YouSaid · the spoken record

Ajay Prakash

lines on the record: 19
first: 2020-08-27
most recent: 2020-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Time period. So the importance of having core values, the importance of having guiding principles so that when you get into situations like this where things can get blurry, you can stay rock solid and focused on the goal, I think is a really important takeaway.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's certainly been a challenging time, just like the second time you start a company or this second kid you have, it becomes easier. I imagine the next time we have to go through this, we'll make fewer mistakes and we'll do everything better and faster. But I think you can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow, right? In February, there's no way our plan factored in navigating COVID and doing what we're doing. And so it's really important to have guiding principles that help you during the good times and the bad times. And for us, we wrote our core values in March 2013 and they've been the same core values for the last seven years. And two of them that we've used are, number one, make mom proud, which is an ode to James's mom, who helped us so much at the beginning, but really, you know, whatever action you take, you need to be proud to tell your mom about. And then the other is embrace change and ambiguity. And that one is really, it applies to every day of a startup's life, but certainly applies and is even more pronouncing this.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just, I mean, it is like a marriage. We've been in this now for seven years, and there's still hopefully a lot more years ahead of us. And I've known James for 21 years now. We're very good friends, but we still went through that exercise to say, like, what do you want out of this? What are your expectations? You know, what is your working style? All that sort of stuff. I think having a lot of those conversations up front are incredibly important because you need to have aligned values, just like a marriage. You need to have aligned expectations. But then also, I think there's an important factor of if you can have implicit trust in the individual, that's really important because you want to make sure that the people beside you are going to be rocks and they're going to be there with you as you go through it.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, on the first part, I would say I think when you look at starting a company, you have to ask the question, why me, why now? Why am I the one who should be starting a company in this industry and solving this problem? And why is this the right time? So for Rinse, I've been focused on consumer startups, James Grop and Dry Cleaning. There was a good story for us to do it. And the why now was that Uber and Lyft had basically made the consumers realize they could use the mobile phone as a remote control for their life. I think being excited about it is really important. And then when you start working on your idea, if you're excited the next week, keep going. And if you're excited the next week, keep going. What you have to do is you have to be excited not just by like the glamour of what starting company might be, but then doing the research and building the model and looking at the numbers and all the stuff that's not as fun. If you're still excited, it's certainly worth trying regardless of the macro environment.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are no longer around. And the interesting dynamic we might see in this space is less about an arms race and more that there are a lot of dry cleaners that don't want to continue dry cleaning. You have a lot of people who want to retire. You have kids who don't necessarily want to take over. So there's a lack of generational transfer. And there is some opportunity potentially for consolidation, but it's not an easy path.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't think that there's a world like that in our space. I think the one thing we found, I mean, we started when Uber and Lyft were the arms race was going. And I think we recognized early on that this isn't a land grab opportunity. It's really about providing a high quality service. The second you use us, if you don't have a good experience, you're not going to stick around and come back a bunch of times. And so for us, it's really about nailing the execution. At the end of the day, this is an industry where the barriers to entry are super low, but the barriers to scale are incredibly high because there's so much operational complexity. And so for us, we spent the last seven years really mastering that operational complexity, implementing technology to be the most digitally advanced company in the space, and really focusing on as we scale, how do you scale quality? How do you scale the customer experience? So, you know, right now from a competitive landscape standpoint, a lot of the startups that maybe started around the same time as we did.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The path of a startup, I think, builds resilience the whole time. And the past 12 months, we as a company prior to the pandemic were focusing on getting to profitability. We were working on reducing our expenses, improving our margins, taking those steps you need to reduce cash burn. And we made a lot of progress. So going into the pandemic, we were actually”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three zip codes in San Francisco and said, Hey, let's prove it out here before we prove it out anywhere. And then in June and July, we got more friends or their friends. And it was all very much word of mouth early on. And then we really just started kind of added zip code by zip code. But it's important to remember in 2013, it was a very novel concept. The second we introduced the fact that we were going to do pickup and delivery of dry cleaning and laundry, and you could do it with some form of technology. We had a large email list right away. And that was part of the early signals that we were striking a chord, and it was worth continuing to pursue this.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we did have an advantage because one thing you do want to do is you need to get the supply side up and running before you start bringing demand in. And we actually chose not to work with James's family to start. It was more finding business partners and we got a lot of skeptical looks at the time. But the credibility that James brought to the table allowed us to sign up some early partners. And then in May 2013, we signed up 10 of our friends. And then we started just testing out the operations. We put a circle around.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one thing we did starting in April was we actually spun up the production of reusable cloth masks. We ordered them from our cleaning partners for our own team and then decided to extend production to sell to customers. And we found, you know, for at least for a couple months, we were able to offset the decline in dry cleaning revenue with the sale of masks, and that helped our cleaning partners continue operating.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the cleaners we work with most of the cleaners, it's not easy for them just to say, hey, I'm going to start doing delivery or, hey, I'm going to start offering laundry. They're totally different businesses. And so for us, when we were looking at our cleaning partners, we weren't sending them as much volume on the dry cleaning side. And on our cleaning partners, we have partners that are specifically for dry cleaning them specifically for laundry.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at a high level, we're holding up okay. And I think the key thing to understand is that we offer dry cleaning and laundry and the way those two services have behaved during the pandemic are a little bit different. So dry cleaning has certainly taken a hit. You have less people going to the office, less people traveling, you know, weddings and graduations and formal events aren't happening. But laundry on the other side has remained pretty stable. And we have a subscription laundry service as well, which has actually been growing a little bit during the pandemic. So, you know, there's all things considered. We're holding up okay. We've been able to ensure financial stability, ensure job security for the whole team. And I think even more importantly, when all of this hit in early March, we sent our, anyone who could work from home, work from home starting March 5th. We're an essential service. We've remained open this entire time. The first thing we had to do was really take a hard look at our operations and make sure that every step of the way was maximized for safety.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. They've been W2 since the beginning, since 2013. As I said, they're effectively replacing the counterperson. And if you as a customer are using rinse and you have a totally normal service experience, the only person you should ever see is your valet. And so for us, we wanted to make sure we were able to hire the best people, train them, develop them, invest in them. And certainly it's more expensive to employ valets, but it's better for them. It's better for rent. It's better for the customers. So it was a no-brainer decision up front.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and I think when we started rinse, the idea here was to really build a process and technology layer on top of an existing infrastructure. Dry cleaning has been around for a long time. There are some cleaners out there that aren't very good, but there are a lot of very good cleaners out there, and they just need help getting volume. And that's really where we stepped in”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For them, they almost had the opposite reaction in the sense that their generation, as Jay mentioned, they're very good at cleaning clothes. customer acquisition has totally transformed. So there's a whole class of entrepreneurs who don't understand that customer discovery has gone online. And so what's happening.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, yeah. So you schedule a pickup. We only serve the customer and we continue to serve the customer between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. because that's more in line with the customer schedule. It's more customer centric. We send our valets to come pick it up. They're all W-2 employees. They're the front lines of the customer experience. They'll come get your clothes, answer any questions similar to what a counterperson might do at a cleaner. And then we bring it back to our facility and then our cleaners will clean it. And our goal is to work with the best cleaners. The reality in the industry is that all cleaners are underutilized. They all have excess capacity and they don't, one, know how to get volume. And then two, because of that vendor-centric approach, their world tends to be very spiky during the week. They'll get that Monday morning rush and then the rest of the week is kind of quiet. What we've done is built a model where we're going to send our cleaning partners a predictable, steady stream of volume, allow them to clean the clothes, fill their capacity, but then also allow them to”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and I think the biggest thing is that as consumer behavior has shifted, what's become very clear in dry cleaning is that it's full of a ton of friction. And it's not one big point of friction. It's a lot of little points of friction along the way. So if you think about the dry cleaning experience historically, you don't know who's a good dry cleaner. So you just go to the nearest one, you're held hostage to proximity. You can't assess quality until after the clothes come back. So it's a bit of a crapshoot for us as customers. The model is very vendor-centric in the sense that they're open nine to five, closed on weekends, which doesn't work if you're actually at work during that time. And there's limited technology, limited customer service, limited transparency. We call that internally death by a thousand cuts. And when we were getting rinsed started, our idea was let's systematically create a seamless experience from start to finish, work with the best cleaners out there who are struggling. They don't know how to give volume, let them do what they do best, which is clean the clothes and then manage everything else. And so that's.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I asked Jay, what Do to help dry cleaners, yeah, and that was a moment for me where the bells kind of went off and I thought dry cleaning was perfect for the trends I was looking at. I'd always view James as a potential co-founder, but I think it was too good to pass up the unique advantage we brought to the table with him understanding the dry cleaning side of the equation. And so we ran out a week later, did a test with 11 of our friends. We picked up their clothes. We cleaned them at James's parent shop. We delivered them back. And from all of them, we got this unanimous response of, hey, this is awesome. When are you guys coming back?”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Rinson, its simplest form is pickup and delivery of dry cleaning and laundry. We started in 2013 to give you a little bit of the background. At the time I was looking to start a company and I was excited about a couple trends. One was the idea of bringing technology to old school industries. And then James actually came to me with the idea of doing something in dry cleaning.”
2020-08-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ajay Prakash and James Joun of Rinse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT