobody was buying any of the branded stationery products that we'd spent probably 90% of our funding launching because our investors thought that would be a little safer, which I understand. And there were 22 designs ever crowdsourced for save the date card invitations. I don't know if you guys even know what those are, but those are wedding. Like you send out save the day card out when you get engaged and you're about to get married. So that 22 of those designs, they started selling. So there's this tiny sign of life in this tiny little corner. One transaction a week, then there were two, and maybe two, another week, and then three. And the question was, the problem is we had no traffic, so we had no ability to tell whether that was good or bad. Except the conversion rate was 0.1%, which is pretty lousy of unique visitors transactions divided by unique visitors. Right. So you want to get a conversion rate at least up to 1% or higher, really, to be a healthy E commerce business. So I thought to myself, geez, maybe I should just take all the money and give it back to my friends. They're all My friends, who angel invested. I'm feeling very responsible. I can't take two and a half million from my friends and burn it. And honestly, the reason I kept going, just completely honestly, was I did not want to lose my friends money. I felt so responsible for taking my friend's money that I just could not lose their money.

I'm going to make this work.

I'm going to make it work. I don't care what happens. I got to make it work. And that means I'm going to take a venture round. So that's why I took the venture round. So I took the venture round in 2008, the first round. Right. A couple of weeks before Lehman failed.

You have some good timing, by the way.

Do not watch me carefully. Do not watch me. I don't want to be watched about this. But, yes. Well, in this particular case, one of my angels called and said, I have a really bad feeling. This is August 2008. I have a really bad feeling. I really think you should raise some money to save the company. I said, I think you're right, Alex. This is my friend Alex Slusky. He runs Vector. And I quit my vacation, flew down from where I was in Seattle, and then raised money from idg. And then, literally, I was saying to the lawyers, I got a bad feeling. We got to close this. We got to close it. And then two weeks later, by the.

Way, just so you don't feel like you're completely unique in this, two parts of my own personal history in this. So PayPal raised $100 million on a 500 pre with no revenue in 2000. And we closed the day that NASDAQ peaked. Oh, no.

That's fantastic.

And this was Peter's genius, not mine. Peter Thiel. Because, Peter, there was so much interest that there was. There were international folks who were deducing our bank because this was the crazy. You remember the first boom, they were deducing our bank account, wiring US $10 million and then telling us, because we had the money already, we had to let them into the round. That's how crazy it was, right? You're like, what? You wired us money from overseas and you think that this is a liar's a mess. Now, I was amongst everyone else in telling Peter that, like, well, shoot, if we have that much interest, we should just, you know, like, raise more money and raise around. And Peter was like, no, this is crazy. This is a sign that everything is totally insane. We're closing, we're closing. We're closing. We're closing. We're closing. And so, you know, he can't get that real. Perfect timing. There's luck in that. But oh my gosh, that was the, you know, that was the beginning.

Scary.

The other one is also 2008. Early in 2008, David Z at Greylock, you know, came to me, was on my board at LinkedIn and said, My partners and I have been talking. This is one of the actually functions and values of a venture firm and say, we think the market's unstable, we don't really know what it is, what's going to go on. They didn't like say, oh, we predict it's a failure in credit default swaps. Right. Things were overheated. You should seriously consider doing a round as insurance. And we raised around entirely on an insurance basis in 2008 ourselves. Our Series D for LinkedIn.

That's great.

Very, very similar kind of story. And by the way, that's part of one of the general scale up strategies sometimes associated with blitzscaling. Otherwise is actually do that kind of capital planning, right? Because you might say, look, I may not absolutely need this money right now, but I may need it intensely. And so now is a good time.

To get it right. And it always takes you more money and more time than you thought to do a lot of things right to your plan. So, yeah, so we almost closed the company down, but we managed to. I just stuck with it. Just a sheer commitment to my friends.

So did the idea for doing the crowd network come as an experiment in the beginning or was that what you wanted to do when your investors persuaded you to do the branding thing?

I really wanted to go do completely crowdsourcing, but I was, I made the decision myself to be balanced because I was being counseled and to be, you know, let's be careful. So. And I, and I willingly made the decision myself. I'm so glad that we did it though, because it saved the company and we did this. We then had to go jettison all the brand relationships we had built. So we signed up all these brands for exclusive distribution and then had to have the courage to go face all of them and say, oops, sorry, we made a mistake, we can't sell any of your products, it turns out, at all. And instead we're going to go completely compete with you and source all these crowdsourced designs. And not only that, but the reason why all these people are entering in the competitions to begin with is because you are here with us right now.

Thanks for that.

And it was terrible. I felt really terrible about it. And so, because that's what created this aspiration for all of these wannabe designers to come in. Because we had all these fantastic brands signed up in the beginning, because it.

Set the brand thing for people to.

Say, this is a good thing.

Competing in this competition is worth something. Is worth something.

Exactly. So is there a different way you.

Would hack that now? If you were to call your younger self, would you, with all the regrets and everything else, play the same path or would you do it differently?

I would feel ethically, I have a hard time doing it, knowing what happened, that I wouldn't have planned it that way and I would have a hard time doing that. But I think there are ways you can hack around that. But the key thing is you need to build aspiration for people and there are other ways to build aspiration. So with the community, you had asked me a question though, about scaling. It turns out that we have not had to do. We've had to make smart and very consistent and fair policies to our community. We don't change them. We don't go back on the community members ever. We have very, very strict policies about not going back on people. Communication is very consistent and clear, those kinds of things. But we've not had to invest money in the community. And so in the art business, just an example, we didn't add anybody to our business for two and a half years in the art business. We just let the community build up over time and create all the content. And then slowly, as the content grew, conversion rates went up and the business grew to basically a eight figure business in two and a half years with absolutely hiring nobody at the company at all. So community can be a great leverage point if you can let people make decisions outside the company. If you can build a community and transfer entire functions essentially to the community. Our whole product design arm is really our community of people who don't work for us directly. Well, you know so much about that. That can be a huge, it's a huge lever point. I mean, we can. We just launched if you go to our site and you go to the participate section. One week ago, we launched an outdoor art challenge. So we are decorating because our landlord in San Francisco asked us. He loves what we did on the inside of the building. So he's asked us to decorate the outside of the building. So we now have a challenge going right now to decorate the outside of 747front. So it's really quite amazing what a community will do. If you manage it with the core consistent practices, are you Familiar with Hayek? No.

Anyway, Hayek, Hayek. He's an Austrian economist who won the Nobel Prize.

Oh, Hayek. Oh, yes, yeah, okay. Sorry.

Did you deliberately design the community rules in a kind of a rule of law, Hayekian fashion?

No, but I think that they think of it as a society, a separate society, which has developed as it demonstrated a lot of characteristics of an actual real life civilization. And in the real world, for example, people are constantly striving to climb ladders in our society, in our minted society, they're never happy being at it wrong. They're always looking for the next wrong. It's very, very interesting. People, People don't want it to be flat at all. They don't want, they want, they don't want communism in our society. They want this hierarchy. There are all kinds of interesting things that we've observed.

Well, this is part of how your community is actually different than Mozilla and Code for America, which is part of last week.

Oh, okay, interesting.

So you actually have the commercial community as a representative. What did you learn about the building of that community network such that you would go, oh, I doubled down on that. That was something that was really important to someone else. Trying to build a community like this is something you think about. And also those are positive lessons and then negative lessons like, oh, if I could call myself earlier, I'd say, don't do that one or do it less or differently.

The positive lessons have been to go really slowly. I mean, there's no rush to change policies. For example, we started very conservatively with commissions because we figured, looking at ebay and some of the things that happened at ebay when they tried to bring commissions down, we thought, well, there's only one way to go, which is up. You don't want to go back. You don't want to reduce commissions on people. So let's start very conservatively and then move up slowly over time. So we like to. That's served us well. Consistently trying to emphasize fairness and good treatment of people has been, has been enormous for us because the word of mouth among designers has been very strong. One thing I noticed early was I read that book Blink By. I'm sorry, sorry, I'm getting this completely wrong. I'm sorry. No, no, sorry. I apologize. There's a book by Daniel Pink called Drive. Drive. Thank you, sorry. Drive. And it talks about how money can be a real sapping, can SAP the true energy of a community and of a society. The discussion around money. And I made an early mistake where having looked At Mary Kay and Avon. I thought, okay, commissions have just come in. So and so has made this much money. Why don't we do what Mary Kay and Yvonne do and. And celebrate the person who made the most money at the end of the holiday quarter and write a letter to the community and say, so and so made this much money. Isn't that great celebration? Because, you know, at the conferences in Direct Sells, they'll get the top seller up on the stage and celebrate maybe a pink Cadillac and et cetera. We had a very negative reaction.

Steak knives.

But yes, steak knives, Glengarry Glen Ross.

There's a movie. It's the classic sales movie. First prize, Cadillac. Second prize, steak knives. Third prize. You're fired.

Okay, I have to watch that again. So we did that. We had a huge negative reaction. People started quitting the community after we sent that email out. They stopped participating. I can never be as good as that person. I'm never going to earn that much money. We had all kinds of interesting reactions, and especially people focused more on money than on anything else. When we moved it away to personal growth, to learning. Because people communicate with each other and critique each other. And that's a key principle of what we provide is education and learning. We moved it into a better place. So we looked at all the incentives and we don't really talk about money very often. We don't say you're going to quit your day job because what an expectation to build that you can't ever live up to. So we talk about things that we know we can live up to. You will get great critique and education from this community. Your brand will be built by us. You will have fun. And we'll play a game that's really fun. This is a fun game to play. There'll be a fun reward set of rewards. You'll make friends, those kinds of things. And we talk about money way last. And that was one mistake I made earlier that I thought was kind of interesting. Learning.

Yeah. No. Especially given the commercial community. Now, how do you reconcile the whole hierarchy of community that you were earlier point together with this? No, I don't want the pink Cadillac grand prize sort of thing where I'm measuring myself there. How does that play?

I think people, they want to know that they're just making progress in life. So I'm not sure. I think the progress can come in many forms. It could be you're going to include me in the catalog or in some marketing vehicle as easily as it could be I've earned it my way into A higher level of commission. So I think that you can build hierarchy. Even frankly, getting a phone call, believe it or not, with the minted team, is seen as a treasure because you might get some interesting insight or critique on your work that you really want. So there's all sorts of other incentives that you can provide other than directly money that can create a sense of progress, continued forward progress. The human wants to make continued forward progress, it turns out, which is a great thing. Yeah. So nobody is satisfied doing the same thing again and again. I think before we get back to.

The scale thing, there's one other kind of technical thing. Do you ever recurse at all? Do you ever have the minted community create things that are essentially the status markers or the progress markers that you then hand out to the mentioned community as part of what you're doing?

Interesting. We do have positive comments that come that we allow the community to give to each other that result in certain awards. For example, the most helpful. The most helpful. The most helpful commenter in the community, for example, is elected by the community members. And then that person receives other rewards. So we're starting to have. We're starting to have. We don't have that fully built out.

So you have some stuff whereby people are saying these kinds of things. It's completely community controlled. Is the recognition also an artifact designed by the minted community?

It is not, but it probably should be. Yeah, we need to take more and push it out. I just want to keep pushing stuff completely out of the decisions more and more out of the community. But all the policing, for example, happens in the community. We don't pay any money to anyone to police bad behavior because the community continuously reports on bad behavior to us.

So they report. Do they act or do you act?

Sometimes they take matters into their own hands and it's vigilante justice. But it's leave comments to each other that are not that great, but they try to be. Overall, it's a pretty polite community and supportive. So they oftentimes would prefer we do it.

Neighborhood watch.

Neighborhood watch, yes. Not complete vigilantism. Yes.

So now get to scaling the community. And this is fantastic. It worked out this way. Did it just grow on its own or were there anything that you actually specifically had to do in order to grow it? And was there anything you did to try to accelerate that growth or otherwise kind of fill out to get to critical mass successfully?

So we did go to a trade show at one point in the very early days and we did mail the mailing list of the Trade show. So we did do that. I think we did it once, maybe twice. And then we thought, geez, we have way too many entrants into these competitions. You know, we're going to start turning too many people away because ours is a curated marketplace. We are curated. Not everybody gets to sell on minted. It's only what gets voted in. So we stopped recruiting because we thought we were turning away too many people. The other kind of surprise was consumer marketing. So in our attempt to build an aspirational brand for consumers, we ended up attracting in a lot of designers, actually. So the surprise was how many artists we actually attract because of our consumer marketing and making that really attractive, essentially, but brought in people who are very design savvy and then all kinds. And then the other thing I want to say is that the creative who is a creative in the US or really globally right now is completely changing. So that was a complete, that was a surprise. I thought that there would be trained stationary designers entering our competitions. Actually it turns out that there were people approaching us at meetups and saying, I have a confession to make. I've never been formally trained. I taught myself how to design in Microsoft Word or I'm a plumber. I met a plumber last week in New York and she's one of the three female master plumbers in New York City. Her grandfather was a plumber, her father's a plumber. She is a plumber. And she enters minted competitions and she wins. And she beats people who have art degrees from really nice universities. So, you know, what's happening right now is a tip of an iceberg as to all the creative talent that is hidden everywhere right now in this society. Either because people were told not to pursue creative careers, they didn't have the money to get an education, or the tools. That's changing now because of visual social media platforms as well as access to tools. And people are now expressing themselves. And so that who is a creative and what the creative economy is going to be is going to be completely different.

Creative culture and class and all these things. Yes, the meritocracy that comes from a network, it's great stuff, but literally actually, in fact, on the growth side of it, it's just you hit the oil well and the oil well goes, yes.

We never really had to do anything after that because the designers would tell each other, you've really got to submit to minted. So there was a word of mouth network that started happening and that we were good to work with. And on the other hand, the Consumer marketing started attracting a lot of designers in, and then we never really had to recruit again when we went into art. The one exception I will make is with art. We did approach a few artists in the very, very early days to submit, and we did do a little bit of work recruiting maybe something like 30 to 50 people once the West Elm deal kicked in and West Elm was promoting minted art.

As you're bringing, you're bringing the buyers, you're bringing already people who are curating this. And so people who are producing it want to get into those channels.

And we brought more credibility because West Elm was seen as credible. So all of a sudden, it was more of the same thing that started the community, which was credibility. That builds an aspiration, that builds more community.

All right, so let's shift to scaling the organization. So now you. You've raised a more substantial thing. You say, okay, I actually, in fact, have to raise executives and pay them and all the rest of this stuff. What have been the key lessons for now that you're scaling? Minted. And it's different than eve, where EVE was like, classic Internet boom. Oh, my gosh. There are competitors that are exactly like me, just a little bit behind me. I need to out execute them, outspend them. I just need to go like the dickens here. I can build out a little bit more deliberately, but I am building to try to achieve a higher growth scale. What are the things that have worked? What are the things you're thinking about? What are the things you're trying?

Yeah, well, one of the most fascinating things is if you're just around long enough, you start to realize that you can grow people within the company, but you need years and years to do that, to grow people into leadership. And then you realize, wow, wasn't I. You think it feels like it was a smart strategy, but all you had to do is, like, be around long enough. Because essentially, if you can look for people's unique talents and then. And grow people from within, those people will become, I think, I believe now, the strongest leaders you have. Some of them will. We have tried to combine a portfolio, have a portfolio strategy. So we take disciplines where we are not experts, like finance, hr, where people do things better than we do, and we hire those people from outside. The things that we do that are differentiated and where our secret sauce lies, for example, crowdsourcing instead of traditional merchandising. We grow people from the inside because it's very hard to take, let's say a merchant from, let's say Gap and say we want you to unlearn everything you've learned for the past 25 years and not believe in it anymore. We're going to completely break you down and build you back up again. So that is a lot harder than to take a person, let's say a very smart person, build them up inside the company and build them into a leader. So we've done that with our GM of art, our GM of stationery are both general managers are both grown within the company and we've hired the chief people officer and the VP of finance from outside the company, for example.

And what are the ways that you try to help them scale as executives? What are the techniques for that? Because that's actually part of the whole scale up challenge. When you're doing that particular approach, it.

Is really hard if you have no in the beginning one of the worst parts was that capital affects culture in that with very little capital you end up having no like basically no bench. So if you have no bench, you can't hold people accountable and you can't you very you basically it's hard to let people fail when your bottom line is you're so close to the bottom line. So essentially if you have very little capital and you can't make any mistakes, it's very hard to let people fail and grow on their own. With more capital you can actually let some of those mistakes happen and your cash won't go to zero, basically. But we were for seven years, were on this verge constantly of running out of cash for seven years. And that was a very tough place to be to let people make mistakes. So I thought few more gray hairs. Was that three more gray hairs? Definitely. So I mean I thought of it as a time where we were doing too much micromanagement and not enough, you know, open sort of like let people make mistakes, let people grow, et cetera. Now what we can do is let people grow, make mistakes. We do make, let them, that's much more possible. Now we also hire advisors from the outside using usually equity to bring in some experienced people to help advise said grown from within executives. So we do have somebody who's very senior from retail right now who's in advising the two GMs providing other alternate opinion to mine.

Yep, that's a classic actually pattern for the Silicon Valley scale up because it's like okay, how do we use a network to identify the key people to help grow the people within the team in order to get to that? Because classically if you're doing a disruptive business, the go recruit Someone who is an expert in retail doesn't actually. Well, they're not an expert in this, they're an expert at that game. This game is. The whole reason this game is working is it's a new game, it's a different game, different success metrics.

Yeah.

So how do you get the advice in order how to learn the skills that are critical and building up afresh. That's a canonical pattern. That's actually very good.

I'm glad we're doing the right thing. I'm trying to think of other ways we've helped people scale. We tried to do peer feedback. So we have gone through coaching to allow each other basically encourage people to hold each other accountable. So I don't know if you guys have read the Five Dysfunctions of the Five Dysfunctions book by Lencioni, but we've all read that together. We went to a coaching session together and we've tried to like basically have peers hold peers accountable which is one of the hardest things to do in an environment where everyone's very collaborative and they all want to maintain very good relationships with each other.

How did you start that?

We just started that last. Well no, actually the beginning of this year and we hit. So we're about 150 people at the beginning of this year. And we had finally hired the executive team after many years and went on hired a coach.

