YouSaid · the spoken record

Amir Elaguizy

lines on the record
26
first
2016-07-29
most recent
2016-07-29
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

  1. “There's really two things. So one is creating the world class consumer experience around shopping for subscription. So that's growing our consumer marketplace, pushing hard for the perfect shopper experience around finding and managing subscriptions, especially multiple subscriptions and gift subscriptions. That's obviously for the good of our merchants too as they get more subscribers, their business becomes more sustainable. And the other thing is making it easier to run a subscription business. So we want to make it so that our merchants really only have to worry about assembling high quality products. And then we're just handling the rest. So for example, we're starting to offer packaging to them so they don't have to negotiate for their own custom printed boxes, which by the way is a complete pain in the ass. And we'll just keep doing more of that logistics workload and make it easier and easier to actually run a subscription business.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “No, no, I listened to this one. I also listened to the Sastron. Actually, after last Saster, I went to that, and when I came back and I saw that you were running the podcast, I high-fived my co-founder.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, honestly, Harry, I get most of my news from aggregators, Twitter, hacker news, that sort of thing. There are some podcasts I never miss, though. Yours is one of them, 816.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This is an interesting learning point for me. Learning that the harder they're pushing me, my customers, the more pressure they're putting on me, the louder they're screaming, that means the reason they do that is because they need us. They need us that badly. They're dependent upon us. So when they're beating down my door for some new feature, for support for some integration, and it's taking us a little longer than we wanted to to get out the door, it's because they're dependent upon us and they need us so incredibly much. It was hard lesson to learn that the opposite of that, which is they're not saying anything, is actually parable. You want them to be beating down your door.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Involve your families. I bring my wife and son to company events and game nights, and I always have, and I encourage my team to do the same because you will be sacrificing for your company if you have any level of traction. And there will be that much more forgiving of the sacrifices and they'll support you if they feel like they're part of the win.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Everything, Harry? No, I think the hardest thing is being judged when trying to navigate an extremely uncertain decision process. So everybody has an opinion, but you're the only one who actually knows how much money and each decision will leave you within the bank and the various relative trade-offs that are involved. And you're making these decisions with partial information and frequently you're being evaluated in retrospect, which when much more information is known. So I have an enormous amount of empathy for founders because there really are no rules and there's no signposts that tell you what to do. It's uncertainty the whole way, and that's a hard place to live in.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Conflicted here whether I should give you something haughty and intellectual or just tell you the truth, what puts a smile on my face. And I ultimately decided to tell you the truth. It's Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I seriously love Ben Horowitz for writing this book. I want to hug him because somebody finally captured the essence of the struggle and really wrote it down. I've read that book three times and every single time I find myself smiling”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I mean, so look, this actually starts before you fire them. When you are letting somebody go for performance reasons, they should pretty much know it's coming and it should be an easy discussion because you've already spoken to them about it in such detail and they recognize that they're not hitting expectations, right? If somebody is surprised by the fact that you're letting them go for performance reasons, that means that you as a leader have really failed at communicating expectations and the fact that they're falling short of those expectations. That doesn't mean that does not mean that it needs to take a long time to fire people, but it does mean that if you're just showing up and surprise firing people, you're not effectively cultivating a team.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And I think that most leaders when they're giving feedback to a team member are couching their words with so much qualification that the team member doesn't really hear them. And I'll frequently, it'll manifest like this. The leader will think that they said, you aren't performing satisfactorily relative to your peers, and the team member will think that they said, you're doing really good given that you're so new. And that's because people's psyche naturally filters out the things that are damaging to them for most people, right? And learning to give that direct feedback in a way that both gets through their natural defense mechanisms and is nurturing rather than hurtful is really important. And I call that skill set candor. It's being truthful of people without being hurtful. And most people, the first time they experience that, when they realize that a performance review at my company's actually, first of all, we do them quarterly, not annually, but they're actually meaningful that we put a long time, a lot of time into it. We've thought it through. They're totally taken aback because they've literally never received Canada direct feedback for their entire career.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, so I think about it as two separate things actually transparent and candor, which are different. So transparency, it's incredibly important to a startup because it's the only way to develop people and get them aligned, right? So I think most founders or many founders, especially first-time founders, frequently try to hide problems the company is going through. Some customers are going to pull out a deal isn't going to close, cash flow issue, whatever it is. They try to hide that. Whereas because they're afraid of losing people or killing morale, but we take the opposite approach. We share everything with the team because the right people are motivated by the challenge and take the struggle as their own. And then when we ultimately win, which we always do, they gain that much more pride of authorship. Whereas the wrong people, they weren't going to stick around anyway. So that's how I think about transparency. And it's incredibly important. It's one of our core values. But on the direct feedback performance side, that's candor. And I'm actually, I got that from Jack Walsh's book, which you should read if you haven't. But it's one of the most important things is to be able to cultivate talent.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “No, that's absolutely correct. I love the Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. It was one of it was a book I read because of Steve Jobs' recommendation, but it's exactly that. The second you think you know everything, that's when you stop being relevant.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “People, you know what motivates them, and you know how to get the best use out of them, and you also know to not put them in charge of something that you're going to need to be working still in four or five years because it's likely that they aren't looking to make those sort of long-term time commitments. So that's how I think about mercenaries versus foundational people. Obviously, you don't want that many mercenaries, but sometimes it happens and you just have to learn how to make the best of it. In terms of how do I know when to invest in an individual, this is actually one of my favorite subjects. Startup founders, we don't get the luxury of being able to recruit from the most obvious top talent, right? Like, because the number one guy out of CMU is being competed for by Facebook and Google, and really I don't have a seat at the table there. So you have to get really good at spotting diamonds in the rough. And a lot of times if you can spot those people and you can invest in them,”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, actually, DevDut at Charles River Adventures, who's one of Annie's partners, taught me a lot about this. And basically what it is, is you have to understand that your company grows, who are your foundational members? The ones that are really you're counting on for being there forever, right? They're motivated by the company. They feel deep ownership of what they've helped build and a sense of mission. And then you need to understand who's really just a mercenary. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people, but they're there for a short period of time, whether it's a career move or to make hope in hopes of making money, you can't really count on them to be there in four or five years as you're growing the business. And once you, as a founder, just knowing that distinction, you can make much better decisions. So with your foundational people, you can invest heavily in them, both from a compensation standpoint, equity especially, but also just from investing your time and giving them ownership over things that you need to be working well for a very long period of time. And then with the mercenary.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think it's case by case. So this has gone both well for me and poorly for me. I try to have a very candid and transparent relationship with everybody on my company, and I've spoken to them about what's happening. You know, they are a generalist, and what we really need here is a specialist, and I've offered them the opportunity to specialize. And the really smart people actually jump at that or they find another role for themselves that makes a little bit more sense. And some people can't make the transition. And some of my more successful cases, I took somebody who was basically a jack of all combination engineer, project manager, customer support specialist, you know, and I turned him into a senior product manager, and now he's one of our best product managers, right? So it's a case by case thing, and it goes both ways, but having a transparent candid relationship is probably the most important thing there.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You still want them at the later stages, but that skill set is insufficient, right? And especially as the CEO or as the founder, you can only have so many people reporting to you. So you end up having to bring on these new additional skill sets that become more important as the company grows. And you have to find homes for the people that were really valuable at the early stages, but their skill set hasn't scaled to take into account what the company needs now as it's kept growing. So I see that quite a bit. I think founders make a big mistake of not recognizing when the company's outgrowing a person's skill set, and that can really hold the company back.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, you see this a lot, right? Especially, I think you see it a lot in sales and marketing, but basically the beginning stages of a company, what you need most is generally for shit to get done, right? You need problem solved, you need shit handled. And as a company grows, you have customers, you have sort of customer feedback, you need to keep things stable while incorporating their feedback and iterating on the product and evolving your sales methodologies. So you need things to get done, but it's also starts to be more important that the right things are getting done and all the factors are getting taken into account and so on and so forth. And then as the company grows even further, you start having scaling issues. How do you actually scale out the fact that Marty is the only one that knows how to do this thing and nobody told John how to do it? So he's doing a different thing, right? So you have to have people that are starting to think about process and just generally making the operation scale. And frequently, the people that are great at the beginning stages because they were just hustlers.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, somewhere in there, but I'm going to do it as long as I can. I mean, the reason that it's valuable is because it's so important is because if you have the right team in place, you can weather almost any storm. But if you have the wrong team in place, it only takes a small gust to blow you over. So Kraidro is a company that we took a long path to get here. We had several pivots before we discovered Craigjoy. And then we've had to adapt to the market as it grows while building Crayjoy. And if we hadn't put so much effort into building a team of flexible thinkers who are in it for the right reasons, we definitely would not have made it here, right? So the first 10 hires you make for your company, their strengths would be what the next 10 hires emulate. And that just keeps on propagating. And similarly, their weaknesses will then be the same weaknesses that are generally emulated by or things that are ignored by the people that come after them. So it's really important that especially”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I'll let you know. Zengai was running teams that were in the hundreds and it didn't work then. So it's somewhere between 50 and 300.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, actually, I think that's a really common mistake. You really need to, as a startup, you need to own your core competencies. And I think founders frequently, they don't realize what some of their core competencies need to be in recruiting is one of them, and they do try to outsource it. So I personally do all the recruiting. I'm heavily involved in interviewing. I personally meet every candidate. That doesn't scale forever, right? We're 50 people, so I can still do it, but I can't do it forever.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “On these social networks, right? And if you think about it, if you're into Shetland ponies and you want to buy something specialized for Shetland ponies, Amazon's actually really bad for that, especially for discovering new products, because Amazon services the best hairbrush, not the best hairbrush for Shetland Ponies, right? But if you remember these niche groups, these subscription boxes are curated by experts in the niche. They understand the nuance the same way you do, and it actually makes a lot of sense inside these groups. You see this, you see this sort of monetization of affinity happening also with things like Vazel and Teespring, right? These groups that previously weren't around or weren't connected in this way, and now these businesses are springing up, which allow them to create swag or whatever to monetize their audience. So a good example on that for Crayjoy would be Outcrate.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “This is what's happening with groups largely on social media. So if you think about things like Facebook groups, Instagram hashtag groups and Twitter, there are these groups of people who are connected on these places that have some sort of shared common interest. Think about it before these social media outlets existed. If you were into Shetland ponies and you lived in Nebraska, it was very unlikely you were going to be hanging out with a guy who's in the Shetland ponies who lives in Texas, right? But now you're in the same Facebook group or you're using the same Instagram hashtags. These people previously two sparse groups are now dense enough to congeal into these real connected nodes. And these niche communities are growing in leaps and bounds and they're spitting out these mega consumers. The voice of the group, which we are calling influencers. And subscription boxes and subscription commerce in general are starting to be these curated offerings by these experts in these niches, which are more numerous than ever because they're starting to congeal.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, I don't think it's misunderstanding as much as I think they see sort of half the picture, right? So I think there's two major forces that are driving subscription. One is the e-commerce fundamentals. So this is marketplaces like Amazon and just increased competition on the internet in general are driving margins lower for e-commerce merchants. They're making it harder to differentiate or build a real brand because, I mean, I don't even know who I buy my things from anymore. I just buy them on Amazon. But that's some merchant somewhere on the earth that's actually the one that's making that sale. They're increasing the cost of making a mistake with your inventory because if you order too much of something and you have to offload them at a loss and then your margins were already thin in the first place, that hurts that much more. These and many, many more forces are driving sellers to experiment with the subscription model, right? And I think that's the piece that most people get, especially investors really get that sort of commerce side. But there's this other side that I don't think anybody really is paying attention to.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, Craigroy is a subscription commerce marketplace. So consumers come to crayjoy.com and they browse the thousands of subscription boxes that our founders, our merchants have curated. And then on the other side, we're a platform for merchants to actually start their own subscription business. So we provide both the tools and then the consumer facing demand and drive subscribers to those merchants.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, so we had been running the company for six years at that point, and we were totally legal. But the internet poker industry was not legal in the United States. But what we were doing was just collecting data and reselling that data. And we had basically penetrated the market all the way. I mean, any one 30-day period, 56% of poker players would visit our website. Like that's how big we had gotten. And the only way for us to expand the business from then on was to start doing things like taking bets. And to do that, we would have to violate U.S. laws or leave the country. And that wasn't really an option for us. So when we met Zenga and they had this problem that we were so good at, we were really excited because we didn't see any other way for us to keep expanding the business and we just wanted a new challenge. And the fit was just really natural. And frankly, there is no exits available to us because we were these Boy Scouts in this sort of sea of online gambling didn't really have any obvious exit opportunities.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “The way did Y Combinator in the summer of 2013, and after demo day at YC, we pivoted to KreitJoy in 2014. And that's when I met Annie. And since then, we've raised about $10 million largely from Charlie Adventures. And we've got about 50 people in Austin, Texas right now.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Great. So I started as a professional poker player in college and I was a huge computer nerd. And my first profitable venture was actually a poker bot that I wrote myself with one of my best friends that made a few hundred thousand dollars playing poker on the internet. That was fun until we got caught and they shut it down. And I realized that I could write software that made money. And that was sort of a turning point in my life. So that friend and I ended up starting a business in the online poker space. We were doing analytics. We monitored all the poker games that were happening on the internet. We caught cheaters. We sold this to consumers in the form of player intelligence. We sold the data to hedge funds. We sold the data to poker sites as competitive intelligence. We sold that company to Zynga in 2011. They had a huge fraud problem. We're the only ones who'd ever caught poker cheaters at a scale of like billions of hands. I stayed there for a little under two years. I was a game CTO there and then I left with one of my co-founders to start what ultimately become Kratejoy. We did that in late 2000.”

    2016-07-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source