YouSaid · the spoken record

Chieh Huang

lines on the record: 148
first: 2021-02-22
most recent: 2021-02-22
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

“You know, we wrote him an email years later and we're like, did you keep the boxes? We're serious. We will buy back. And he was like, I didn't keep that box. What are you talking about?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I hope people that are out there that look at the story of boxing and learn more about us end up just like me back at 2.30 a.m. in a law firm reading the stories of some of these businesses that we were helping and realized that yes, it's a lot of hard work, but it was a lot of timing and a lot of luck. And the reality is you probably have an outsized effect on just one out of the three. And so that's not just humility speaking. That is the absolute truth. And I feel very fortunate because, again, I only had something to do with one out of the three of those factors.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the journey you've had so far, where Box is headed and the considerable success you've had, how much of that do you attribute to your hard work and intelligence and how much do you think is about luck and chance and privilege and other things?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would do whatever is in the best interest of our team. At some point in time, your motivation as a founder of the company no longer is you and your financial outcome, but it's making sure all these folks that bet on you and this vision have a great result. And if that's what we have to do to provide everyone with a great result, then so be it. If it's a public outcome and that's the way we maximize everyone's time here, then we're going to go down that path. So that's kind of how I think about life and my job these days.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Please back in March, April. I like to say I became the most popular person from my high school about like 20 years too late. Because here we are sitting on tons of toilet paper around the country. And yeah, so luckily we were able to kind of help some friends and family out. But overall, the year is going to end as a very positive one for us.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my gosh. I mean, high school friends I hadn't talked to in like 10 years, 15 years, like, hey, is this still your number? Can you give me some?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we do a variety of things between social distancing, masks in the warehouse, air filtration, even down to like, hey, no more overlapping shifts. So between every shift, instead of having people mingle in the parking lot, we'll have some downtime where everyone can leave the property and the next shift can come on without hundreds of people in a parking lot mingling. All of those things. The most important thing though is to say something and truly believe in it. And so throughout this pandemic, it has been our mission to have at least one C staff member on site at a facility to say, hey, If I say it's safe”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have an emergency, someone in your family's sick, you have a car repair, and you just need something to tide you over, and no one should declare, have to declare bankruptcy or not pay bills because they got a flat tire, especially if you work at Boxed. And you would think that it's just like, what are we doing? Like, how much money does that cost? But it's all depositing in this piggy bank of trust that we recently were able to break it open and draw down in this era of COVID. And I remember sitting in one of our fulfillment centers thinking, is anyone going to show up for work next week? Because this thing is getting real bad. And it really is the honor of a lifetime to be in such a crazy time and to see these folks just show up for work to do their job, getting the stuff to folks who are immunocompromised.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So a lot of these things that are seemingly unscalable, they are if you really want them to be. So for example, the college program isn't even the most used program at Box. The most used program at Box are, for example, our $500 emergency fund.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We make you follow a FAFSA. And so depending on your need, you're going to get it subsidized already. And it's tuition only. And so it becomes a lot more palatable My family's kind of evolution in the early days when we were rather poor. And so luckily, we don't pay anyone minimum wage here. But certainly, working and having hourly kind of salaried folks, it makes for sometimes not the easiest of livelihood. So education was my way, or was our family's way out of that. And I hope we can help a few folks here along that path.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still offer it, so there's still even this next semester, there's multiple folks part of that program and they're getting put through college.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um, something we haven't talked about is the company culture, and I want to ask you about an incredibly generous and just mind-blowing thing that you offer, and I'm just trying to figure out how you do this. If you still do this, which is, I guess in 2015, you announced it to employees that you would pay the college tuition of every full-time employee's children. Do you still offer that?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is really hard. We had to call multiple all hands in the facilities as we were rolling these robots out and testing them. It doesn't take a genius to see what the robot is doing and what they're kind of doing and saying, wait a minute, where's my future here? And so what we committed for everyone here is that you weren't going to lose your job solely because of automation. You will have to be retrained. You will have to learn how to operate, how to service these state-of-the-art machines and work alongside of them. But you weren't going to lose your job solely because of that. Because as a company grows, we'll have more volume and we can use that volume to leverage these robotics as well as you so that you always have a place here. And you see folks in our fulfillment centers, some without a college degree or without a high school diploma servicing really advanced kind of robots. And we retrained them to be able to have that on the resume and on their life skills.