So this is all part of the scale up plan.

This is definitely trying to get people to bond, have a create this sense of a first team meeting. First team principles is your peer group at the executive level and then being able to hold people accountable each other. So the CEO should no longer be really the only one delivering all the bad news. And instead of holding people accountable, the idea is that the team can help manage each other. So that's another thing.

Well that's kind of classic scale up plan. It's also part of the key thing that I think all scale ups need to do is culture, which is how do you establish a culture that will actually preserve as you're going is actually in fact really key. And so it's like, okay, let's do that as well. So let's shift a little bit to your role. How your role started and changed. Obviously seven years of staying very close to above the just profitable enough means that tremendously in the details on everything in order to make it work. And every fire is a fire that lands on your desk.

Yep.

So at the beginning how did you triage fires because there's too many. How did you kind of Go, all right, these ones I let burn, these ones I deal with. And are there any particular interesting examples?

Yeah. In the beginning I knew everything about everything that was going on at the company and I think one of the biggest adjustments now is being okay actually not knowing everything that was going on at your company. So it's very weird, disconcerting feeling for somebody who's very detail oriented in terms of triaging. In the beginning it was all about revenue growth, revenue growth and revenue growth. It was very revenue oriented because we had no cash. Right. So it was very quantitatively based in terms of we'd rank our initiatives, figure out what would drive revenue growth and go down the list. I mean it was very like focused on that whilst not building, while not damaging the brand.

And by the way, just for the class faces, part of the whole scale up thing is you have to be. The fundamental strategy layer is managing capital. So you either have to be having a financing plan and some companies do this through a successive set of financings and they're planning what their next financing is going as they're doing it, or you have to be managing this cash. But if you're not managing, the financial strategy is fundamental. You can't get the product strategy, you can't get the product distributions around, et cetera.

Yeah. So in the early days my role was very much about capital, acquiring capital, making sure the product was working very well and hiring basically. And I was trying to think about this over the weekend, which is, has anything changed? I'm still thinking about capital, I'm still thinking about product, I'm still thinking about strategy, about hiring. And I would say I've just layered more things on frankly as the company's gotten more complex.

Have you changed the way you're thinking about them?

Yes. So now, for example, in the beginning I was very much involved with our go to market monetization strategy, which is how to get sales going. I was super involved in marketing. Within two to three years I was no longer involved in marketing and I'm very not involved in marketing right now. For example. I'm more involved on the product side on strategy. We growth companies get hungry and we're looking for constant areas of growth. We're hungry companies. And so what happens is you basically get your product strategy, you do product market fit, you've got your revenue scaling, you figure out how to get your revenue to continue going without you doing it and then you make your life more complicated because you might look for growth avenues and that could be either going to different geographies you could be going for us at a different vertical. So we made our lives more complicated, looking for more adjustable market size to attract capital, to attract people and basically to fulfill our mission of making everything in the world really well designed because we really think that everything in our customers lives can be more beautiful and better designed over time. But yeah, so to answer, I guess to answer your question, the role has changed because I basically try. There are many, many areas that I do not manage directly at all. We set objectives, we manage by numbers and I look at the numbers and basically it's very. By creating very, very succinct and repetitive dashboards, frankly that we look at every Monday, you can tell when something is going wrong or not and then if something's going wrong, then you can go dive deep.

You strike me as a numbers person. You probably created those dashboards earlier than most entrepreneurs.

Yeah, myself. Yeah. Well, because the thing with Eve.com back way back when was that there was nobody to make dashboards so you had to sit there with a blank piece of paper and think now what metrics should I invent to manage an e commerce business? Like you have to do everything completely from scratch yourself on a blank sheet. So I got really into managing and building dashboards and metrics. It's one of my favorite, absolute favorite things to do. I know it sounds crazy, but I love building dashboards like metrics and I find now it's a way of teaching people. So now I think about analytics at the company as a key way of leveraging myself and creating reports for other people to transfer knowledge to other people who are burgeoning GMs.

So you're naturally that way, but it is actually one of the also classic kind of blitzscaling techniques is you have to actually begin to start putting metrics and dashboards at the center of your management chain and your cross communication and collaboration tray. Yes, and there's dangers to that too, because if you have the wrong dashboard or too many things, or there's metrics that people are tracking that are not actually in fact the strategic metrics that can actually create dysfunction as well as function. Any particular historical backlook at great function and dysfunction through the creation of.

Well, the key thing is to create really consistent questions from the very beginning and do not change those questions over time because you need the year over year history and you need that record to be sacrosanct. Like do not touch the history and don't change the questions every year. So for example, we've been tracking our NPS Score and asking the same exact questions since July of 2000. And just in case, I suspect everyone.

Knows, I apologize, but just. No, no, no. Just in case. Net promoter score. It's basically will your customers refer your product or service to other people? And it's a way it basically. When business school profs. I think it came out of Wharton, but I'm not exact. I don't know which group it actually came out of. But when they did an analysis about how you analyze how ultimately happy your customers are with you, a lot of them all correlated with your NPS score. So it makes it much simpler in order to do something.

Yeah, exactly. And so we put into place basically the things that I have not let go of. Just. I'm going to circle back to analytics are analytics, reading customer feedback and talking to customers directly. Getting the primary information versus secondary information. Brand community strategy.

You're not doing much in marketing, but you just said you're holding on to brand.

Brand expression, but not acquisition strategy, traffic generation, driving revenue, but actually the brand. Like what are the. What's the brand expression? The creative expression of the brand. The. But not operations anymore. I used to run customer service. I do not do that anymore.

By the way, the most hardcore one of that. Have you ever met Paul English who did kayak? He's out in Boston. No, he put his cell number as the customer service.

Oh, my God. Wow.

That was the hardest. That was the hardest core one of that I've heard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we are very, very. We're very customer centric as the customer service oriented. But I would, you know, manage a lot of shifts and basically manage customer service for a couple of years during the holiday season, which I would not wish on anybody. It was a great learning experience, but glad it's not me anymore. But the key thing with analytics, learning.

Experiences, that's usually the. Glad it's not me anymore.

Yeah, it's fantastic because there's nothing that can substitute having that experience, I think. But for us at least, we built key metrics early and did not change them and were rigorous about tracking them at a regular pace. Every Monday morning, every Monday we produce our dashboards. They're rigorous, they go out regularly. It's a process that people follow.

Do you have a staff sit down with the numbers?

We do. We have a sales meeting every Monday. And on the research side, we believe both in the sort of qualitative talk to the customers to interpret things. You can't get through the numbers and then take those hypotheses that come out of that and then test them through large scale like SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey. I have built so much of our business using SurveyMonkey. I could go on forever on serving monkey. Okay, well, we have really significantly impacted our business by using SurveyMonkey to intuit new products to figure out what people. I mean, you wouldn't believe how much we built.

Is there anything in how you developed the initial kind of stationary contests and everything else that you would change different, like you would change when you look back?

There's probably a ton of things I would have liked to have engineering capacity to build and I probably really underfunded the business, frankly. I probably was a little conservative, honestly. I think it was a little bit though influenced by wanting to not get diluted ownership wise and then also worried about, you know, just the outcome. You know, was I going to get forced down the path of taking the company public or what was going to happen? I didn't want to. I didn't. I wanted to have control over the outcome, at least a little bit of control. But I did underfund the company and I probably should have used engineering time to build more features into the. Into the game earlier. Yeah. So I would. I would have done that. I would have done that a little bit earlier. Yeah.

So I'm going to ask two of the questions that were submitted. I have a. It gives you a sense of how many more questions. I have a stack of questions I haven't gotten to. But I'm going to also open it up to questions from the audience in case you guys have specifics that are coming out here. And if not, that's fine. I've got plenty to go through. And one of the things that's from Andrey Payonkov. I'm really terrible with names, actually. I used to always announce my superpower as I'm terrible at pronouncing names from written form. What are some of the important characteristics of the independent artist community which enabled building a successful marketplace and also correlated. What should one consider when evaluating a market as a candidate for building a marketplace business?

Okay, I'll take the second one first. So if you have a product that can benefit from a lot of diversity, so there's a long tail of demand, that's a good one. So you. Diversity and variety should make a difference in this market. Another one is there's enough room in the product to have variety express itself. Another one is hits are important. The more important getting the hit, identifying the hit is let's say you're in the music business and you absolutely have to know that one hit because the hit's going to do a huge amount. So on the other hand. So on the one hand, you want to have a lot of diversity because you can get a nice long tail. On the other hand, if a hit is important in any way, I can net it through the curation process, through voting. So I like having both aspects. But I do think in the end, having the long tail is more important then a lot of talent, a lot of people who can transact as suppliers is important. So if we did something where there are very few artisans in that profession or in the area would be hard. So you need to have enough talent. Yep, yep.

So from Deanna. Okay, thank you. Right. Like I said, super weakness. How have you seen the conversation around diversity shift or not since you first came to Silicon Valley? What would be the most impactful actions for individuals or companies to take to promote more diversity? And add to that, what kind of advice would you give for women entrepreneurs?

Okay, well, first advice for women entrepreneurs would be to start as early as possible because you do have a shorter Runway before life starts to sort of present trade offs, let me put it that way. Family, for example. So I would take more risk as a female rather than less risk. I think women should be encouraged to take far more risk than men, actually, because the time Runway is so short. And I accidentally discovered that and benefited from it because I was able to afford a nanny and all this other stuff. I had great negotiating leverage after the first one. So the first company. The other thing I would advise is actually to get male mentors, not just female mentors. Everyone's like, oh, you need a female mentor? Well, actually, if most people who are in positions of decision making authority are male, you actually need a male mentor and male friends to help you. And luckily, I'm happy to say that despite everything that's being reported out there, that most people are actually open minded, it turns out. And the bad ones get a lot of the press, but the good ones don't. And there are a lot of good people to help you. And a lot of the. I mean, I would say almost everybody who's helped me has been male, you know, and the generation behind me is actually even more enlightened than my generation, which is great. So I have, you know, I really do believe that actually that the millennial generation is more actually, you know, things just keep getting better.

So just to clarify, because I think I know you reasonably well, so I think there's a nuance in what you're Saying that's important. Make sure you have male mentors as well. You can also perfectly find.

Oh yes, I'm sorry.

No, I just wanted to make sure.

Let me make sure that's very clear on camera.

I know you so I wanted to make sure you.

So you do. Female mentors are important but they're not the only thing you should go find in terms of mentors. You should find male mentors as well. You need to have both. And many of the people who have helped me really gain financing and other access to other things have been male mentors and friends. And then the diversity conversation, things have shifted a lot in that in general generational turnover creates more open mindedness. It just happens. It's like just natural. You just wait it out and things will change. So I mean it's true, things are changing and people are acting on things and you know, I, I look at some VC firms that never found funded female entrepreneurs there and then all of a sudden they've got a couple of female entrepreneurs in their portfolio. So it's very much changing. People want to make money and if you can provide results and that's the key thing to focus on, that's the number one thing to focus on. They will go where the money is because they are business people and they will want to make money on you essentially. So that would be my number one piece of advice is focus on delivering the results and everything else is going to follow that and try to ignore all the. Build your own company the way you want to build it with people you want to build it with.

Focus on company building.

Yeah. And get the right people inside your company, are open minded and it's not going to eventually be a problem for you I think.

So I'm going to ask one more question and then open it up. Like I said, I can continue. So on the goal of moving past the critical failure point of curation of like for example, like one purchaser who has to get it right this year. Have you successfully totally blown that out of the water? Are you partway down that.

Sorry I said.

So you previously looked at these retail businesses and said you're dependent on one taste.

Oh yes, yes, yep.

So is that proven done dead part of the past or is it still something that you're coming up to?

I'm feeling very, very confident about it.

Now.

We have, let's say you have a set of bestsellers. Right. That let's say in the traditional Pareto rule is there's an 8020 rule. Right. So 80% of your sales are, let's say, done by 20% of your assortment. So take that 80%. About 80% of that 80% is now ranking in the top 5% of our votes of our voted ranking. The way we apply analytics to voting, so we do some things to the votes to weight certain voters differently. And those voters are what fit our predictive model. Yeah. And so we can't talk about that. Please don't ask me, but I can't talk about the specifics.

If I asked you, you could just say, I can't answer.

That's true.

I could.

Yes. But we have certain characteristics that even if you've never voted for before, we can fit you to and profile you. We will then weight your vote differently and then based on that, we can now predict bestsellers.

Do you do machine learning, intense data science?

Not yet, but we're building analytics up right now. Yeah, so I'm feeling good about that.

So for the first 20 minutes that you raised back in 2000, what monthly revenue did you have to keep for that? And how did you like, first make that connection to real time?

In the, for the Eve.com example, I just tried to network with Stanford and.

Repeat the question a little bit.

I'm sorry. The question was, for the first company, Eve.com, we raised 26 million. How did we network our way? How do we get an entree into raising that money? And what was the monthly. Did we have to make a certain monthly revenue? Back then, people were not focused at all on proving out the revenue or the profit. They just wanted us to go fast. And they were happy when we produced 10 million in the first year in revenue, but they were not asking for that at all. Now, for an E commerce company, you probably want to show good traction, consumer traction, before you're going to get funded. I think potentially, although he's more of an expert than I am on the funding, the way we did was we basically, my partner was a HBS alum and I was a GSP alum. And we just looked at our networks and we tried to network our way to VCs who would meet with us. And at that point, people were very interested in business school students raising money. Now the tide, and the tide keeps shifting. The tide shifted more towards engineering and user experience.

Designers, this is a CSF undergraduate class.

Perfect. You guys are great. You guys are very well positioned. Way better positioned than an mba. Back then it was like, oh, you know, who's the MBA? You can write a business plan in 98. It's very outdated model now, now it's, who's the brilliant engineer paired with a great designer who could come forward. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's, you know, you could easily. It's a networking game, networking your way, getting introductions. Because a lot of the VCs will meet with people who have been referred to them.

Referrals help just to amplify that. All the quality VCs get, call it minimum 10 to 20 cold pitches into their inbox per day.

Right?

You can't even look at them, right. You just like, I've got the best new app thing forever. And you're like, I just don't have time to process it. I don't have time to think about it. So the proxy that everyone uses is somebody who they trust says, take a look at this, this person, this plan, et cetera. That's always the way it works. Now, if you happen to be already showing so many points on the board where your traffic's really growing and else they may reach out, may look for you. If you say, look, this is what my baseline traffic is, they may forward it to an associate and say, take a look at this and see if this is not assertion. Because by the way, a bunch of people send in lies too when they're doing this stuff. So it gets very hard to distinguish between signal and noise. So that's the reason why what Miriam is saying is essentially true. Now, on commerce, generally speaking, it either has to be traction, obvious that you'll get traction, or a clever enough plan that you want. Okay, this is an interesting gamble. It has to be one of the three.

So I was surprised to hear you say that you're tackling both digital and physical design simultaneously because a lot of companies have failed and they try to do both. How are you thinking about that strategy and scaling both simultaneously? Yeah, we were. It's nerve wracking. We spent, you know, we've been around now for eight years and we finally are doing it. So we took a long time, right? So we. One thing we did was we acquired a company in January that does wedding websites, that made wedding websites there in Kansas City. And we reskinned them completely with minted, pushed all the community content through their platform and that was a success. It's. The product is launched, it's working beautifully. So we tried to buy one and start one and we'll see. That story hasn't been told yet. A couple months from now, I might be wishing I bought a digital invitations company too, because it's A big learning experience for us. And Selena from SurveyMonkey was previously at Evite as their founding CTO. So we actually called. We called her. Yes. Yeah. And we are.

And you're gonna meet Selena. She's gonna be here.

It sounds like you'll meet her, but, you know, very carefully, I guess is the answer. And with trepidation.

Great product, an awesome talk.

So thank you.

So you kind of had a two front war when you're starting out because you have both your artists who are producers and your buyers who are consumers. And you have to reach out to both them, but you're only a small team. So as you were scaling up, how did you allocate resources?

Such a great and insightful question. Because I felt like I was constantly running back and forth between the two audiences myself personally, and I was trying really hard not to let. I'd been mindful of reading about ebay and that they were focused too much on one, not on the other. Amazon was on one, not the other. And in the end, I felt like in the end, if I could keep the designer experience simple, well run and very ethical, that if I produced more revenue for the designers, that ultimately would keep them with me long enough while I could get the capital to make their experience even better. So I bet on I would run back and forth. So I had to do double duty marketing, go to market strategy, run over to a meetup and make the designers happy, run back over to the marketing strategy ready sheet, pop up the revenue, run back over, you know, back and forth, back and forth. I can say finally now, today I have a great community relations team who takes a lot of that community relations management off my hands. I'm still out there meeting with designers all the time in our community, like doing meetups. But I have a big. Not big, but nice, very great team on community relations and I've got a great team on marketing. But in the beginning, I had to do double duty and really run between the two audiences. And I tilted towards the consumer thinking. The more that I built the brand, the more aspirational I made the brand and the bigger the revenue grew, the more of a virtuous cycle I would be providing to fuel community interest in minted. Because the bigger our revenue got, the more designers would be interested in us, essentially.

So the classic question on this particular question. Excellent question, just asked.

Really good. Yeah.

Is there anything you would tell your earlier self to do differently on the prioritization?

I don't actually. I think given our capital strategy, I would have just raised more capital earlier. That's the only thing I would have.

And then everything else flows down and.

I think everything would have flown from there. Well, we just bought a 3D printer and put one in our office to play with because I'm fascinated. Like, what can I make out of this? What can we do? So I think it can be done. I think you crowdsource, but you need to think about a fast to market. I think you could do 3D, but we are making pillows now on demand. So we're making 3D things. We're making pillows on demand for consumers. So we now make. But the part that's crowdsourced is the surface material, the textile. That's where all the goodness is. It's in the 2D printed material that's just made into a couple of standard form factors. So we're not trying to source a different form factor design and then manufacture it, which would be really hard at scale. So it's threading the supply. If you're talking about products, it's threading this needle between enough differentiation from the actual crowdsourced content with a scalable supply chain. And that's fast to market. It's really a needle that you gotta thread.

One last question.

Is there another one?

Are we good? All right.

Okay.

Thank you very much. Please give Sharon.

Thanks.