YouSaid · the spoken record

Carlos Cashman

lines on the record: 57
first: 2021-01-07
most recent: 2021-01-07
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

“Whatever you're storing. So I needed that. So it's like $2,500. And she said, you know what? If you can make half the money, I'll put up the other half. You both incentivized me to work and then helped me produce value. And I'll tell you, that computer burst is an enormous amount of value for me afterwards. She did it. I mowed a bunch of lawns. I got halfway there. I think I probably didn't even get halfway there. My mom put up the money and got it done for me. And look, it's easy to say your mom or dad have done the nicest thing for you. They have for a lot of us. But that's the thing that jumped to mind the first time I think I heard you ask that question of somebody. That's what jumped to mind. That's my answer. I'll stick with it.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just said in my head when you started getting to this, I said, Oh shit, I forgot to come up with the answer to this because I know you're going to ask it and I haven't gone there. So I have thought about it a bit. I mean, there are so many kind things that people have done throughout your life and what you do. But I have to say my mom did something for me. So when I was young, I was a computer geek. I just loved computers. And growing up in Oklahoma, there wasn't a lot of outlets to learn about them and stuff. And I got a VIC 20 where I learned to do programming, but I wanted something more. And when the first Mac came out, I was just enamored and I had to have one. And we couldn't really afford something like that. It was $2,500 for the Mac 128K with a printer and an external drive because you needed two drives.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that problem. And then he's just all right, see you later. You guys solve it. My team is way closer to all these issues. We've got a supply chain issue. I had a supply chain as a genius. He's brilliant at supply chain. And I've never seen anybody be able to do all this. He's been two steps ahead everywhere. But when he's got a problem, I just want to make sure he's got the resources he needs and the right people in the room to solve it because I'm not going to solve that. I don't know. The first thing about what he's doing. That's my job as a manager is to do those things. And it's his job as a manager of his team to do that. I've been through enough shocks and enough different businesses that I just a while ago just said, dad, screw it, don't worry about it. They're going to come. And as soon as you let go of that and don't worry about it, then you're not surprised by it. You're not freaking out by it. And you just work through it. So that's why I sleep well at night.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of us can worry and freak out and is much more operationally focused. You know why? And I don't think he needs to worry either. Look, I've done a lot of companies in a lot of different spaces. Things move on a grander scale than you think. I told my team this early on. I said, I've got faith in this team. I've spent a lot of time building a team and this great team and how they work. We cannot predict what's going to happen. All I can do when I hire people into startups early on, all I say is, look, all I can guarantee you is a bit of chaos. Hopefully a lot of fun and some good people. We don't know what's going to happen, but I can tell you the shit's going to hit the fan at some point. But I've got faith that will recover, that will react to it intelligently and well and move ahead. And if you've got that, then you don't really worry about, you know, I remember the first time I had some situation at one of my first startups. And I mean, I lost sleep for weeks and we're freaking out. We missed a delivery date and all, you know, and everyone's losing it. That does nothing for you. They're not worrying about it and just working the problem. Make sure you has the right people in the room.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you can imagine, I've been asked this by every single PE firm and whoever we've spoken to and investors. And it's always funny. You won't like my answer is I sleep like a baby, dude. I always have. So Josh will be awake all night. So this is the benefit.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Podcasts and stuff, all I can to try to get a sense for what's happening and what's coming. But I also think it's going to be different everywhere. Latin America has 4% e-commerce penetration, and it's got 650 million people with average incomes in the 10,000 range across the board, vibrant, rich market waiting to happen. And it hasn't yet. So who's going to own that? How are they going to own it? And what's that going to mean is going to be fascinating to see. Huge opportunity.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hasn't worked, but maybe it's because we have this legacy of those things and we have an Amazon. In China, that's in many ways what this live shopping is all about. And these live sellers, I mean, it is unbelievable what they can move in a 24-hour period. Some of the top Chinese live sellers have moved nine figures of goods in 24 hours. It's incredible. There are many businesses. I think this space is evolving faster than anyone can think. Instagram finally integrated Apple Pay. It's one click shopping, right? It's what it was about Amazon. Now I'm on Instagram and they show me something that I think is awesome. I can just double click and I've got it. The reason I didn't before was I didn't want to go type in all my information on my phone again and again and again. You've got people who create Shopify pay, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, where my information is stored and can be reused quickly and easily. So that's just taken out friction. And if you do that, it can increase the ways and places that people sell. It's fascinating. It's not something that's very easy to predict. We'll listen to a podcast.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“eBay is still a humongous company moving 100 billion plus of goods i mean they're doing a lot i mean that's an amazing place to work too and it doesn't quite work for us in our model but it's fantastic and what they're doing etsy is another phenomenal company that has created an incredible marketplace and then shopify is making phenomenal moves toby's brilliant i love the story of that company and how they built it and what they stand for and where they're going and it's going to be fascinating to watch because they're building a network of shipping centers they're going to have something that's more competitive with amazon over time and look amazon you could say it's one in the us perhaps but it certainly hasn't won everywhere else around the world and this is a global world man i mean 20 of our sales are outside of the u.s there are other marketplaces and overseas and other places and people shop differently there we talked about earlier with china it's discovery based it's live shopping so many people have thought about and tried to get qvc or home shopping network for the internet in the u.s”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a day to day, week to week responsibility that has to get done, let yourself sit on top of it, particularly when you're managing people. It's even more important because you got to spend a lot of time on those relationships.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a huge fan of the book The Outsiders, and this isn't the old story of Pony Boy and the kids in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the movie. This is the outsiders about the eighth grade CEOs. I know you know the book. It's fantastic. What great lessons in there? And I think it was Teradine who said, I don't give myself any day-to-day responsibilities. So I'm not in the loop on anything day-to-day that has to get done. First off, that I can focus then on the things that I find add the most value at any one time. To me, thinking about business is like thinking about a whole handful of levers you might have in front of you, the right lever at the right time can give you the greatest possible gains. But to have the freedom to think about those things, you can't be doing something every day that has to get done. Oh, it's just an hour in the morning where I got to fill in this spreadsheet. Well, that's taking up valuable time and mental space of yours. The example I try to set, and I think every one of our senior managers can do this, is don't give yourself anything.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fantastic people to do their job because they will always find something else to do. And if they have that extra time, they can focus on something strategic for growing the company. So you want to hire the best people you can that'll do the best work they can and get it done. So I always tell our managers, I was always saying, look, you should be striving to work 20 hours a week. And if you get there for like a month or two. Hunch is you just never will, but if you keep pushing in that direction, hand off your stuff, that is so super important.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've scaled teams twice. Once in the late 90s, we got to about 300 people with Opus 360 and FreeAgent.com. We own a big chunk of that came through a large acquisition. And I learned some stuff there. But then Thracio has been on like anything I've ever seen. I mean, pace of growth here is unbelievable. And I got a sense of it early on. And I think I learned a ton from listening to podcasts like yours and other places also. People have done it because very few people have lived through massive scaling. 600, 700 people in 18 months and whatever and growing from there. Been saying this to my team all along, you want to grow, you got to let go. It's this thing like you can't do everything. It's more important to find people to do your job. I always say my lazy manager theory, which I thought was my kind of unique theory until I heard Bill Gates has a very similar version of it. But when I'm hiring a manager, someone's going to manage people essentially and manage essentially delivery of something. I want them to be lazy. I mean that in the sense that I want them to hire”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building a company is just about people. That's all it is. Whether you're building the next great biotech company or you're building an enterprise software company or an agency, it literally is all just about people and getting a bunch of people excited to do something together, to go after the same goal and making sure you all know exactly what that goal is. The challenges that I've always found are the big ones are always around people. Scaling is a particularly unique challenge around people. I always find that the first kind of breakpoint in scaling an organization is around 30 people. For some reason somewhere in there, that's where the first time you start to have to have regular management structures and meetings and communication because there's just, it's larger than the numbers sitting around the lunch table talking about what we're doing. Some people have trouble at that point. It's just this weird inflection point companies go through.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phenomenally well, and our fantastic businesses at some point for your day-to-day entrepreneurship and your better odds of success, it's really more about building something that makes revenue and doesn't have to be the next $100 billion company. And I feel like people with MBAs are much more, at least with regards to entrepreneurship, much more geared towards this. Just tell me the steps and I'll do them. And that's just not how it happens when you get out there in the real world and build a company. So they can get flustered and lost when they're faced with crazy adversity that takes to build something.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know some terrific MBAs. I think my partner has an MBA, but it's this thing that you don't learn entrepreneurship from a book. Frankly, I think college is a waste of time too. And that's a whole other thing we could go off for a while. But for most people, almost for anybody, I don't know anyone who's really needed their degree. Certainly not a four-year kind of thing. So, you know, in MBA, I think it's quite often, it's just, it teaches a rigidity in thinking. entrepreneurship is a class. And the way it's always taught, I find, is just that it's the Silicon Valley kind of mindset. How do you start a company? Well, you write a business plan, you pitch it to some people, get some friends and family, or go raise money from a VC and that boom, you're successful. That is not at all success. I mean, the businesses I've seen are successful at a much greater rate are the ones who bootstrap, who get customers, who raise their money from their clients who pay and get revenue right away, get something right. Now, that's not to say Facebook will be out there, businesses without revenue that grow.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product. It was not anything sophisticated, yet every nuclear power company in the country was using this software, this data, to help them do maintenance. We had a company paying us, you know, we went out and sold it to somebody and paid us $50,000. Anytime anyone's willing to write a check, a fairly sizable check for what you're doing, you've got a business. Maybe it's going to be a $5 million business. Maybe it's going to be a $2 million business. Maybe it'll be a $500 million business. But you've got something. And that's, again, that goes back to that customer proof. If you don't have that, if no one is willing to write a check, you can give it away. Then people don't value it. You don't necessarily know if it's useful. You want to know that someone's willing to open their wallet and cut a check for what you're doing. And that's when you know you've got success. That's easier to see. If you've been at it for 10 years and no one's paid you and somehow you've stayed alive, maybe it's time to hang it up.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, sometimes it's painfully obvious. So I had a company, our primary business was selling event tickets. It had gone great for the last 10 years until March. That one was very obvious. The revenue literally went to zero overnight and it just couldn't keep up, couldn't keep going. I mean, the company actually still is around. I sold my interest in it, but it's a shade of what it was and hoping for things to come back. I think that is one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs. And I see this a lot. It's this weird dichotomy you get of the messaging that's always the entrepreneur has to believe more than anything and barrel through all the things that get in your way and the people who tell you, no, that'll never work. But then sometimes you got to know and it's just, hey, that's not working. Maybe the people are right. Knowing when to listen to that and how they wish there were a very clear rule to put in place for that. I don't know if there is. That's why I like that customer focus. I've looked at small businesses and someone's all worried, do I have a business or not? And I'm like, when we got started with our preventive maintenance software company, we had an access database.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friend of mine who went through i combinator he said in his class there are two really types of entrepreneurs there were the tech people who had just great chops and could build stuff and then there were the nba types who couldn't build anything but could talk a good game it wasn't just the mba type because i'm not a big fan of mbas but we can get into that another time it was more about an execution focus and a customer focus on the people who weren't so tech focused so that tech group would often want to lock down in a closet for eight weeks and build something great and then release it to the world And it said the other group would go out, pretend they had it, find customers, and say, oh, yeah, we've got this in the behind the scenes, just do the work with spreadsheets and a bunch of people, you know, and then figure out what the customers really want, how they're really going to use your stuff. And that just stuck with me because that's so, so important through iCominator. He said that latter group, the ones that went out and faked it, pretended they had something and then built it for the customer were invariably more successful and could come out with something better.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always found there's not necessarily a common thread. It's seeing opportunity. I've become very predisposed to things that can very have a very clear path to making money or are making money right away. I'm the poster child for the dot-com boom in the bust. The bust in particular.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You added the sold qualifier, which is a good one because I started a number of them that didn't quite get there. Some of those were really small. I mean, I've started over a dozen companies. And it really depends how you count. I got two people. I started a company, had them focused on something for a while, and then it didn't go anywhere. But I did lose some money on that. I sold, I think, six last count. And that includes the one we took public in 2000 and then later sold.