YouSaid · the spoken record

Eddie Liu

lines on the record
22
first
2018-07-27
most recent
2018-07-27
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “And turn your company culture into a competitive edge. So put your people and culture first and find out more now on cultureamp.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a fantastic set of episodes next week.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Growing video and web conferencing service providing one consistent and surprise experience that allows you to engage in a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and persistent chat all-in-one platform, classes the easiest solution to manage, scale and use and has the most straightforward affordable pricing, but you don't have to take my word for it. Zoom is the top-rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2 Crowd and TrustRadius and you can see for yourself sign up for a free account, not a trial, just visit zoom.us. And speaking of connecting people there, you must check out CultureAMP, the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand, and act on employee feedback from onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more. The platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you. And that's why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAMP and it enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact,”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I have to say, I did just love having Eddie on the show there and some fantastic stories. And if you'd like to hear more from Eddie, you can on Twitter at Eddie Liu. Likewise, it'd be great to see you behind the scenes here on the 20-minute VC. You can find us on Instagram at hstebbing's 1996. Again, a big hand to the wonderful Greg Bettan Elliott upfront. For the intro to Eddie Ste. So appreciate that. But before we leave you today, you told your standards are too high. Well, the league is the app that tells you to keep them that way. They know your time is valuable, so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you plus even better, your profile will only be seen by people who match your preferences. Matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn out games. And they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. I have to say I am a big fan and you can apply now by downloading the league on the App Store or heading to the league.com. And speaking of products that I'm a fan of, you must check out Zoom. The fastest”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I couldn't agree with you more. That must have been a humbling experience going back to them. At what moment in your life has served as an inflection point and change maybe the way you think?”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The one thing I would change about VC is just if you already have it in your mind to not understand the market or not understand the sizing, don't keep asking out your I couldn't agree more. I think the most valuable things your time, so I think that's pretty inconsiderate. But I do have to ask given the many rounds that you said there that you've been through, what would be your biggest fundraising advice to maybe an angel investment in the early days who's kind of starting out on the fundraising journey? What would that advice be?”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And you give me your immediate thoughts. In about 60 seconds or less, how does that sound? Right. Okay, Eddie, your favorite book and why. So I read Crime and Punishment in Junior High, and it's haunted me ever since. So not sure about my favorite, but it was the most impactful for me just because when I read it, it was just like, wow, you can get away with murder. But the mental anguish that you have after, when you hear the dead person's beating heart everywhere you go, will consume your mind. So I've been a good citizen ever since I read that book. Wow, that really is an effect on you. Tell me, what would you most like to change about Silicon Valley and VC? Harry VC is like you are great, but sometimes it can definitely be a multi-year waste of time. For GOAT, I've had big-name investors, many of them who have been on this show pass on me for the Series A, pass on me for the Series B, pass on me for the Series C. Every single point, it's the same exact thing where they're just don't understand the market or scared of the market size.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And so, what we did was we responded to every single customer service message, apologized, and just told them that we're going to make it right in the future, that we're trying to build a great business. And to be honest, at this day, I would have done it a thousand times over, even though it was so painful, because that was the true inflection point of the company. Can I ask, that really is a tough time. How do you deal as the CEO with moments like that where shit really hits the fan personally? Is it a meditation? Is it a run? How do you deal with those moments? We just hunkered down and just focused. I mean, it was a tough time, but we knew the customer experience and customer journey was the one thing that we could try to salvage. And so all of us literally were on the customer service lines for the next five days answering every single message possible. And that's how we got through it. Yeah, no, I love that. In responding to every message, that is quite a task. But I do want to move into the final element being the quick fire round. So essentially, I say a short statement.