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, entirely robotic. So you still need human beings to physically pick the items and pack the items. But you see these robotic self-driving carts roaming around the fulfillment center now in our newest ones.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You take a picture of people's box. Yeah, that's right. So it's the boxed selfie cam. So on your order confirmation, it says your boxed took a selfie and customers love it. And also, it's for you to verify that we packed everything well and it's on its way to you. But the most important thing from there was that the same folks that built that camera system for us now build the robotics that we use to automate our newest fulfillment centers. So our newest fulfillment centers are 100% automated by our own hardware these days. The roots were in that camera project.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I read that you guys do, which I think is super cool, is you take a photo of every box. That's fact. And then you email it to the person who ordered it so they can see their box. It's like when you go to the airport and you travel internationally, they ask you to verify your suitcases. You take a picture of people's box before it's chipped out so they know that it's right.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Otherwise, you're going to Yeah, definitely. We're not that far off. And it really is one of the stories of, you know, everyone jokes about it in the industry. It's like, we'll make it up with scale. And with us, we're doing it every day. So you're starting to see it because again, it's just like the more items you buy from box or any e-commerce company, the more effectively you can price the items because all those different items in that box quote unquote share that shipping cost, which is the biggest cost in e-commerce. And so if you ship one item, of course, it's pretty hurtful. But if you're shipping 10 items per order, man, suddenly you can make money selling Oreo cookies online.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So, you know, there's not many companies even today that are independent that have their own fulfillment centers that ship food around the country. So that has never really been not a problem for us, but like there's always conversation swirling.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, online for them suddenly became not just again almost like how we were relegated to the basement at Zynga in our early days. You know, they're like, oh my gosh, digital. What are we doing in digital? Bring those folks here. And, you know, they really start to staff the hungry potential A players at all these companies to really go after the opportunity.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So it was a wake up call to everyone in the industry and then also everyone outside of the industry as well. That's something with online grocery is so important that Amazon will do the biggest deal they've ever done to buy their first brick and mortar chain. That had immense kind of ramifications for us in our conversations with everyone.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that the Whole Food Steel did for us is that it put this industry on the map. At that moment, everyone who didn't pay attention to this was forced to pay attention. Because for all you could say about Amazon and how they do it and how they compete, if they're getting into an industry, it's a little bit different now. But at that time, that company was not buying $10 billion plus companies. Maybe they'll do a big buy like Zappos for a billion. So a giant sum like that.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I mean, from the early days of zero, two straight days of zero orders, that self-doubt, you know, not much, it doesn't get any worse than that, you know. And every time or in the early days where you basically got not laughed at, but essentially laughed at at meetings with big CPG companies or big other kind of distribution companies, self-doubt. And you just learn to have thick skin as an entrepreneur. And luckily, this is not our first time at the rodeo. This is our second company. And that thick skin was developed over the course of now two companies versus us trying to do this as if it was startup 1.0.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still think there are items out there that truly you just, because of patents and because of the brand equity or other items that you”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the margins are really good, but also, more importantly, it builds a lot of loyalty. So over half of our repeat customers have a Princeton Spring item in their cart. And if you buy a Princeton Spring item, over 80% will buy another one in their ensuing shop.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we're like, I was like, oh. All right, so through Princeton Spring, you make now everything from coffee to olive oil and nuts and a bunch of stuff. And so that's your label. That's like, right? And presumably, your margins are much higher on your in-house brand.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had one of our first offices was on the corner of Prince and Green in Soho. And as we filed a trademark, the attorneys didn't even file it. They said we're going to save you the $1,000 an hour we charge and reject us for you. And we're like, what? You don't even want our money? Like, just finally, what's wrong with you? And they were like, yeah, pretty sure there's already a PNG out there. And so I was like, oh, fine, fine. And so the real sharp New Yorkers are like, Prince and Spring are parallel. They never intersect. And I was like, that's right. But it was the closest coordinates to our office at that time.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Telling the team, like, because the team was despondents, like, we still have a few holdouts that will not sell anything to us. And I was like, guys, Elon Musk is out there talking about sending human beings to Mars. And we're sitting here sulking over the fact that we can't make a CPG product. It's like, I'm pretty sure someone will make one with our label. And that was the day that Princeton originally Princeton Green, now Prince and Spring, was born.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So, part of the philosophy of the company early on was that we tried to curtail SKU's assortment because it made for an easier and smoother shopping experience. And so you didn't have this kind of paralysis by analysis. And so people would come through the app and hunt and pack and just build this, suddenly build a basket of many items to make the unit economics work. Another reason was that by not carrying everything, you could really concentrate your buying power so that, yes, we were not buying as much as Amazon would be with these big CPG companies, but the items we carry, we do a good amount of turnover in. In the beginning, though, it started off out of necessity because back in 2015, some of the big brands still didn't want to work with us. So I remember...”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think for us, like, we're not fully hubris and we're not out here on a mission to say we got to beat these folks or crush them for us to succeed. The bad part of the business we operate is that it is hyper-competitive with large, large companies. The good part is that the items we sell every single person in a developed country uses our products on a daily basis. And so the market is just absolutely gigantic. And so we're still on this growth path generating like a good amount of revenue, but we're not even close to saturating the market. And so I think that is a silver lining.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the thought was that when we asked our customers, okay, 200 items, certainly not enough. Like they were saying, well, I need to buy more. You don't have this brand or you don't have that category. Right. And one of the leading categories was fresh foods. It's like, you know, yeah, I'll buy all the dry goods from you, but I still have to venture into a store to buy fresh foods. Sometimes when I'm there, then I'll buy the center store items anyway. So that was something we began building all the way back then and have still been honing over time to get the economics right.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely the Packers around the country all have their own kind of tips and tricks. Some prewrite them or they'll draw things or they'll get people from the office like, hey, can you help me with this stack of cards? And so it depends on the packer, but they're all handwritten. It's not an auto pen machine. Some people think it's an auto pen machine. It's not. We still make it happen.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. It seems like it's totally not scalable. But welcome to the story of most startups and especially Box. Neither was starting in our garage. But if you really feel like it's important, you'll make room for it. And now with engineered standards and automated facilities, we know down to the second how much it actually costs us to write a handwritten note, but it's worth it. It's worth it to differentiate and to have that one-on-one connection with the customer.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read that, and I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, that when you guys were writing handwritten notes in the early days, apparently one of your employees handwrote a note to somebody who ordered four forty peck boxes of Trojan condoms, wrote a note to this person saying. Everyone loves an optimist. Is that true? Did somebody really write that note to somebody who ordered 40. Boxes of condoms?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So, you know, the genesis of handwritten notes was that I remember we had this old laser printer that were printing these invoices and it would take something like 10 seconds for each invoice to print. And I remember looking at one of the folks in my garage and saying, you know, instead of standing there, why don't you just write a note or something to this customer? You're just waiting for paper to print. And so from that day on, we just wrote a little clever note to every customer. You know, of course, with COVID, we've had to pause that for safety reasons and for streamlining the process. But we fully intend once we can safely do so to bring that back.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess one of the ways that you also were differentiating what you were doing was writing handwritten notes in the boxes where it would say, hey, I guess people write like, hey, thank you so much for ordering from us. Hope you have a good laundry day ahead of you or something like that. Just these little notes that people would write.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a little bit of both, and so we had to be sharp on prices, so we knew we couldn't be wildly priced compared to similar items online. But at the same time, we wanted to target customers that valued that convenience and also valued the fact that they didn't have to pay a membership fee to get into the door. And so initially, very coastal. folks just like us who didn't have a car anymore to get to a warehouse club but now increasingly what you find is a big part of our audience is now suburban and rural if you're in the city you might not have a car if you're in the suburbs you might not have the time or if you're out in the middle of the country you might not have the patience to drive 90 minutes to your local warehouse club just to save 10 bucks because you you might burn a good amount of that in gas and you have to stand online and pay a membership fee so so those three things are really what we hit upon”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Based upon how much you buy, it costs a different amount of money to serve that customer. You can't make a 10-10-2. It probably is like 15, 10 to. And so it starts to really fall off the rails. So from a business model perspective, we did think purely offsetting costs with a membership, unless you are at gigantic scale and you knew for a fact with years of data how much your cost truly are to serve each customer, hard to offset.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So, for two main reasons, one is that there were a lot of folks that we understood that would otherwise shop at a warehouse club but just didn't want to pay. They didn't feel like from a principal perspective. They want to pay to be able to shop somewhere. And so if we can capture that audience, we could probably build a pretty big company just doing that. And then also the traditional model of how warehouse clubs work doesn't really work online because it never really contemplated the variable cost being the main cost driver. So traditionally it's called the 10102 model. So 10% cost, you get your 10% margin on your goods. You break even on all of that and you make your 2% operating profit just off the membership. But now because”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Throughout the day. Yeah. First time I ever hurt my back was lifting a giant box. And so it was physical work, but I really enjoyed it. I felt like, you know, unlike a purely digital business, you're getting your hands physically dirty. You're like packing these boxes. You see the fruit of your labor every day as it goes on a truck. Now years later, I was thinking, now I look back, I'm like, wait, we were selling pink virtual cows for $4.99 online. Yeah, I'm like business. Amazing business. What were we thinking, you know? But it is still gratifying to see all the orders go out every day, even to this day.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bet to this day some of my neighbors have no idea what we're doing, and I bet they thought I was selling drugs, like for sure, because there was just like these young kids showing up in cars, unloading boxes. And it was like, what are they up to down there? But luckily, we grew out of my house and we were out before the cops were called.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pour in. It's like it was so cliche, but just looking at the order log, we used to refresh it just to, oh, we got one, but we just stopped refreshing because it just kept coming in and we're all like, oh, like, what are we going to do now? And so it just, we ended up undrilling my garage door. So it was just a net as a garage door. Like pallets were being dropped on my front driveway. This is a residential neighborhood in New Jersey. And eventually because we're like, oh my gosh. like it's going to start raining so we ended up getting a container so like a pod container and we put extra merchandise in there hired neighbor friends weren't your neighbors annoyed”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's That's why I'm like whine at the third hour of today's show. Let's keep it up. So, you know, Kathleen Hoda, if you're listening to this, we owe you one. Let me know the address to send wine to. But we owe you one.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kathleen Lee and Hodar were like, wait, mobile app don't have to wait online and they literally said, this is genius. Genius.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, all like the beautiful items of like laundry detergent, bounty paper towels, you know, cereal, just like our better sellers. And I remember sitting there and watching the live hit. And then there's a bit of latency because you have to build a basket. So the average boxed order has almost 10 items for the order. So it's not like you're checking in and out within 30 seconds. And so after about half an hour.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every company, every person I firmly believe has a spark, and not everyone takes advantage of it. And our spark, at least early on, was a producer for the Today Show was a customer and loved the product or a contributor to the Today Show, loved it, and emailed us through this PR firm that we had hired and said, do you mind dropping off items so I can talk about it on the today's show with Kathy Lee and Hoda tomorrow? Yeah, no, I don't mind.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. And I remember one of the things that really shook my confidence early on was that I was driving home from a meeting in New York and one of the folks that quit his six-figure paying job to join the dream and sit in my garage called and said, dude, I refreshed the page over and over. It's not broken. We got zero orders today. So we were getting like two or three orders a day, maybe as high as five to six, and then this dropped down to zero two days in a row. And he was like, dude, I risk my livelihood to do this. Are you sure this is still going to work? So getting no orders, having this person who quit their six-figure job, asking you if it's going to work out, and having friends and family invested in you and you're smoking through their money. Like, where do we go with this?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I remember telling folks that we're going to need a lot of capital, and there's a significant chance this will not work out like our first one. And so you have to treat this like a donation.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And the added pressure was that this time was different in that we did take friends and family money in our seed round. So our first company, we did not. It's not that we didn't ask, we just didn't get any, and this time around, it's really interesting there's second time around if you have a win in your first one. People want to give you up. Exactly. And it feels almost like an obligation you have to. And the question becomes, why didn't you take, why wouldn't you take my investment? You're shutting me out”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First sale that we ever made was bounty paper towels and tide pods, and we shipped an item to Queens, and on the inside of the box everyone that was working in my garage at the time signed it and drew the outline of their hands, and we wrote a handwritten note to that customer and said, I would keep this box if I were you and we will buy it back in the years to come.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was a guy in the UK that had squatted on it since like the mid 90s, probably bought it for 99 cents back in the day and did nothing with it. And so we emailed him and said, well, buy this domain. Would you want to sell it? And he's like, I forgot, it was like 200 grand. And we're like, we'll give you 30. And he's like, no way. And we said, come on. You sat on it for so many years. We'll write you a check immediately. Come on, how many percent return is that? And he wrote back and said 35 and you pay all the escrow and closing fees. And we're like, done, we're in box.com was born”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT