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

“Oh, that brings up such a great memory. So the first thought of the company was to buy stuff.com, S-T-U-F-F-F-F-F-F. And you would think it's the magazine that owns it. But it's not. I haven't checked recently, but as of a few years ago, it was still for sale. So we reached out and they were like, it's yours for 2 million bucks. And I was like, yeah, so we ended up saying, well, guess that's not going to work out. So we also had on our list boxed.com. And we found out, you know, it was one of like the few five-letter names, domain names that meant something that wasn't owned by these hyper professional traders.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. As crazy as it sounds, that was how we started. We started to form rules around it. Like, you weren't allowed to seal the box unless someone double checked it. And then we realized, oh, man, like we need software to be able to scan the items to make sure that we pick the right items. And then we were like, wait, where are the potato chips? I thought they were next to the kitchen table yesterday and who moved them. And so we started to build a real inventory management system as well based upon kind of my house.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up. She had more power than us. So, you had a garage in New Jersey, you got the app, and you're just waiting for orders, and every time an order comes in, somebody in that garage just packs it up and ships it out.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone but us had the power. Even the UPS lady that picked up our boxes, if she didn't come by that day or didn't want to pick it up, she had more power than us because none of the orders would go out the door.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really strange. I used to have these moments where I'm like, what am I missing? Why am I pitching people to sell us things? Shouldn't it be the opposite? And when you're starting out in this industry, you have to understand that it's run by bohemists feeding other bohemists. And so the supply chain, how their bonused, they're not incentivized to really sell each other's to people. It just doesn't move the needle for them and it's not worth their time.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, like, however, we can get it. So calling random distributors, if there was a hot item that no one had or no one wanted to sell us, like just going into a store and buying it off the shelf and then reselling it, whatever we could do because people did not want to do business with us. We were in a garage. I mean, looking back, I don't know if I would have done business with us.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was in Edison, New Jersey, right back where I grew up We knew we didn't have that much money to start a proper warehouse facility, and I knew we were going to make a ton of mistakes. And so let's just keep overhead low. So we got a windowless conference room in New York City if we needed to.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Form a company in a garage and end up getting the largest CPGs, companies of the world, excited about us enough to frankly sell us their product and to partner with us.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we did that, and you could imagine writing a cold email to someone at a big CPG firm saying, I started a business in my garage. I'd like to do business with you, and we're willing to buy 10 units. You know, like, I don't even think it gets red. It automatically probably gets flagged before it even makes it to a human's inbox. And, you know, to this day, if you ask some of the old timers or the early employees of Boxed, they'll tell you that was the most unreal thing that they thought we could never get across was to.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, like laundry detergent pods, toilet paper, paper towels. We had some distinct mistakes like protein powder in our first 200 items, sriracha sauce, certainly a lot of hits.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the extent possible, you know, just like some market research, but good old store walks, as we call them in the industry, and just walking other people's aisles and seeing what's on what's on the end cap, what items are being promoted, and then also just talking to people in the stores. It's like, hey, I saw you picked up that can. Do you like it? Why did you pick that up?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we thought we can get away with just selling 200 items, the fastest moving items. And so I personally picked all 200 items.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just Exactly. Already thin margins. How are you going to make shipping work? And one of the other quotes was you guys are bits and bytes guys, but moving atoms around the country is not your thing. And that is a different game. And that quote stuck with me to this day. That person actually ended up investing, but just warned us that that was what we were signing up for.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they just thought, I mean, there was like the question of, okay, this sounds awfully like web van. And I barely use my phone to buy anything. And the last thing I'm going to buy on my phone is Di Coke.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So have at it. There was one investor, though, who actually said, this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard, meaning that if you had told me nothing, I would have written a blind check to you. But I have a fiduciary duty to my LPs, my limited partners. And after you're telling me this stupid idea, I can't in good conscience invest in you.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So they said, you know, we didn't invest in your first company, but hey, it looks like it ended up okay. You learned a lot. I want to be on the second ride. And so basically half of our seed investment were kind of what I call blind checks. Right.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we luckily after kind of exiting Zynga and where we had a decent outcome, we had a few investors that were willing to fund us no matter what the idea was.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. And we felt like there's probably millions of folks out there that had a similar problem like us where you grew up knowing to stock up to save but didn't have the time, the means or the patience to do it in their adult lives. And that was who we wanted to cater to.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew So you're thinking, hey, people who live in cities like us, they don't go to Price Club or Sam's Club or whatever Costco because they don't have cars, they don't drive out of the city. So let's bring bulk warehouse to them.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, shopping at the Price Club back in the day all the time with my parents. I was like, Ben, can I buy this bulk stuff online? And in 2013, the answer was no. And that was our epiphany all growing up in the Burbs. We knew that was what we needed to do.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was basically calling upon our childhood. So we thought mobile commerce was going to be big. But what are the things that we can actually? So I like to think about kind of opportunities as a mix of what are big kind of wild themes that the world will live out to the next five, ten, fifteen years. And how do you marry that to an actual problem someone has of day to day? And so that wild theme was mobile commerce. And then we ended up figuring out that, wait a minute, like we all live in the city. And I hated buying toilet paper downstairs at the bodega for like $3 a roll when I knew it was like $10 for a giant pack at a warehouse club. And so.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in the time that we did have coffee together and thought about what's next, we just felt like we got the thesis right, right? Mobile was going to be big and we rode that wave. So if we have all this knowledge about mobile, how can we go after a bigger opportunity than just social games? And so it was from those discussions that we thought commerce, man, commerce, people are going to use these phones to buy things in the future. And that is way bigger of an opportunity than just virtual currency. So as we came back together, we just began building a mobile commerce engine. So you can check out, you can buy things. We didn't know what we were going to sell at that time, but we just started building the bones of a commerce stack.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were not at that time. We just felt like everyone probably needed a little bit of a break. And at that time, games had evolved quite a bit so that our skill set and making the games that we used to make were not well suited for where games were going. And so I wasn't going to stay in games. And neither were many of the folks that we worked with.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think so. Like, just tongue-in-cheek, like we had a game graveyard that all the awesome games that we wanted to make, but the home office didn't allow us to make. There became this massive wall called the game graveyard in our office. And then the home office HR heard about it, made us take it down.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first few months were wonderful, and then you know, as they were getting closer to IPO, one of the questions that analysts had and everyone had was, well, what about mobile? Mobile seems like it's going to be a big thing. And so we suddenly, you know, we graduated from Will's mom's attic to the basement of Zynga where we were like, the mobile is going to be big, folks. And then suddenly they were like, mobile, didn't we buy a few folks in mobile? And the eye of Sauron came firmly on us. And we were getting pulled in different directions. We merged our studio with other studios. And it just felt more and more like a day job versus kind of the fun kind of times that we had previously.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was in the sense that you didn't have to worry about keeping the lights on. Right. And it was like probably the most joyful experience of my professional life, you know, in those first months after we were acquired because it was all the fun of making games with people you liked. And we were isolated in New York. It was great.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like Upper mobility, man. You know All right, so you guys, so you're acquired. Ester Ape is acquired by Zynga, and the three of you stay on, and you're basically still running the office, right? And was it markedly different from how it was before”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and I to this day I found it so hilarious driving around my neighborhood after that had happened because, you know, like Chris's childhood house had new siding. There was a new like Honda CRV in front. And I was like, oh my gosh, you know Upward Mobility Man, you know, it was just hilarious of like normal people living in the burbs that kind of made some money. And this is what happens. You buy new siding for your house.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Presumably, it was not enough money to mean that you would never have to work again, but it was certainly enough money that would enable you to take risks and start something new or certainly maybe buy a house or stuff like that”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my gosh, you gotta think like growing up, let's just call it, like growing up earlier in childhood being poor and seeing that number, you're like, you're almost like, I feel like I wanted to be in the shower, fully clothed, crying out of happiness. You know, like it's just like I had made it.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny because, you know, we were kind of enjoying what we were doing. We had raised money. We were out of the doldrums of the attic. And so we're like, you know, I don't know if it's time to sell the company. But I remember sitting there and they slide a piece of paper across the table. And then you read it, you're like, all right, boys, time to sell the company. Yeah, that's good.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, and just not only in games were they huge, but within Silicon Valley, it was seen as a game changer because here's a company growing at ginormous growth rates making like, you know, huge gross margin selling virtual currency, basically just printing money. And so they were on top of the world at that time”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did not as we were patrolling the mean streets of Palo Alto looking for Series A, we got a call from Zinga and their Corp dev team saying, hey, we heard you're in town raising money. And I was like, wow, news travels fast in this industry. Can you stop by the office? And we did. And they eventually made an offer for the company.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't become profitable, but we actually weren't burning that much money because purely digital businesses, anytime someone makes a purchase, your gross margin on that is gigantic. Right. And so we weren't burning that much money, but we also didn't raise that much money. So we ended up having to go out and hit the road to try to raise a real Series A investment round”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly the same. You're just skinning new art, new dialogue between the characters. And that's it. And you just keep pumping them out.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And you basically have the engine of the game and how a lot of games make money efficiently is they basically just reskin them. And so instead of doing menial tasks at your laptop, you can now bake bread in your mini bakery for dessert heroes.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were all from Japan. And it was about as frosty of a meeting as you can ever imagine. And as a throwaway, I said, you know what? I don't know. Why not go for it? Let's shoot our shot here. I speak a little Japanese. And the CEO is like, oh, really? Tell me about it. Where did you learn? I was like, I lived in Japan. And she said, where did you live? And I was like, oh man, I'm going to embarrass myself. I lived in the back waters. So I told her where I lived, which was Nigata Japan. Her eyes lit up because she said, I grew up in Nigata. And we just hit it off after that. Like, I knew the 7-11 that she went to when she was growing up in middle school and going to high school. Like, we just hit it off. And less than a month later, they wired us our first ever investment.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, right. And so a week later, we go into the meeting. The CEO's there, flanked by probably 10 to 12 bankers. It's a big giant conference table, me, Will, and Chris, and all these bankers are staring right back at us”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so hundreds of thousands of people playing it, and probably are just how naive we were was probably showing that we truly were first-time entrepreneurs, had no idea, quote unquote, how the game is played, and just had like dumb luck of making this game at the right time. And that was the hard advice that we got. And I remember it was silent in the cab ride back. And I remember telling everyone in the cab like, well, I don't think that went well. And, you know, now I laugh about it, but at that time, people are like, yeah, this isn't going to be easy. But we eventually raised money because, and this is connecting the dots altogether. So we got a message, ironically, on Facebook from one of the largest social gaming companies in Japan where social gaming had already taken off on mobile. They said their CEO was in town. They wanted to.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost nothing in the beginning. We thought we hit another bump because as we hit the road, as this attorney kind of connected us with big and prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the first meeting we had, I remember this day, like we showed up at the meeting and we had breakfast. And at the end of breakfast, he closed his notebook and said, you need to immediately go back to your guys' day jobs. You're not business people. This is a side project. This is not going to work out well for you guys. And I was like, yeah, wow is right.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know who you are, but I don't think you know how this works. I choose who I want to represent. And I don't think this is a good idea. And it was a short Kurt call. And I remember looking at one of our first employees and just saying, wow, that was not good. But later he came back and said, you know what? I grew up not far from you guys, and I like the fact that you guys are pretty naive. And maybe we can make something out of this. So, you know, I'll take a flyer on this and we'll help you guys out.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We were total noobs to this. Remember, like Central Jersey where we grew up is not Sandhill Road. We didn't know any venture capitalists. I didn't know much about venture capital. So I just Googled best Silicon Valley law firm because someone could help us there. And a few names come up and I got on a call with one attorney. And I remember asking him like, what makes him qualified to be our attorney? Because, you know, I've come from a law firm where... Yeah, I thought lawyers always had to pitch for work. And I remember to this day, he said.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and it also becomes abundantly clear that we need to raise money because the bank account is almost at zero. And so we weren't taking salary. Money was coming in, but not to the level where we needed it. We thought we had to go kiss the ring somewhere and raise money for this thing.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were buying stuff. So we were making money, but not a ton of money because we were brand new to this game. So the theories of how do you get this core loop of kind of user behavior going, we weren't privy to it at the time. So we made a ton of mistakes on retention and other things. And so, yeah, we made some money from it, but not angry birds type money.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They evaluated the game, probably liked the story of us just being a few country bumpkins in Jersey in an attic trying to build for this new platform they were launching. And like the fact that we were building a social game, which was wildly popular on Facebook at the time, but not so popular on iTunes yet, and featured it. And there we were.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. And so we sat down and said check what they're doing. Like, are they actually going through the levels? And Will actually said actually it looks like people are playing the game. Like they're not just pinging it or trying to DDoS it. They're like, they're actually playing the game. And I was like, what? And then we got a call from one of the kind of launch firms that we eventually hired to help us with the launch. And we found out that we were on the front page of iTunes all over the world.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I remember getting a call from one of our co founders saying, you got to come to my house now, like we're in trouble. And I race over there and I'm like, what's going on? And he's like, dude, someone's hacking us. Like the useless patterns are all over the place. And I was like, oh my gosh, like on top of no one playing the game, we just got hacked. Like this is what a terrible company. And we all sat down and thought about it. And I was like, that doesn't make sense, man. We don't hold credit card numbers and we have three people playing our game. So even if we did, they would make away with my credit card and yours and yours and none of our parents, you know?”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The parents told them that they were playing the game, including my parents. And I was like, yeah, that's impossible because only three people registered as daily active users. And so someone's parents are lying to us. So it was not a pretty sight in the beginning. And after a few weeks of that, I felt like it was probably time to grovel back to the law firm or somewhere because this ain't going to work out.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's the thing, man. Like, the games business is hard. We found out, we put it up on the App Store, and we're like, here we go. Book that vacation to a warm tropical space. And it just got lost in the ether. So I remember all the co-founders said that their parents were playing the game.”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so people thought, oh, you cash it out, right? You could always cash it out. And you're like, no, it's not a casino. Yeah, it was difficult to explain”
2021-02-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Boxed: Chieh Huang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT