Season 2 Episode 2: Ajay Kori of Urban Stems

Come on into The Room. The Room is a series that lets you get a view into the room where it happened. I'm Claudia Laurie.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, your co-hosts. In honor of Valentine's Day this past Sunday, we are excited to interview Ajay Kauri, the co-founder and former CEO of UrbanStems. For those who don't know, UrbanStems is a direct-to-consumer flower delivery business that sources flowers from all over the world and ships bouquets nationwide. After an ill-fated birthday flower delivery failure to his then-girlfriend, Ajay realized this could be done better. An unlikely founding team of 5 adult men, Ajay and his college buddy Jeff Sheely, set out to change the vase— I mean, face— of flowers everywhere. While Ajay is probably most known for UrbanStems, he's actually a 4-time founder. His first business was bought and sold before the age of 18. While most recently he's begun solving for one of the largest ailments in the world's population, migraines. With his new business, Aley Lamp, Ajay and the team is providing drug-free relief from a common yet unfortunate illness, leveraging cutting-edge research coming out of Harvard and other top universities. It's not every day we meet such a prolific founder with a profound sense of self-awareness and cheerfulness. In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as why the customer is always right, how to scale an operationally complex business, and the nuanced journey of learning what kind of founder you are. Let's open the door. Thank you so much for being with us here today on The Room.

Thank you so much for having me.

We're really excited to dive right into your multiple founding journey, which started with some interesting stories. Uh, but before we dive into, you know, what was, what you're most well known for, UrbanStems, we'd love to start at the beginning, which which is that you had grown up in Durham, North Carolina and actually went to college in your own backyard at Duke, majoring in psychology and chemistry, which is such an interesting combination given eventually you will be building a flower company. But I'm curious, at the beginning, did you always know that you wanted to be a founder?

Yeah, when I was in middle school actually, I was really nerdy, which if you know me now is not surprising at all. And you know, around the time people were like discovering video games and like the opposite sex, I was like too scared to do all of that. And so I learned to code and actually took my first university class when I was in middle school on HTML and started just building websites for fun. I fell in love with it to the point where my parents were a little concerned how much time I was spending on the computer, but ended up just building websites. They started getting some traction. Once I kind of understood what people like, I just started doubling down on it, ended up building what I like to call BuzzFeed before BuzzFeed existed. It was like dancing cartoon characters. The online fortune cookie was one of our most popular things. There were all these sites that were, you know, just got sent around to a lot of other kids. And so by the time I actually graduated middle school, I had one of the most visited websites in the world. Didn't know at all what I was doing and didn't know anything about venture capital or building a business. So I just went out and found other teenagers who were building content. Brought them on my platform and developed a revenue share with them. And we ended up having one of the most visited websites in the world for people my age, you know, kids 13 to 18. And this is around the dot-com boom. And so obviously there was a lot of capital in the markets at that time. And so two publicly traded companies ended up putting in bids to acquire me. Being a teenager, I was like, well, there were two very different offers. One was very heavy on stock and one was very heavy on cash. And being a stupid teenager, I was like, well, Stock only goes up, so I should do the stock deal. And I sold to that company and they went out of business 6 months later during the dot-com crash. The company, publicly traded company I didn't sell to, ended up starting MySpace and eventually acquired by News Corp. So very different outcome, but one of the best experiences I possibly could have had. And ever since then have known that I've loved entrepreneurship, loved starting companies. And when you mentioned that I did chemistry and psychology at Duke, that was because I knew what I was going to be doing for the rest of my career. So I just kind of took the classes that most interested me and most of my time was spent doing tech stuff. I was the CTO of the student body for, for 2 years and yeah, it just gave me the freedom to kind of study whatever I wanted to 'cause I, I knew I loved entrepreneurship.

It's pretty epic that you were like, actually, I already totally have built a website, built a business, sold it, so I don't need to major in computer science because I can code better than any of the teachers here.

That is absolutely not true, but I'm sure I thought that.