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing a fantastic job. The person who started that loves to see that. They walk into a store now and they see their product on the shelves and they're super happy. Now we couldn't do that with everything right away as quickly as we wanted to, but we are moving that direction for building. I mean, we're barely two years old, I guess, two and a half years at this point. So we've got a lot to do, a lot we want to do.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brand need to mean something to her. I'd never intended it to be in front of consumers, and hopefully it doesn't end up there because it's just not a good consumer brand, but it could. But for us, Thorastia needs to represent something to the selling community, to the investment community, to possible employees and things like that. And I think we've done that, but not massively intentionally yet, just by being who we are and being good actors in the ecosystem. But it's the story starts to get distorted. I hear sellers in Europe who think of us, oh, you guys are cheap. You're the cheap company with a formula. No, that's not quite the case at all. And I'll show you a lot of people who have done very well with this. So we have to start to be more intentional about how brand plays a role there. I think it's evolving. We're always learning. We're going to be learning how brand interacts with all these various channels and how brands can play in this new world. And I've got to continue learning there. Our whole team does and figuring out how all these things will interact. But looking again at that smiling curve, I think that's a hugely important part of what we do. We are building brands.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've got some that are $100 million. So, what do you do with that? The opportunity to sell in other places. I feel like our product should be available anywhere the consumer is. That could mean retail also, then you need to have something there. So there's opportunity to understand how brand plays in this ecosystem. We've also thought about how brand works across all of these products. Today's world, people are a little worried about what they're buying sometimes on these sites because is it some random overseas company that has faked their reviews and faked their ratings and my battery's going to explode and burn me, which has happened. We have a brand that goes across our products called Zaba. It's just trust what you buy. We only buy great products and we ensure that whenever they say they have a certification or something, we've got the certification. We do that. We make sure it's there. We make sure the product is good, high quality product, and a good value. I think you'll start to see more of that across the board. So that serves a function also. And all that is separate to Thracio. Who does a Thrasio?”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And certainly in a space like ours. And then you keep moving along the curve. It's about selling it and marketing it, getting into people's hands. And brand that can exist there also because that helps you sell it. That helps you build a defensible moat. Yeti's a fantastic product, but it's a brand that represents a lifestyle that people buy and pay three times the price for a cooler than you really need to because you associate with that. I look at that smiling curve and look at the places there's value and I think about where we need to be and where we need to play. Brand is obviously some place we really need to think and think about it intelligently. But while we're moving so heavily in the Amazon ecosystem, it's reviews and ratings, right? Stars and number of reviews is the brand. But what do we do with that further? So we've had products grow from a couple of million dollars. You want to talk about hitting earnouts for people, brand we bought that was doing less than 2 million. And it's going to be a 25 to 50 million dollar brand this year, less than two years later. And it's going to keep going from there. It's fantastic.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at a graph, so value is on the y axis and product life cycles across the x axis. So if you look at the very left on the x-axis, what's the high point there is in the life cycle of a product, that's where the value lies. So that is in patents. The idea for the product. The squatty potty is not a complicated product, but it's a great idea and they sell it. Pardon my friends, they sell a shit ton of them. So there's value in design patents, things like that. So there's a lot of value in that. But then you move along the life cycle and you're getting closer to manufacturing. which is the nay deir of the value curve manufacturing has become no value building your own factory and making these things is not valuable it's amazing to me that china has figured out how to drive value out of that and make money but even look at apple you get your new phone what does it say inside there designed in cupertino it doesn't tell you it was made in china or indonesia or wherever foxcon has a factory right and power to foxcon for doing what they've done but there's less value in that manufacturing”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to be thought of that way. Nice kind of tie in what we do. So I just said, fine, great. He said, well, let's do it thrast.io because dot IO is cool. So I said, fine. I just registered the domain. It wasn't even a discussion. It wasn't worth me spending a minute of time thinking about that or debating it because I was like, look, we're going to acquire stuff and whatever. So here we are, 150 brands later and thousands of products starting to think about this and look at it another way. And there's a couple interesting dynamics here. One is that brand”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been very dumb in my history, also. So, when it comes to a name, like, I don't get tied up in it anymore, and certainly not one that wasn't meant to be a consumer brand. Josh thought about it for a while, my partner, Josh, called me up one day and said, very early and said, what do you think about Thracio, Thrassos? And he said, Thrassos is an Amazon queen. She was an Amazon warrior. Oh, that's awesome. And it means boldness or confidence in Greek. It actually means borders on cockiness, but let's stick with boldness and cockness.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First off, let me talk about the screw up here, not really screw up, but like Thorazio is the worst name for a company. I think just about Certainly with the URL thrass.io, there are investors of ours today who still call it thras. And I don't know if it's just because it's fun or remembering, but they didn't know it was Thrassia. But it was never intended to be a consumer-facing brand. The story of it is kind of funny. I don't know if you know the history behind the name, but I've worked in one of the highest end strategic branding and design agencies in the world back in my New York days, learned at the feet of giants at a company called Frankfurt Balkain, fantastic people who are legends and branding and advertising. We did these naming studies. People would pay us millions of dollars for it and name something. They named Adobe Acrobat. Great name, whatever. But at the same time, then you see Steve Jobs go, let's call it Apple. I like apples. And everyone would say, oh, that's a crappy name. And it turns out to be great. Or Google. I remember seeing them hang that sheet out the window in Palo Alto back in 98. And I was like, that's the stupidest name I've ever heard. And who needs another search engine? How many of us said that, right? We got excited and Ink Tomy and Alto Vista. They're all crushing it. No one needs Google.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've gone from 10x to 3x, you're kind of PO'd. You're not super happy. But if I enter the market at 3x and I can still get my profit margin, I'm perfectly happy. It's great. As a marketplace, these things will settle out to a place that makes sense for the bulk of the advertisers where it gets weird during elections at my Facebook agency. We would actually pull back advertising for many of our customers and actually towards the end of the year Christmas we pulled back advertising for many of our advertisers because the prices just go ridiculous first off in elections they're not trying to make money They're just trying to get it in front of a ton of people. So it's a market distorting element and sometimes the end of the year a lot of our products weren't holiday products. So why waste your money when prices double for everyone else who makes a lot of money selling in the Christmas season? So we would pull back, but those are just market distortions that you just got to be aware of because it is market-based pricing for any of these things. The advantages aren't going to last very long and you can't build your business counting on that. You might get lucky and walk into that.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely correct that that's how it happens in any marketplace without having a unique edge, you're still making money, just maybe not as much. I've never been fortunate enough to be the first guy in one of these ecosystems. I don't know whether my team just missed it or I didn't have the right business, but like Snap when they started launching it because it's funny, most of these things will launch. The pricing is always market-based pricing. You need technology to interface with it. We use some fantastic technology to do our automated bidding and things like that, right? And bid management. But you have to understand that. So you're bidding on Google a keyword and Facebook an audience person, their attention, and Amazon combinations of those. And yeah, look, early on, like Amazon advertising was phenomenally effective for the people who first started it, let's say a couple years ago. They didn't have to spend much and they were crushing it. And we saw that in a number of the businesses we've bought and looked at. And they're more upset because they were getting a 10x return on their advertising early on. And now it's three. But they still make money at three. But you can see life is about directionality.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't buy it tomorrow, you'll get an email with a different umbrella. So I've been fascinated to see there's the boycott Facebook and everyone goes after the big advertiser and says, hey, we're going to get them if we get PNG to stop advertising on Facebook. Facebook's revenue barely takes a blip. There are a lot of people who figured out that this works. And those are not huge businesses, a local pizza shop who could use it effectively. But you need that expertise. The big companies have to do a better job than they are over time of making it easy for the small guy to do. The more they do that, the more they increase their revenue and throughput. And I think the more utility and value they provide to everybody.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ago, and they usually last about 18 months. That could very well be what's happening. And it quite often is. People, I don't think, want to believe that we're that similar and that some system can find out we're that similar. I mean, when Facebook introduced the like audience feature, at first it took 20,000 emails. You'd say, here's 20,000 customers we have. You upload the emails and you say, go find me people like these. And the conversion rate from that group would be twice what it was from just advertising on Facebook normally, maybe three times. And then Facebook soon said, oh, we only need 10,000 emails. Oh, we only need 5,000 emails. Now I think you can give them on the order of hundreds, a couple hundred. And they have so much data. They're so good at it. So this is 100 of your clients. You load it up and say, build me a like audience, and they can build you a custom audience that's like that. And here's the people who are 99% similar. Here's the people who are 98% similar. This is what our Facebook agency did, when you break out those groups and you advertise differently to them and you optimize your conversion on each one of them.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't realize the power, and I'll tell you with a little anecdote, a story, but like, and the story plays out almost every single weekend where we're hanging out with our friends or neighbors. We start talking about cutting boards, let's just say. And then my wife the next morning wakes up and the first ad in her feed is a cutting board. And it's always this like, they're listening to us. They're listening to our conversations. And a year ago, I was always like, no, they're not. That might be going on now. I looked at Apple's terms of service and stuff. It's not like there's a person sitting there listening, but there is a system that can sit there and can understand what you say. Frankly, I think less often people don't understand the power of the data these companies have and the power of predictability of people, frankly. We'd have this debate when I said it's an argument. My wife would say, oh, they're listening to me. And I'd say, no, they just know that you live in this zip code. Your income is this. You're married to me. You're interested in these things. And they know from your credit card receipts, you last bought a cutting board 18 months ago.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaving China coming into the various coasts, you don't necessarily get a feel for it, but that's what is going on, that's the consumer products world today. There's just so many people who've made it easier along the whole spectrum.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, I remember distinctly I was doing getting crushed by the dot com boon bust. Before that, like, you couldn't have done a lot of this stuff. Even 10 years ago, it's funny, we talk about the scale of our company. You don't get a feel for it. I tell my team all the time, we're shipping over a million goods a month to people, every month into people's hands. And that's growing dramatic. There's probably a million and a half. I think it's in that number for a few weeks now, so it's old. 10, 15 years ago, we would have had a humongous warehouse. We might be based at Ohio or something so that we could have a million square foot warehouse to bring in that stuff and get it out and do it ourselves and have 100 warehouse workers and our company be based near that. We'd see trucks going in and out all the time and you'd have a sense for this scale. We started this somewhat remotely in three different cities, Boston, New York, and Houston. We don't see these million products getting shipped out and shipped around every month. We don't see the hundreds of storage containers on the ocean.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people are kind of using this line, and we aren't the first, and we're not the last. We talk about the consumer products company for the next century, right? And some great folks talk about this for a little while. So what does that mean? So what's most exciting to me? It's a combination of all these things coming together. No small part, the commoditization of manufacturing globally, in particular in China, the simplification of moving goods around the world, and then selling them both through marketplaces, whether it's Amazon or Rakuten or Zalando or whatever it is and other places, like these have all built up all over the place. Mercado Libre, right? The ability to go D to C, you're going to have other Instagram shops, all that stuff. So all this stuff has been going on. And if you looked at that and you were to start a company, which many of us have here to sell products directly to consumers nowadays, you wouldn't go build a factory. That's the last thing on your mind. You don't do that. Nobody does that anymore. But we're talking with just 20 years here. I mean, this isn't that long ago. It's really not.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm lazy about it. I'm sure much to Josh's chagrin at times. He really runs a lot of that for us. Now, that being said, we talk about it. I understand this stuff. And you're right. There is something of a formula. I couldn't give you everything because part of that is our secret sauce is how we've done it and being smart about it. We've largely done this with debt. That's no secret because when you're buying assets that are fairly low multiple and you know at some point if you're a reasonable operator, you're going to come out with a higher multiple. And where that tops out is depends on how great you are and what you do with it. Then you can follow that formula basically. Look, Thorazio's never been just about assembling Amazon assets. And a lot of people out there say, well, how can they be worth that? This is crazy because that's not what is in our pitch decks behind the scenes and it's not the only story here. It's a much bigger story. And this is step one, phase one.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'd say two things about that first. You're talking to half of the Thraciobrain here. The other half is Josh. That half happens to be the capital's horsing half and the finance half. I mean, he is a savant when it comes to capital strategy and debt and equity and all that. I've never met anybody smarter. Unbelievable. So we've talked and you've learned about me. Like when I have someone who's great at something and better than me, I hand it off.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time. They're starting to learn that they can. That's interesting. There are other competitors, right? There's a lot of people now who are copying the Thrazio model saying we're going to be Thrazio for this or that or do Thrazio in this vertical or that. But we haven't seen a large impact on pricing there yet. I imagine you will at some point, but that remains to be seen. Again, there's a decent number of these businesses out there.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of They call seller directed earnings in the space. We've paid more for many businesses at times. People have gotten it in their head that, oh, Thrazi only pays this. They have a formula. It is what it is. And that's not the case at all. We look at every deal, the larger you are, generally the more money or multiple you can command. We do earn outs everybody does on these deals to some extent. We've paid 90 some percent of our earnouts also. We're very good at that. We have become fantastic operators. This is all my team. I mean, they're just great. And it's just amazing. I think we're world class at Amazon operations now. So when we say here's an earnout and based on these numbers, here's what you're going to get paid. We hit that and pay it more than 90% of cases, which is fantastic also. So being able to do that and confidently say that, that's changed. We didn't have the track record before when we first were starting. And that was harder. So we've seen that change a little bit. But other than that, I haven't seen a massive change. There's more people who are willing and interested in selling.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We look at a lot of stuff, but we have closed fully about 94% of the deals that we have gone into LOI with. We've closed deals that have had review scrapes in the middle of the deal and got just hammered down or some other change that caused their product to drop in revenue. When we know it's not the seller's fault, it wasn't malfeasance and it's possible to fix. We move ahead and we don't even let it impact the terms that much. We know what we're doing here. We know we're getting into. We're better at that now than we were early on, I would say early on you don't necessarily know what is great, what isn't, and how to look for warning signs and things like that. But again, when we go into LOI, we close. It's rare that we don't. And it's usually, like I said, something that was discovered that they were doing bad or wrong, which can happen or change their mind here and there, but it's very, very rare. We have seen multiples expand, but not a whole lot. And it's mostly due to COVID. So the massive e-commerce bump that everybody got this year, who was selling online.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to see it, and it's particularly too when companies most of these people will have one killer product that drives most of their revenue or profit and then a handful of others. We love that. We love to acquire that. But I can see why that's scary to an individual, right? So their mantra is always launch new products, distribute your risk and all this stuff.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get scored, and based on that score, your fees change, you might be paying more if you're not doing a great job of that. So that starts to get really hard. These weren't things that a lot of these people signed up for. So it was like entrepreneurship in a box and now suddenly they're having to do all this stuff, have this particular expertise. And then it's getting very competitive. I mean, you hear about the competition on Amazon. And there is a lot. And there are a lot of unscrupulous competitors. Mostly, I'd say those are overseas firms. You can attack. I mean, 10 ways to Sunday, your listings get attacked and stuff that's just crazy. And Amazon just can't keep up with that they're trying, but it can be very difficult. When you're an individual and you've got this asset that represents this huge portion of your total net worth, maybe your entire earnings for the year and you're worried about it being at risk of just drop off the first page or not selling anymore. You're used to making 20 grand a month profit for yourself and living happy. And then suddenly you're down to one. That's a big deal. So I think where we...”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more complex it gets for that loan operator and the more it really favors bigger operators or people like our company or medium-sized sellers who have a team. Because a few years ago advertising on Amazon wasn't much. Now they've had the fastest growing advertising ecosystem ever. Google grew so fast we were all amazed. Then Facebook came and blew that away and Amazon has blown Facebook's growth rates away. So now you have to be a fairly expert marketer and advertiser if you want to advertise and keep up. And you're not going to be able to compete with my team. I mean, I ran a performance marketing agency. I've got those kind of people that are fantastic. I know what they're doing focused on. Now you also have Amazon has released multiple different advertising options and things you can do. Year, year and a half ago they introduced a supply chain score. You get scored on the quality of your management of your supply. You didn't have to do that necessarily before. You just shipped the products to Amazon, they'd figure out exactly where to put them and how to get them out to people.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting thing is the challenges have changed and multiplied in the last few years, last couple years even, since we've gotten into this. Early on, it was enough to just get a good product and ship it to Amazon and be smart about selling. Almost all of the early sellers we spoke to had taken an online course on doing selling on Amazon. Some of these things that seem cheesy or whatever, but they frankly have a lot of good information. You spend two to five K to learn, and most of them had done that learned. So they were doing the basics, and that's all you needed to do. This really all started to explode. I think the third party marketplace really in 2015 around that time period. So if you got into that there, had a good product, pick the right category. It starts to take off. Where it starts to get difficult is when you start growing, you're getting to million, couple million a year in business, and you're starting to order a lot from your supplier. Amazon's got Prime Day. There's deals, all these things start to happen. And you have to keep up with that. But the more Amazon has released in terms of flexibility and power to the third-party seller,”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other and launch something or retired executives we've met a number of them and just weren't done. They retired early and said, I want to try something and launch products on Amazon and or maybe bought into a small business and grew it. These aren't sophisticated company builders when you're talking about shares and asset purchase agreements and all this stuff. They don't really understand all that. And it can be a little daunting. This is an asset that represents probably 99% of their net worth. You're speaking in languages. It's like real estate. Think about it. When the first home you buy or sell could be terrifying. There's a lot of stuff to learn and whatever. It's the same thing in business, but it's something even less people know about. Everybody owns lots of people own home. We all know people own homes. Very few people know people own businesses and or sell those businesses. We've made over 80 millionaires in the last couple years since we've done this thing. We're going to make a lot more. I love to see, to hear the stories of what they can do with that and to watch it.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing, but Amazon took the rest of it out of the equation. I mean, the hardest thing for these businesses that I saw I ran traffic agencies, I've done Google PPC, I've done Facebook, like getting the traffic is the hardest thing, it turns out. As the agency, I was seeing this value created by fewer people shipping product from Asia, two guys shipping stuff. And we would come in, create all the value by building their customer base on D2C. Amazon brings the customers. They're there. So if you understand, use one of these tools like Helium 10 or Viralunch, right, to help you understand the space and understand where there's opportunity and how to rank on keywords and what keywords you need to be looking for, then how to pick a product. Okay, I need to pick spatulas because I can get on the first page there and sell. They make everything else so much easier. So you have to procure and produce a great product, but that's easier and easier for everybody to do. So these companies are really just, they can be oftentimes just an individual do it on their own or maybe it's a couple of friends from college that knew.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of this is the way that manufacturing has been commoditized in the last 20 years by China. It's stunning. I think everyone says it and talks about it, but you don't really understand or appreciate the extent to which that has happened. So an individual can get an idea and just say, hey, I want to sell these things. Go on, Alibaba, one of these sites and find a manufacturer in China, a bunch of them, and arrange to have samples sent over, pick out a product, tweak it a little bit, and then ship it directly from them to Amazon's fulfillment center and start selling. And the cost to get started is almost nothing. I mean, I remember reading a business week article where the reporter had decided to try this out and it made like pink jeans or something in order like 500 pairs of pink jeans or something. It was really, it was funny, but they ended up selling them all, but they just showed how that process was just, the gears had been greased across the whole spectrum of things you need to do. Amazon sourcing the product.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much, they are 100% on Amazon. I mean, that's what we look for, and that's our kind of our ideal case. Although now we're larger, we're looking at businesses that have more off Amazon business additionally, but it was important early on for us to just look at that. They're not a business in the sense that you think of a business where you get a bunch of people and start doing things and have raise money and all that. This is the thing that Amazon has done with the third-party seller program. The most unbelievable entrepreneur creation machine the world's ever seen. I mean, they've got 3 million active sellers around the world now or 2 million, but there's a couple hundred thousand that have produced sales of six figures and up. And there's half a million or a million. I think they released these numbers every now and then that do 50 grand in sales, let's say, which is not insignificant. And if you're living in Asia or some other country, 50 grand a year, 20% margins making 10, 20K on that could be fantastic. And as a side hustle, it's great for almost anyone. What they enabled was an individual to be able to sell product for one thing. And then the other.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's still sold under the Cafe Casa name, but it's battery powered handheld mixer. I literally have a drawer full of mixers I bought on Amazon because a blender's too big to blend a bulletproof coffee, you know what bulletproof coffee is, I assume butter and MCT oil and stuff. The hand mixers that plug in, you don't want to go plug something in and do all that. And they're too big generally too. I tried that and shot coffee all over my catch. So this thing's a little battery powered thing and you just stick it right in, blends it up perfectly. Turns out it's also fantastic for opening wine if you've got wine that needs to open. Fast parent, you can scramble eggs with it. So, this was the first product we bought. It was very small doing a couple hundred grand in sales and stuff. It was fun. It got us into the game.”
2021-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source