The First Steps For Starting OfferUp As A Marketplace

What was the founding story of OfferUp and maybe the first steps that you took to start it? So as I mentioned, kind of give you a little brief history of my background. So I had moved on from my previous company, Connexx, and another— somebody that was running it and a CEO that was running it. And I didn't believe in the direction. And I said, look, okay, I'm done. And so here I am. My wife and I bought a house and plans of having kids. We had a room full of stuff. Most of you have like probably a junk drawer in your house. I have one of those too. But I also had a room that I had really good stuff in. And we wanted to have kids. And one day she says, hey, I'm pregnant. I'm like, this is awesome. So I go into dad mode and I'm standing there in that doorway because I'm going to turn this room about the size of this room into my daughter's nursery, my soon-to-be daughter's nursery. And I remember standing there thinking, kill me. This is going to take me forever to try to sell this room. And I'm looking down at my first phone, which was the second-gen iPhone. So there's no Android phone at the time, by the way. This is where we are. And I'm sitting there just gesturing going, why can't I just take pictures? Why can't I just do this? And then I think I closed the door and I didn't do anything with that room. I was like, ah, forget it. And so, you know, here I am, my wife's working at Microsoft. I had no income because I just quit my actual company I started. And I'm kind of out there interviewing, but I could not forget about that moment in the doorway. I'm like, oh, there's got to be apps for this. And sure enough, I installed a few apps, but they were terrible. I'm just like, these apps suck. So, you know, spent a number of months thinking, I'm like kind of dabbling and kind of drawing a little bit. I'm kind of thinking like, is this a time to go disrupt Craigslist and everybody? I mean, it's a graveyard of companies trying to do this. And finally, like months, it was like probably 4 or 5 months, honestly. My wife's like getting bigger. She's like, where's your job? And I'm like, you need to come home. I gotta show you this idea. And keep in mind, I was like sleeping on an air mattress in my last company. So I was not really like, you know, go do this. And I didn't want to be a deadbeat dad, right? I'm like, who am I? I have no income. I have my pregnant wife, right? And so I asked her, I'm like, I gotta show you something. So she comes home and I pitch her on this big screen and it was about 10 slides. I'm like 6 slides in. She's like, this is the best idea you've ever had. You have to go do this. And I said, okay, you know what this means. And so that began, once I got the green light from her, I went all in. And so I grabbed another guy I used to work with back at Connexx. And basically the first year we just coded nonstop, like 7 days a week. And, you know, we basically built out the first iOS app, the first website and the whole backend. And it was like functional, no Android app yet. And I think we hired a guy, I remember interviewing a guy that had 5 apps in the App Store in high school. And it was hard to find iOS developers, by the way, back then. And I said, look, would you mind doing some work for us? I can't pay you in cash, but I'll give you equity. And he goes, well, I need to talk to my parents. So he was the first guy to actually write code for us on iOS. And so like the first year, that was kind of it. And We'd raise about $100,000 from somebody willing to take a risk and we would just sip on it. We'd have conversations like, I need money for food. Like, these are the conversations we were having. And so that was kind of year 1. It was not, I love it. I always love year 1 in companies. In fact, I'm kind of incubating another one right now because there's no drama. You don't have to deal with a lot of employees. It's just like the sky's the limit. Right? It's a fun, creative time. And that was just a fun time. And we'd meet every now and then and have coffee just to get out of the house. But the rest of the time, I was literally in my pajamas all day. My wife would come home from work and she's like, have you showered? And I'd say, no, you know, I've just been here coding. And so, but my belief, again, going back to why disrupt something like Craigslist was, I believe we would all have these. So you have to make bets early on and like where the puck is going. And I believe we were all going to have these devices. I believe we believe the cameras would get better. We believed you could take a problem space full of friction, which was the desktop, and make it way more efficient. Like it's got maps built in and payments built in and, and, you know, just a better interface and you could take a picture instantly. You don't have to tether something to the, you know, you know, and upload an item. And so we just thought all those things were there. And the biggest macro trend we saw was value was stuck. So I always tell people, like, I don't look at OfferUp long-term as a classified business. I look at it as a local marketplace business, full stop. And so today it's mostly used goods, but we also have a lot of power sellers selling, you know, out of retail stores. And that's because we have a huge local audience that's using OfferUp. And so that was always the vision was how do we unlock value locally? And I'd always think about like, where's all the Amazon stuff go? Where's everything going? And what's happening is our homes are getting bigger. We're actually having less kids. More and more of us are ready to storage it. It's like value was actually stuck all around us. And so our vision was like, well, we think we can leverage mobile to unstick a lot of that. So I could keep going, but I'll pause there for a minute so I can have my coffee. But let me know if you want me to elaborate on anything there.