Fast forwarding to to when you were in college, that you clearly have continued to be very entrepreneurial throughout your whole life. But in college you met Jeff Sheely, who was someone that's gonna continue to come up in our conversation today. But at the time he was a friend and you co-founded a social networking site where users wrote biographies about other users instead of just themselves. So like I would write one about Claudia and she about me. This is not the first business you built, but this is, it's like a fun kind of college thing that you part— partaked in. But maybe tell us a little bit more about this social media endeavor at a time when Facebook was really taking off. MySpace was a maybe, will they, won't they, and, and why you were building this then.

Yeah, you absolutely nailed it in the timing of when we did it. It was kind of an inflection point in social media. And we were sitting in our common room, we lived in the same dorm, and we were just talking to one of the custodial staff that was in our common room cleaning up, you know, probably some big mess we made from a party the night before. And he told us this like amazing story of how he came to the country, how he, uh, built a family here. He had 5 kids, you know, just like the living purely, you know, the American dream, came here at like, you know, able to afford a house and send money back to his family. And we were just blown away by the story of this kind of everyday person who, you know, built the American dream himself. And, you know, we were like, you know what, Wikipedia only really tells the stories of those people who are kind of, you know, famous or something is known about them. And we have these everyday people who have these amazing stories that are never going to be told unless they become famous. And so we decided, you know, social media is all about me. Social media should also have a component that's about you. And so we designed Wikipedia to be a biography for every single person on Earth, written by every other person on Earth.

Honestly, you probably have the most interesting background of anyone we've interviewed pre-22. But after that, your, your career went the traditional path, dare I say, maybe a little boring. You went into consulting. And then, you know, went on to Harvard Business School, which is not too shabby. But then after Harvard, you went back a little bit towards your entrepreneurial roots, getting a job at Quidsi, which for those who don't know, is the parent company of diapers.com. And was this before it sold to Amazon for $450 million or after?

I joined right, right before the acquisition. Yeah.

Great timing. A little bit better timing than your stock that got bust in the dot-com bust. Of 2000.

You randomly have to get it right every once in a while.

Exactly. Yeah. Luck, luck will have it that way. So what was your role as you were getting hired into Quizzy?

Yeah, so that was a really interesting time. So as I was, you mentioned I was at HBS. I actually wanted to start a company right out of school and specifically in the men's fashion space. And one of my professors, mentors at the time took one look at the way I dressed and said, you shouldn't do that. And he was absolutely right because You know, he made a very good point. You know, when you start a company, you are married to that idea likely for the next 5 to 10 years. And I didn't care about fashion. I just saw it as an opportunity. And, you know, our— my class at that time was really into fashion. You know, Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix was in my class. She actually told me about the idea when we were on a trip in Africa. And Birchbox was— Hailey lived above me. You know, there was just a lot of There was a lot of swirl around the space and for obviously good reason that we know now, those are phenomenally successful companies. But I was doing it because there was an opportunity, but I had no real passion for it. And so he correctly was like, go find, you know, wait till you're actually passionate about an idea. And I said, well, what should I do in the meantime? He said, go find someone you really respect that you can learn from and a company that's growing really fast and you're going to be part of that diaspora for the next you know, for the rest of your life. And so I randomly got connected with, through some classmates, with Marc Lore, who was at that time, you know, in talks with Amazon about the acquisition. And everyone I talked to, he just came so highly recommended and they were all completely right. And so when I went to talk to Marc, he knew I was an entrepreneur. He knew I wanted to start my own company. So he made me a deal. He said, you know, we want to start pet pharmacy, pet pharmaceuticals, believe it or not, extremely profitable business, but very regulated. And neither them nor Amazon had ever started a pharmacy before. So they wanted an entrepreneur to essentially kind of launch it, tackle the challenges not from a retail perspective, but from a startup perspective. So he said, come build the pharmacy and we'll mentor you for those 2 years that you're building it, and then go off and build your business after that. And I took that deal and it was one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life because Mark Lore and Vinny, who's the other co-founder of Quizzy, they're Two of the smartest people on earth. He, what he really discovered and the reason all those sites are so successful is that if you create, you know, you can boil down his hypothesis to, to one thing. If you create the best experience for your customers, you'll always win at the end of the day. The, the two most important things in e-commerce are the cost it takes to get a customer and how much value that customer provides over their lifetime. And typically when, when people start an e-commerce company, they look at very short-term metrics of what it, you know, obviously what it costs to get that customer, but how much of the money they're generating in the first couple of months after that customer. And when they look at customer acquisition, they're looking at, you know, their Facebook spend, their Google AdWords spend. They're looking at things that they can easily measure. And when you look at lifetime value, same thing, things you can easily measure, you know, what they've spent in the first couple of months that they became a customer. Those are the wrong things to focus on. What Mark has really pioneered, but it's much harder to measure, but it always works out, is that if you create the best possible experience for your customers, that it's going to lower your cost of acquisition because they are doing your marketing for you. It's all through word of mouth and other things that are really hard to measure, but it absolutely plays and they're going to be much more valuable customers.

It's pretty incredible that you had the kind of experiences that you have given, you know, you were a founder on your own, but you knew at a, you know, not young age, but still early on in your relative career post-college that you just had more to learn from the mentors and people around you. And I think oftentimes when we're in our young bullheaded days, we We feel like there's nothing we don't know, but it's really refreshing to hear that you leaned into the opportunity for mentorship and learned what you could from a legend, a legend in his own right. So that's incredible. And I happen to know, I think what his new thing is, if I can push on that for one sec, is it the new food truck delivery, like cook at your home thing?

Yeah. It's an idea that he's had for a long time. In fact, during our mentoring sessions, we, we talked about it. Back in 2010, 2011. So it's clearly something that he has wanted to solve for a long time. And it's a, you know, he doesn't do anything that's not enormous. And if this works, it would fundamentally change how we eat. So which, which is the bare minimum of big enough for him.

You know that if you have an idea that's lasted, you know, beyond 10 years, that there's probably something more to it.

Exactly. Exactly. It's very ambitious, but I think it's an amazing— when it launches, it'll be an amazing way, an amazing change of how we think about food and restaurants and everything.

You mentioned that you were thinking about men's fashion as kind of your industry that you wanted to go after, after HBS, but it wasn't necessarily where you were passionate. And so moving into the founding days of UrbanStems, what was the first aha moment when you, a guy, thought, I'm really passionate about flowers and I want to go and disrupt this market.

I was living in New York and, you know, I worked at Quizzy. And at the time I was dating someone who was doing her residency in Philadelphia. And so we were both incredibly busy in this long-distance relationship. And so I sent flowers quite often and I would just have bad experience after bad experience. And I thought I was just getting really unlucky. Finally, on her birthday, I sent her a bouquet to surprise her and held off on calling 'cause I wanted the bouquet to surprise her at the hospital. And by the afternoon it hadn't come and I called, it was FTD I ordered it from. I said, "Where is this bouquet?" They said, "Oh, it's coming, it's coming." This kind of stretched on into the evening and I held off on calling 'cause it was apparently imminently about to be delivered. And it got to about 11:00 PM when I finally was like, "It's not coming." and now I've royally screwed up because I have not called on her birthday. And after that experience, which to be completely fair, that is a lot on me. But after that experience, I was like, there's, you know, I can't be this unlucky. There's gotta be something wrong with this industry. And we looked into it and sure enough, you know, out of all categories of e-commerce, floral used to be dead last in customer satisfaction. And the juxtaposition of being, you know, quitsy at diapers.com where we were literally beating Amazon because we so overinvested in the customer experience and seeing this entire industry that just existed where you paid a higher, you know, you pay a higher price than if you bought locally and you get a worse customer experience. It just stood out to me in a way that, you know, there was an immense amount of opportunity to go in and fix it. And also, like, someone just needs to fix it because this sucks right now.

I similarly had had so many experiences of sending flowers to family members, my mom, and they would just like show up dead. If at all. And I remember actually ordering from UrbanStems for the first time for Mother's Day and, you know, added the add-ons. And I mean, my mom was like, what is this company? Like, I've never seen— every time I tell people, don't send me flowers because they're always awful. This is incredible. Like, give me the name. I'm going to send it to my friends. And so that was kind of a personal moment of delight and, you know, a moment where I realized, oh, UrbanStems is doing something very differently. And I think that probably contributed to your massive early growth. Can you tell us what UrbanStem's first Valentine's Day looked like?

Yeah. And if I can actually go back to what you just said, thank you for sharing that story about your mom. This exactly exemplifies, you know, Mark Lurie's hypothesis. You know, your mom started, probably told 3 or 4 other people about UrbanStems. A couple of them have probably started using it. Customer acquisition for floral is about $30 to $40 on Google AdWords or on Facebook. Facebook right now, us delivering a great experience to your mom costs, obviously does cost us a little bit more, but in return, that's, you know, $80+ in value of just customer acquisition in addition to the value of her as a customer over time. But on the first Valentine's Day, which is actually the first day of the company, we had nothing. We had a windowless closet in the basement of this building that had felt bad for us and so gave us what we later learned was a rat-infested closet. 200 square feet, and we bought flowers from this distributor that was locally in the area and put them together in this closet. And there was so much manual effort. It was all the, you know, co-founders doing all the work. There was so much manual effort that went into putting together each bouquet and then getting it delivered. I think we did 150 deliveries that day and it felt like 150,000 deliveries, which is the amount of effort because we had no processes. That went into each bouquet and getting it to, you know, each office building. And I remember distinctly at the end of the day, this closet was filled with flower petals all over the floor, and I just laid back on it like a starfish on all these flowers, all these flower petals. It was like, how the hell are we going to scale this business if this is what it takes to deliver 150 bouquets? You know, at scale, we're going to be delivering 10, 100 times, you know, 1,000 times more than this. This seems impossible. And there was a little bit of a wave of panic followed by another wave of we'll figure it out, which over the course of the next, you know, 7 years we did.

I have to ask, did you take a flower arranging class in anticipation of this? Like what? How did you know how to arrange flowers?

So I don't know if you've been spying on me, but Jeff and I definitely did. We took a— back when LivingSocial was a big thing, we took a flower arranging class, like a multi-step flower arranging class with LivingSocial. The instructor was actually one of the first people that we worked with and hired to make our flowers once we started to scale.

So just digging into like the context for this sort of rat-infested closet, petals all over the floor. This was in Washington, D.C., is that correct?

Yes. Yep.

Tell us what it was like kind of starting this business in D.C., where politicians are far more common than founders.

And that's absolutely correct. And we were really naive. I mean, I remember asking one of my close friends who's a VC, you know, what if we start the company here in D.C. and then move it to San Francisco in a year? And he said, that makes absolutely no sense. The fact that I would even ask that question shows you how naive we were when we started the company. You know, we started here for personal reasons. Jeff's wife, who's also one of my best friends and went to college with us, she was working in the Obama White House at the time, and so she couldn't move. Nothing was holding me to New York. And so we like to say we essentially started the company here for her career. And so I moved down here. We, we got the business off the ground, didn't really realize the impact of starting a company in D.C. We just kind of wanted to execute, and thankfully we executed well. But, you know, I think starting a company out— as much as, you know, there's been a movement of you can start a company anywhere and, you know, a movement towards starting companies and investing outside of Silicon Valley, there is a distinct disadvantage to starting a company anywhere but San Francisco. There is just, you know, the ecosystem, the people, everything is so well-defined. It gives you the best chance of success. And when you start in the Bay Area or even, you know, a little bit less so, but in New York as well. Because we started it in D.C., we ended up having the disadvantage of obviously not having as much access to capital, at least initially. But we, we had an advantage that I don't think we either foresaw either, which is that because there's so few startups here, everyone just kind of rallied behind us. So, you know, I'm not from D.C. and neither is my co-founder Jeff, although he's, you know, now lived here for close to 20 years. When we started the company, the entire tech ecosystem, even though it's not very big, rallied behind us immediately. And they were our first customers. And, you know, every single person that, that does invest in tech, we had a conversation with because there, because there isn't as much, people are just incredibly supportive. And so I actually think we turned what, you know, overall is generally a disadvantage starting a company outside of the Bay Area to an advantage for us. Virtually every, you know, major consumer capital provider invested in us. All our initial customers were either the tech scene or people in the tech scene telling their friends. And we just kind of— we got really lucky, I'd say, and it ended up working out really well for us.

It's so interesting. Like you noted, you know, in Silicon Valley, it's really about the people and the ecosystem, and that sort of provides immense value. But it really seems like people were so core to your founding story and core to your success. Out of personal curiosity, what is your favorite flower and what is the favorite sort of bouquet that you've sold?

That's a great question. My favorite bouquet is probably one of the most unpopular we've ever sold. So we did this. My favorite flower is the bird of paradise, and we put that in a— it's a very tropical flower. It comes from tropical regions, Ecuador being one of the bigger places that grows it. And so we actually partnered with Smile Train Ecuador. Smile Train is a cleft palate nonprofit. We partnered with them to develop a bouquet that surrounded a bird of paradise with donations, you know, part of the purchase price going towards small train. I thought it looked great. It was one of the worst sellers we've ever had. And mostly because like, you know, birds of paradise are, they're like cool, like grass looking things and they have a little bit of a flower, but it's not your traditional flower. Every time we kind of deviate from the traditional, you know, flower recipe, it doesn't usually go well for us.

You touched on like this kind of concept of the classic bouquet and how your bird of paradise love really wasn't what sold to the lowest common denominator florist. And one of my favorite activities in quarantine has been going to SF Flower Market, which is open to like non-badge holders only on Saturday mornings. And so you can go like as a layperson, not a florist. I can go and I can buy like at cost wholesale flowers, which has been wonderful. And so I've gotten to know a few of the florist stand owners who have a lot of flowers they're sourcing from Central Valley. And I was asking him, and you know, my, my favorite flower is peonies, um, which is probably the most basic flower to love, but one of the most popular. And he was sharing that, you know, they get these, you know, wedding brides come in and they say, we want peonies in January.

That, that's absolutely true. I mean, people are like, why don't you put peonies in like your bouquets year round? We're like, they don't grow year round. We'd literally have to freeze dry them or they're living things and they grow, only grow in certain seasons.

Yeah, exactly. This like concept of, of growth, both like from a, you know, plant perspective, like as you're, you're building this company, that has a lot of like components to it that your typical software company does not. And, and more so like both on the side of local distribution for flowers and, and being a marketplace for enabling flowers to be delivered locally and starting in DC. And on like the actual, like where are the flowers grown and what kind of seasonality do they have and catering to customer interests such as mine that are not seasonal. Like I'm, I'm trained now that I can get raspberries whenever I want, I can get peonies whenever I want. And the idea that I would buy something seasonally is not in the concept of the modern American consumer today. And so all that to be said, I'm curious about how that fit into the growth strategy for UrbanStems.

Yeah, so it's a great question. And, you know, to be totally honest, I think if we had known how complex the infrastructure would be today, we may not have gotten into it because— and this is actually very true for a lot of startups and you'll hear from a lot of founders. Being naive to an industry was a strength. So had we come from the floral industry, we may have abandoned the idea of UrbanStems because we would have just said it's too hard. Like, the infrastructure is not there for it. Everything is going to have to be rebuilt. And, you know, it's simply— it's going to take too much. Because we were so naive and all we said was— we started with the customer experience. To, you know, your point, customers have high expectations. And we said, you know, we're going to deliver in hours with complete transparency on the order. So you're going to get a photo of your order as it's being delivered with flowers that are going to last, you know, over a week, hopefully two, at a price that's cheaper than what you spend on 1-800-Flowers and FTD with none of those silly fees. And so that was the customer experience that we said we were going to deliver no matter what. If customers expect to have, you know, an amount of choices all season, we will do what it takes to deliver on that. So we source from farms all around the world, not only Colombia, Ecuador, but Mexico, Africa, Africa, Holland, you know, we get flowers from all over the world. So we're able to produce recipes that provide a pretty broad selection no matter what time of year it is.

So you've built really honestly what is probably one of the largest nationwide distributor of flowers and one that actually delivers on their promise, unlike some of these other 1-800 companies that you've kind of alluded to, um, colorfully here. Um, so I am curious though, as you were continuing to build, was there an op— a moment where things did not go as planned?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so many of them, but the one that stands out and the one that's probably been written about most in the press was, was as bad as it is represented. And that was Valentine's Day in 2017. We were at kind of an inflection point in our company, you know, growing really, really fast at the point where we needed warehouses, but we're trying to get away with urban fulfillment centers. And Valentine's Day, the floral industry is unlike any other kind of industry where you have these two one-day spikes in the year. And typically for other floral retailers, these two days represent 50% of your entire revenue for the year. That's how big the spikes are on these days. For UrbanStems, we're a much more year-round gifting company, so it represents a lot less, but we still see a huge spike in demand on these days. And so Valentine's Day can see about 20x the day before and the day after. So you're just doing, you know, 1,000 bouquets the day before, then you're doing 20,000 the next day, and then 1,000, you know, the day after. And so we, to try to deliver on this, you know, we had hit an inflection point where we were growing really fast. And that 20x of that number that we were doing in 2017 was an enormous number. And we had mapped out every square inch of our urban fulfillment center. And we said, you know, it's all going to fit. It's barely going to fit, but it's all going to fit. And Valentine's Day came around. And what we realized very quickly is that just because every square inch is accounted for doesn't mean it's all going to neatly fit in there. And so the biggest thing, just to put it into practical, you know, where it actually broke down, you know, we were putting the bouquets in alphabetical order for the couriers to pick up. And within the letter A, for example, they— we were trying to arrange them alphabetically, you know, within the letter A itself, but there wasn't enough space. And, you know, bouquets are 3 or 4 deep on the shelf. And so things were just getting— as long as it was an A, it was getting thrown somewhere near the A. A B was getting thrown somewhere near the B. And eventually just became a huge mess. Like things were somewhat near their letters, but not really. And we could not— I mean, when the couriers came in at 6 in the morning to start the first window, took an hour for the first courier to find all his bouquets in this, you know, this sea of tens of thousands of bouquets in 400-square-foot area. And so very quickly what we started doing was we started reprepping bouquets for the couriers that couldn't find certain bouquets on the racks. Once we started, you know, redoing bouquets or repacking bouquets, we had to stop packing the bouquets for the afternoon windows. So the couriers themselves are going out 2, 3 hours late for their morning windows. None of the bouquets are being packed for late afternoon or evening windows. And, you know, at that point there was no way we were going to make all our deliveries. By at that point, when you have tens of thousands of people calling in, our customer care line, our email, our social channels got flooded to the point where we literally had to turn them off because we just couldn't answer in time. It was a massive failure. I mean, we completely fucked up and we kind of, you know, by the afternoon just kind of rallied the team. I remember in the loading dock, we just gathered everyone in the company and we said, look, we screwed up. Like, we screwed this up operationally. We fell down. But what we, what we can do is make this up to every single customer over the next evening and next couple of days. We will do whatever it takes to make it up to every single person. The office turned into a dorm. We literally, no one went home. We all slept in sleeping bags underneath our desk. A bunch of, you know, to the point of, you know, founding a company in DC versus San Francisco. All the other founders in DC came, including some of our investors came and manned the phones, but we fully refunded everyone. So we emailed everyone and said, we screwed up. We are going to deliver your bouquet over the course of the next 24 to 48 hours. So we talked to every single customer and we made it up to them. Whether we had some people like a guy who deployed overseas and we bought them a date night when he was back from his service and we bought hundreds of massages for people to make up for their Valentine's Day. One long-distance couple who had a particularly great story, we bought her a plane ticket so that she could come visit her boyfriend who had sent a bouquet that we screwed up. By the end of it, when we surveyed everyone saying, you know, would you use UrbanStems again, would you not, it was 100 to 1, yes, I would use UrbanStems. And even further than that, it was a 50 to 1, I will never use another flower company again versus I would consider using another flower company.

Thank you for sharing that story. Oftentimes people tell the up and to the right, the high growth, high fast, no failures. It's really helpful, I think, for first-time founders to hear these moments of both uncertainty and, if I can be so bold to say, failure, as you're promising to deliver things that you couldn't. At the end of the day, what mattered most was making it up to your customers and instilling that trust from a retailer and from a provider of a service that are moments of a lot of sentimentality for, for many individuals, which flowers tend to denote. You really brought UrbanStems to a place where it was a well-oiled machine, cooking flowers being delivered. You've achieved scalable growth, which is the goal for, for many founders building their companies. And so in 2019, you became the chairman of the board, handing over your CEO title to the then COO, Seth Goldman. Now, I think it's incredibly impressive that you recognized your own skillset of taking a company from zero to one was no longer what was best for the company's next phase. And I think for our listeners, it would be helpful if you could share why a founding CEO might proactively decide to change roles at a certain stage of growth.

Yeah, it's a great question. And to the beginning, I mean, you know, that crisis in 2017 was also a blessing in disguise. So actually, one of my mentors likes to say, never waste a good crisis. And through that, we realized that we were operationally not where we needed to be. For, you know, we had grand ambitions for UrbanStamps to scale much, much bigger. And the way that we were doing our warehousing and just the way we did operations wasn't going to match that eventual, you know, huge growth goals that we had. So I went out, you know, to the point again of the diaspora, the original diaspora that I had at Quizzy. One of those guys is a guy named Seth Goldman, who, you know, when he left Quidsi, went on to be the US CEO of HelloFresh, one of the best operational minds I've ever met. Somehow was able to convince Seth to come over and be our COO, and he ended up building an entire warehouse structure that was incredible. And, you know, our margins steadily increased under him every single month. And at a certain point, I kind of, you know, looked around and looked at the business and said, this is This is about executing and this is about building the best operations we were able to build. We already have the best customer experience. Building the backend has, you know, that, that supports that best possible customer experience has always been, you know, the challenge and the opportunity. At a certain point I realized, you know what, like this is what the company is about. It's optimizing, it's about supply chain, it's about, it's about operations. Seth should really be the CEO. And as I was like thinking about this, another mentor of mine, one of the founders of Priceline, who happens to live here in DC, you know, took me aside and was like, hey, you know, what kind of startup founder are you? Are you an early stage or later stage? And I was like, I'm pretty sure I'm early stage. I love it when we have no idea what the hell we're trying to do and you have to figure out how to initially put it together. It was through those conversations with mentors that I really realized Seth was the right person to be CEO and the company would be able to achieve its goals faster if he was CEO. And so, you know, we ended up making that switch. And again, one of the best decisions that I've ever made.

Thank you so much for your authenticity and sort of that answer. And I think it's just actually really encouraging to a lot of young founders or people who are thinking of founding. I've heard from a few friends, like the thought of, I'm really passionate about this problem space. I want to start something, like I want to go after it. This is really exciting, but I can't really see myself in that like, you know, exec role, like, you know, in the boardroom trying to like optimize a business 15 years later. I'm probably going to get bored and I want to go do another thing. And so I think it's encouraging just to sort of show that that's absolutely possible and you can go and do your next thing and, and start again from zero and bring a company along. And I think that's a great segue into what you're building next or now. You're getting back in the weeds with Alley Lamp, which you're founding again with your third time co-founder, Jeff Sheely. Could you tell our listeners what Ally Lamp is.

Yeah, so I— my dad is actually one of the foremost migraine specialists in the country. So I've grown up around people who have migraines. And for those of you who aren't familiar with migraines, which I hope you who are listening aren't because it sucks, but it is, it is one of the— it's the third most prevalent illness in the world. And drugs, several of which my dad has helped develop, are at most 50% effective. So when you put it all together, 10% of the world's population at any given time can become completely debilitated and there's no cure for it. And it is, it is a, it's so common at this point that we just accept it, even though when you say it out loud, it's ridiculous how big of a problem it is. And so on a trip, a recent trip up to Harvard a few years ago, we were talking with one of my dad's colleagues who, a migraine specialist at, in Harvard Medical School. And he was like, you know what? I think I've discovered something that is really interesting, but I'm not sure what to do with it. And so he pulled us, he pulled me into his lab and I walked into this room that was just green. And I was like, okay, great, I'm in a green room. Like, what are we, what are we doing here, Dr. Burstein? And he went on to explain that he had started, he was trying to figure out why people with migraines have such bad reaction to light. Very well known that like if you have a migraine, you have a huge amount of light sensitivity. In fact, the number one cure, quote unquote, for migraines today is to go into a dark room and turn off all the lights. So when he was trying to figure out, you know, why the light sensitivity exists with migraineurs, he took blind migraine patients and exposed them to light to better understand what the pathway was. And then he started exposing these blind migraine patients to different colors of light, and he found something really incredibly surprising, that if he exposed them to any color of light, red, blue, yellow, whatever, as predicted, their headaches would get worse, even though they couldn't tell that either a light was being shown on them or the color of the light. But when he showed them a narrow band of green light, they actually felt better. Their pain levels went down, their headaches started to subside. It's 90% effective. It works for 90% of migraine patients.

It's awesome that you're able to build a product and build a company that's fundamentally changing quality of life for millions and millions of people. That's like huge. You also are quoted saying Allez Lamp has gotten more traction in the market than UrbanStems did in the first year. And I think one of the differences is probably that Allez Lamp is a lamp. It's a hardware product rather than a perishable good such as a flower that, you know, gets transported for 24 hours and then quick, get it into someone's home. How is the difference in product categories impacting impacting your early growth?

Yeah, so our inventory doesn't die in 7 days, so that's a breath of fresh air. I mean, I think, you know, it is true we are growing even at a faster clip than UrbanStems' first year. I think a lot of that, though, is just experience. You know, at this point, the reason why Harvard— you know, this technology is patented by Harvard Medical School, and they gave us the exclusive license to that. And the reason they did is because, you know, their only goal is to get something that helps people out into as many hands as possible. We've sharpened our knife on with UrbanStems, and now it's something that we know, know how to do.

I'm so excited for this journey that you're really getting started on right now. And it's such a treat to get to talk to you as you're embarking on— I think this is your fourth startup, if we've calculated that correctly through our conversation. So we look forward to watching Alley Lamp soar as well. Our closing question that we transition into now is one about mentorship, which we've touched on briefly on our time together. This is our here question we ask all of our guests. It, but it's who's a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you?

Yeah, it's a great closing question. For me, there, there have been many, but the one that stands out to me was my, my first boss and my first job out of college. So, you know, we talked about, I had started this company in high school and middle school, sold it. After that, I was like, I know nothing about business. And so, you know, I always knew I was going to be starting companies, but I thought, you know, let me go to a big company and see how it's run. So I understand like what I'm building building towards. And so I joined GlaxoSmithKline, say, Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company, in this management training program. And I distinctly remember, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. If you're an entrepreneur, it's really hard to work for anyone else. And that's part of the reason I'm not an entrepreneur for the fame or the money or anything like that. There are much easier ways to make money. There are much easier ways to get notoriety. This is a hard path. But a lot of us do it because it's the only thing we can do and we can't work for anyone else. And I remember at points I was almost fired from this job because I was just off doing things I thought should be done. She was so great in just being like, you're getting all this resistance. You have your rotational manager right now, you're like, is not great. And you're learning what not to do. Audrey, that's almost as valuable as learning what to do. When you learn the things that you don't want to do, when you learn the ways that you don't want to manage or ways that you don't want to be, that is almost arguably just as valuable as learning what you do want to do and who you do want to be. I think at the end of the day, her unwavering support of like, you know what, you go do what you need to do and I'll protect you. That helped me go from someone who was almost fired to by the time I left, I received one of their highest awards, one of the youngest people to ever receive that award. And it's just that ever since then, I have realized the importance of mentors and I would not be where I am today without without great mentors, and she was the first. So Rebecca, thank you so much if you're listening.

That is so touching. Thank you, Ajay, for sharing this story and many other fabulous stories and adventures that you've been on in your multiple founding journeys. Um, it's been an absolute treat to talk to you today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like, follow, subscribe, talk to us in Clubhouse, Love House and share with friends. We'll be back next week with Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, Cho Chocolate, and Neolife, airing Tuesday, February 23rd at 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia and Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5AC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.