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Crashed our site every single day. I mean, we didn't cache pages, we didn't optimize queries. So our site load was really bad. And imagine that day of Black Friday when 100,000 people tried to get access to these products. I mean, we had a few thousand customer service messages. People said they skipped work, they skipped school, they were on the checkout page, waiting to check out because they thought they had a chance at these shoes and ultimately only a handful of people won. So it was so traumatic because we had people just hating us. If you look at our Instagram, I can send you a photo. I took a screenshot. There was a comment, a second just saying, F, Eddie Lou, F goat, this app sucks, etc. And we didn't know what hit us. So it's funny that day Greg texted us and was just like, hey, is everything okay? And we were just like, no, not really. But he told us something that was really important. He said, it's better to be hated than unknown.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We sold something today. So that was still painful times. And you fast forward a couple months later to Black Friday of 2015. Our head of marketing sen, he was just like, hey, guys, let's do a Black Friday campaign. And naturally, we said, sure, try anything. So what we did was that we decided to discount all the hot styles of 2015 to retail prices. It was about a dozen or so styles, the Yeezy Turtle Doves, the Supreme Fives. And, you know, they were selling for $500,000, $600 on our app, but we discounted it to retail prices around $200. So little did we know, the whole internet thought we had thousands upon thousands of pairs of these shoes, but being a startup, we had much less than that amount. But every influential sneaker blog picked up the story, hype beast, complex, heist nebide. They all wrote about us. So that week leading up to Black Friday, we had over 100,000 users sign up.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Moving from kind of purely online to adding the retail element, how does it fundamentally affect your margin structure? Well, for me, I don't think it impacts margin structure too much because while their store overhead, if the store is in a class A location, it's no different than spending money on Facebook marketing. Instead of spending it on digital ads, you're spending it on rent and having a physical showcase for your product. Yeah, no, I love that. I do want to finish it. And before the quick fire round, I want to ask about a story that many of your investors cited being Black Friday. You've said to me before that you should always learn from your failures and see them as opportunities. So talk to me about Black Friday, the failure and the subsequent learning and opportunity that you experienced. Yeah, so we launched Go in July of 2015. And to be honest, we still didn't have product market fit yet. I remember there was a day in late September. It was 6 p.m. We didn't even sell a pair of shoes yet. And I went in and secretly bought a pair of shoes so that I could tell the team, hey guys.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Omnichannel in the future. I mean, sneakers are a very tactile experience, and people want to feel the shoe, wear the shoe, even smell the sneaker that they're buying. So it's one of the few commerce categories that I think actually makes sense to have physical retail stores. Yeah, no, I can agree with you more. In terms of explaining that decision to the investor base, was that a difficult sell? It actually wasn't because Flight Club has been in business for 13 years. They have such an iconic brand. And when we talk to them, we've been friendly with them for a few years. And we were all digital. And for them, they started in brick and mortar retail. But they were looking to invest a lot more in digital and technology. So it just made so much sense because we wanted to get into retail. They wanted to get more into technology. Each person had what the other person wanted. So there were just so many synergies that when we discussed it with the investor base, it just made sense to join forces instead of compete against each other. Can I ask, in terms of the margin structure,”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Ceramic tiling, but really it was just us taking those pictures in our office with a one by one tile. So it was just kind of hacking supply to get from zero to one. No, I absolutely love that. Switching sides to the table, though, to demand, again, Paul said, early marketplace demanded is dependent on existing distribution and offline activities. Again, would you agree with this statement? Yeah, I agree. It's a lot easier when existing distribution exists. People were already buying and selling sneakers, both online at places like eBay and offline at sneaker conventions and at brick and mortar consignment shops like flight club, which we merged with earlier this year. So for us, we're taking that and just enhancing the experience through technology. You mentioned that flight club. I'm really intrigued. What were your motivations for taking goat offline? And how do you explain a very controversial decision like this to the existing investor base? So with Goat, we were 100% digital before the merger, but we knew we wanted to become”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And just think about how to bring trust and safety to alter or enhance existing supply. Can I ask, having scaled supply so successfully, what advice would you have for maybe other marketplace founders looking to scale from zero to one on the supply front? So we did it with a very hacky solution, and you have to do unnatural things and unscalable things in the beginning to get from zero to one. So in the beginning, we were the only seller since no seller would want to list on code because we were unknown. So what we did is that we went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of different tiles. So you see you have like the wood tile, those one foot by one foot tiles, the wood tile, the ceramic tile, the aluminum tile. And back then we still took seller photos and the seller photos showed up on the app. So we would use the same exact product, but just replace the background tile when we took the photos. So it looked like we had a bunch of different sellers in homes with wood tiling and”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Sense when you do make the pivot there, you have to have the incredibly tough conversation with investors. And a real question for me that you clearly did so well. At existing investors, as you said, raise $7.7 million there with Grub with us. How do you get existing investors back on board for the new vision that wasn't maybe what they originally bought into?”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Element from maybe a more data driven perspective, what were the leading signals that you must acknowledge before pivoting at their certain kind of data points?”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, no, I love that. I actually have Marco from ThumbSack and Adrian Aoun on the show from Ford recently. And they said that it's this kind of ridiculous misnomer that you have to have this overarching vision to start a company. And that actually there can be a framework and a real kind of process to coming up with the initial idea. Would you agree with that or do you still kind of”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And I have to admit, Eddie, right now upfront, I am as massive Goat fanboy, so I do have to put that one out there. Thank you, Harry. Not at all, but we mentioned the founding story with Goden, and I spoke to many of your investors. Greg included, who suggests I discuss the pivot with you. So with that in mind, a real fundamental question for me always is, how do you distinguish between passion and vision for, in this case, maybe grub with us and the mission ahead and then the realization when something's not working? How do you manage that balance?”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “None at all, but I want to get a start estate by discussing a little bit about you. Now you went from Wall Street to 99 cent apps to Japanese desserts of all things to goat today. So talk to me a little bit about this and how you went through so many iterations before that aha moment with goat in a very succinct three to four minutes.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Eddie, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Huge thanks to the wonderful Greg Bestonelli at upfront for the intro. But thank you so much for joining me today, Eddie.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2C and Trust Radius and you can see for yourself sign up for a free account not a trial just visit zoom.us and speaking of connecting people there you must check out cultureamp the platform that makes it easy to collect understand and act on employee feedback from onboarding surveys to company wide engagement individual effectiveness and more the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that's why companies like Slack Nike Oracle and Lyft all trust culture amp and it enables leaders to make better decisions demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge so put your people and culture first and find out more now on cultureamp.com but enough of these dulcit British tones and so now I'm thrilled to hand over to the incredible Eddie Lou founder and CEO at Goat.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “You told your standards are too high. Well, the league is the app that tells you to keep them that way. They know your time is valuable, so simply tell them your preferences, and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only be seen by people who match your preferences. Matches expire after 21 days, and so there are no drawn out games. And they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. I have to say I am a big fan and you can apply now by downloading the league on the app store or heading to the league.com. And speaking of products that I'm a fan of, you must check out Zoom. The fastest growing video and web conferencing service providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration enabled conference rooms and persistent chat all-in-one platform plus it's the easiest solution to manage, scale and use and has the most straightforward affordable pricing, but you don't have to take my word.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We are back for Founders Friday here on the 20-minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings at H. Stebbings 1996 with 2Bs on Instagram. And there you can both suggest guests and questions to future episodes. It'd be awesome to connect there. But to our incredible founder today, and I'm so excited to welcome Eddie Liu, founder and CEO at Goat. The largest marketplace in the world for buying and selling authentic sneakers. To date, Goat have raised over $97 million in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including Excel, Index, Upfront, and include angel investments from Elad Gill, Ashton Kutcher and Alexis O'Hanian, just to name a few. And prior to Goat, Eddie probably has the most fascinating of backgrounds, including founding a chain of Japanese dessert stores. Yes, Japanese dessert stores, building a slew of different 99 cent apps, and started his career on Wall Street with Lehman Brothers and Deloitte. I do also owe a huge thanks to the wonderful Greg Bettanelli at Upfront for the fantastic intro stay. I really do appreciate that.”

    2018-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source