YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Gilboa

lines on the record
23
first
2018-02-19
most recent
2018-02-19
sittings or episodes
1
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “We ended up getting a $200,000 SBA loan. We had to sign probably 400 documents, including one that said we weren't going to use the money to open a zoo And we really tried to think of other creative forums of financing the business. And so we were working with a third party logistics company that managed some of our inventory. And a CEO loved our brand, our business. And he was asking, what can he do to help drive growth in our business so that they can have more business? Yeah. And we said, well, really constrained by our ability to purchase inventory at this point. He said, well, you guys seem like you're really good at PR. Our company needs some help with PR. What if you do some PR consulting for us and we'll pay you a few hundred thousand dollars for that? And we said, yep, that sounds great.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I mean, I remember waking up every morning with a laptop on my chest because I'd fallen asleep responding to customer emails and there was just an overwhelming amount of work in those early days. And so we didn't have even a minute to breathe and take a step back and think about what was happening.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “We were primarily, we're still trying to figure out how to run this business. We were working out of our apartments as full-time students. Our customer service line was a Google Voice number that we set up when someone would call, it would simultaneously ring all four founder cell phones and whoever answered. You were the customer service rep. Right. And so we looked at our class schedules and there are 12 hours per week when all four of us were in class at the same time. And we said, well, we should hire someone who can answer the phone when none of us are available. And so we hired this woman named Mara and said, you're going to be working 12 hours a week and trained her.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “But I think we also learned a lot of important lessons in terms of being empathetic to customers. All four of us founders, we reached out to everyone on that waitlist for people that had bad experiences or were really disappointed. We would give them free glasses. We gave people discounts”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, you know, I think it did have some positive effects that it created this aura that, wow, this is in really high demand.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I think we learned a lot of important lessons in those early days where we were terrified that we had all these early adopters that were excited to place an order from us and we didn't have anything to sell them. And for a lot of those customers, it took us upwards of nine months to get through the waitlist. So we were terrified, you know, are these people going to leave with a bad taste in their mouth that you really only have one opportunity and launch a brand?”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “We're also constrained. I mean, we hadn't raised any money from investors. It was our life savings that we poured in. So there was really a limited number of frames that we had the ability to purchase”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And so we place an emergency call to our developer and miraculously was able to build in this waitlist functionality on the fly. And within a four-week period, we'd sold out of our best-selling styles. We had a waitlist of 20,000 customers.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “We had no inventory tracking at all because we were assuming one to two orders a day and kind of joke that if nothing else, my mom would buy 100 pairs of glasses from us. But we really had tempered expectations because we also recognized that what we were trying to do was build a brand. And that takes a really long time. So we called an emergency meeting after that first hour and a half class and we were debating, okay, what do we do here? Do we just keep taking orders and then figure out what to tell people later? Do we take down the website? And while we're having this two-minute discussion, I'm looking at my phone and we have 10 more orders. And I'm like, guys, we got to do something here”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And I had my phone set up to be notified anytime we got an order through the site. And so it was around 10 a.m. And so I get an order and then 10 minutes later we get another order and then another order and then another order and we kind of go from this feeling of elatement to, oh crap, we don't have this much inventory and we hadn't contemplated building in any sold out functionality or waitlist functionality into the site.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And we were sitting in class the next day. We hadn't told anyone that the site was live. Our parents didn't know the site was live. Our best friends didn't know the site was live. But we didn't live.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “We were just blown away by the impact that it had in terms of traffic and sales. So we got a call from our publicist the day before GQ was going to hit newsstands, and we still had a landing page up. If you went to WarbyParker.com, it said coming soon, please enter your email address. Wow. I said, guys, what's going on here? GQ's hitting tomorrow. And our website still had a bunch of bugs in it. We were working with one developer, and we were on the phone with him kind of frantically working out some of the most critical bugs in the site. And we finally at 4 a.m. said, okay, guys, this is stable enough. And we all need a couple hours of sleep before we have class tomorrow. Let's make the site live.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, so we had meetings with almost 50 PR firms, and part of it was us evaluating them. But at the same time, we had to sell ourselves to those PR firms. And there's nothing less sexy in the fashion world than for MBAs from Wharton. We knew we were going to launch sometime in the spring of 2010. And we really wanted to be in these premiere magazines as a stamp of approval. So what we were targeting was GQ Invote. And so we had some production samples. We didn't have a website up, but we were really pitching these magazines as exclusive launch partners. And we were thrilled to hear that GQ and Vogue were going to run stories. We had no idea what those stories were going to look like, what the content was going to look like”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “So, the nice thing about business school is that most people work for a few years before going back to school. And so collectively, the four of us took our life savings from when we were working before school and invested into the business. We invested $120,000 between the four of us to get the business off the ground. And we worked for a year and a half without paying ourselves a salary. We didn't have an office. We did win a couple grants from Wharton, so that helped as well. But we were very scrappy and very much bootstrapped for quite a while, and we ended up launching the business and then went another 15 months before we raised our first round of funding.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “We often joke that the hardest thing that we did in those early days was settle on a name that all four of us liked. I think we still have our spreadsheet of over 2,000 names that we tested on our very patient friends.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I think the other element was that we were trying to sell a product that normally cost several hundred dollars and we were selling it for less than $100. And so there was inherent skepticism about the quality. And so we said, well, how do we just get as many of our glasses on people's faces as possible? And that's when kind of this light bulb went off for the home try on program, which really no company was offering until that time. And we said, we just want to get our product on people's faces. And we think people will buy afterwards.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Basically, all our friends and classmates. And a lot of people told us that creating a brand is hard enough. So is creating an e-commerce site. You should pick one of those. But for us, the magic was in creating a vertically integrated brand. So we honed in on this issue that we had to figure out a way people could try on glasses.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “We talk to everyone that would give us five minutes just about the idea. Initially, we got a bunch of pushback that said, well, the idea of buying glasses online is kind of strange to me.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, so I think all of us, we talked about how excited we were about this idea, and we said, well, we're at business school to learn how to run a business, what better way than to actually build one ourselves. So we all decided to take the same class, an entrepreneurship class where the output of that class is a full business plan. And so we spent the next several weeks really researching every element of our idea, getting a bunch of great insights from professors, running a bunch of surveys, standing for hours in different optical shops, and then that culminated in a 40-page business plan. Entered the Wharton business plan competition. And we got eliminated. I think just kind of put a chip on our shoulder where we said, okay, well, now we got something to prove. And at that point, we felt really passionate that this was going to work.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And so we kind of started this conversation where we were kind of frustrated by different pieces of the eyewear industry. And we knew that Neil had spent a number of years working for an eyewear nonprofit and probably knew a lot more about this than we did. And so we were on the computer lab one day. And we started asking Neil a bunch of questions and no pun intended, but I think all our eyes were open that there was this massive opportunity.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, so I was complaining to anyone that would listen about wide glasses were so expensive. And then Andy kept losing his glasses and he was buying everything online, but couldn't figure out why he couldn't buy new glasses online and why no one was effectively selling glasses online.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “They'd cost me $700. And I just couldn't justify as a full time student paying that much for a new pair of glasses The new iPhone 3G had come out that weighed in line at the Apple store, paid $200 for, and it did all these magical things. And meanwhile, the technology behind a pair of glasses is 800 years old, and it just didn't make sense”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I get an order, and then 10 minutes later we get another order, and then another order, and then another order, and we kind of go from this feeling of elatement to, oh crap, we don't have this much inventory.”

    2018-02-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT