YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Lawson

lines on the record: 83
first: 2023-04-03
most recent: 2023-04-03
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

“I think we're all a product of our environment. So much of what we know or have the opportunity to do or just Problems that we end up getting visibility into or having the resources to go solve them. I mean, these are all things that are a product of like How we were raised, when we were born, where we were born. And so you can seize those opportunities or not. But the first thing you need is those opportunities to exist for you. So, I definitely feel tremendously lucky to be born. Where and when, and all sorts of things. And I don't take that for granted. I take it very seriously, that we have an obligation for those of us who have had opportunities to use part of our time and our money on this planet to try to create more opportunities for more people.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I actually think that instead of having a formal office in a city, what you might want is like a thousand square foot coffee shop. It's only for employees, you badge in, but it's like, hey, I work from home often, but I need to get out of the house. I need to concentrate more. I got to get away from like a distraction at home or I just want some energy around me so I can go to a coffee shop. And like, you know, for a few thousand square feet, like you could have one in every major metropolitan area or even every neighborhood in some major areas and have enough employees in those areas to be able to justify the cost because they go in every day. And I think that combination of like the showroom, the destination off-site space and the coffee shops ultimately will solve the problems of like why does the company need physical places? I think it's those three problems.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second is you need off site space. If once a quarter employees are traveling from wherever they are to meet, wouldn't it be nice if they had an experience that felt like your company? Those are like regional. Like, you know, you can have one in North America. That's where teams do their off-sites. And by the way, if everybody's doing this, it'll be cheaper than renting a hotel every time. But the third is my favorite. The third type of office space are coffee shops.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenge is to get there. I personally believe that the future of a company like ours, I think that the company's offices are going to consist of three different types of locations. I think you'll have, number one, like a showroom, the place where you bring customers or like recruits or like a place that looks really fancy and nice and people are looking, but it just looks like your company. It's a physical manifestation of your company.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like face to face interactions, like I think most human beings do, but I do not think we need to have it on as regular a basis as like the nine to five office used to have us doing it. And so if I have to pick, which as a CEO, I basically do, I am picking a distributed company that as we work through the phases, we'll be able to get together on a regular basis in teams or divisions or departments, have fun together, break bread together, and then break up. And so if I have to pick, that's what I'm picking.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our headquarters is in Soma at the beginning of the pandemic. We had, I think, three buildings in San Francisco. And today you look at those offices. They're about low single digit percent utilization.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the hard thing is when you go extended periods of time without the ability to have that face-to-face. And the challenge that a lot of companies are having in the current environment. Because you see, there's a lot of startups that were born during the pandemic. Were purely distributed because, like, look, that's all you can do during a pandemic. And I think their cultures are probably doing fine. But then you've got a lot of companies that have a big investment in real estate. And those companies, you're saying, I can't afford to carry all this real estate that people don't want to go into and afford for people to travel everywhere to go see each other. I got to pick one or the other because I only have so much budget.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who have never seen a high interest rate environment in their career? And that created a whole generation of entrepreneurs and workers and investors too who are accustomed to like revenue growth, future opportunity, all that. And suddenly you look at it and you're like, oh, actually, current day profits are highly valued. And that's the change that the whole industry, especially in tech, is going through. And that's a difficult transition because our muscle memory is so oriented towards the last 10 and 15 years”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The eventually part that changed because the eventually became, well, now it's like a lot closer to today. And that's what makes this period so hard. Now this happens, this is a business cycle. This business cycle happens all the time. This is not the first time we've been through one of these cycles. But the one thing that's different is the last business cycle, the boom time, the low interest rate environment went on for a pretty historically long time. So there's a lot of people in the world.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then they're much more likely to want to put their money into a more speculative stock like a tech company. But once the savings account is making five, six percent, whatever, in a higher interest rate environment, you're like, well, now I'm less likely to take risk. That's why the equation of tech companies that are going to spend a lot today to go build market share. And if you remember, like the internet is a massive market. And so for everybody who's building an online business, you're like, I've got billions of people who are my potential customers. There's tremendous amount of entrepreneurial activity. I'd be a fool not to invest as much as I can in go building my market share today for this enormous market we're in. And that's what people have done. But once you change that story and say, well, actually, the profits that we said will eventually give the equity value.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, overhire is a simplified way to talk about it, but I think you have to look at the root cause. But the end result is like, yep, if you have to let go of people, it means you hire people that in retrospect you wish you maybe hadn't hired. But the reasons why are more interesting. When you are operating in an environment where Interest rates are very low, meaning an investor can put their money into a very safe account, like a savings account, and make nothing.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, right, you'd be like, this is a bunch of BS. Like, why am I doing this? And so if you look at a stock price on the day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis, you're like, this is completely disconnected from what I'm doing today. What new information exists in the market on like a Tuesday afternoon when we're not reporting earnings about our company's future profit potential? There's no new information. So what's causing the stock price to move? I don't know, a bunch of stuff that's not in our control. And so in order for you to actually believe that you have agency over the outcome, you have to ignore the short term. But you also have to believe that in the fullness of time, the activities we undertake do affect. But that plays out over years, not over minutes, hours, days, or even quarters.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, everything Gaia is about timeframes, right? If you look at the stock on a hour by hour or even day-by-day basis, I kind of liken it to imagine you were playing in a basketball game. But the score did not go up when you made a basket. The score randomly changed. You know, you're dribbling up the court and you get 10 points. And then you make a shot and you lose five points. It's like a random, like the score is disconnected from the thing you're doing. Would that be a fun game?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember saying, like, look, you know, this company is not about one customer. We've got tens of thousands of customers, and we're building this for an enormous opportunity that's far bigger than just, you know, the activities of one customer. And I think that was the right way to look at it.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a budget owner somewhere who's spending now millions and going on tens of millions of dollars on our services with the very least have to know that person really well. And that was the transition that we had not really made because we were taken a little bit by surprise when Uber one day said, you know what? We actually want to use less of your services. So it was a bit of a tough transition for us. But I remember standing up in front of the company the day after that happened. And the company, we're a newly public company. I think it was our third quarter reporting as a public company. Everyone was like, well, what happened? Like, I thought being public was just like, you know, up to the right.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know there's a sense in certain customers, especially like very technology driven companies, that they're like, like, yeah, we don't want a salesperson. Like, we just want, just leave us alone, just give us a service. And, you know, we don't need to talk to you. And like, I'm a software developer myself. So I can understand that mentality. But at some point, like a customer gets big enough that you're like, first of all, someone in that business is signing the check every month. We need to know that person And even though the customer was saying, we're fine, we're okay, we don't need you, and we had assigned our sales resources elsewhere, the mistake we made was saying, no, we needed to be walking the halls. We need to be really working that account”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it actually didn't worry me. You know, our business model is usage-based, right? So when a customer sends a text message, it costs a very little amount of money, but like those things add up over time. And what results from that business model is that a company like Uber, when you get in in the early days, as they expand, our revenue expands. But in some ways, like when a customer's growing so fast as Uber was during those days, you look at it and you're like, do I want my company to actually become just like the Uber story? Not really. Like I've got tens of thousands of customers at that time. So they were growing to be like, Actually, a problem. That's not something to celebrate. That's actually something to worry about.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A carrier sized company, that's a miserable failure and shut that thing down. We don't have time for that. And that's the natural advantage that every startup has over incumbents in the market. And we saw that innovator's dilemma just play out time and time again inside of the bigger companies while we went about building this. And now today, we're approximately $4 billion of revenue. But like, you know, that's a 15-year journey. And that's the nature of that creative disruption.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inevitably, like the carriers, they weren't dummies. Like they saw this trend of APIs and developers and innovation. They saw this stuff happening. And inevitably, almost every carrier in the world that I can think of in that era, in those early days of like 2010, 2011, 12 built an API on top of their services and launched with great fanfare their developer platform. And every one of those carriers within twelve months had shut it down. Why? Because it didn't immediately pass their bar for like, well, is it making us a billion dollars revenue? And if it's not, we don't care about it because it's not moving the needle for our big company. And that's the advantage that every small company has. It's like when we were, our first year, we made $200,000. Our second year, we made $2 million. For a startup, that's a huge success story.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it was interesting because one of the early questions we got from investors, they said, well, won't carriers do this? Won't AT&T just do this? Know they could, I guess. But, you know, people always overestimate the ability for a big company. See an emerging market like this and actually invest in it because it is in its early days, small peanuts compared to the scale that those big companies are operating at, right”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wearing my twilio shirt and just handing out tacos. And I remember I closed down that taco bell. There was a taco bell in Oakland that was still open at that hour. And I went out, I pulled into the drive-thru. And I said, how many tacos do you have left? I said, I'll take them all. And she literally turned off the open sign. That was a very gorilla approach to how to reach the world's developers. And we really had to develop that. But I think I benefited actually from a lot of the gorilla marketing that we did in my college campus for versus... A lot of the similar things. Like, you're just getting to where your customers are and like screaming from the mountaintops and whatever the most relevant way is.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, in those days the notion of like anything is possible with code was really permeating the world. And so you had these hackathons. And they were happening all the time, like every weekend, every college campus, every major city. And we were right there, and we made sure to go to every hackathon. I remember one of the big hackathons in San Francisco was going on. And it was happening over a weekend. And the hackathon organizers got wise to this. They started charging a lot of money to sponsor it Like, oh, you want to sponsor our hackathon? Great. That's $50,000, right? And so they started getting wise to it. So I remember I showed up at one of these hackathons at 2 a.m. with about $700 worth of Taco Bell.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all of the people who founded these companies and were building these companies would just come over for a beer. And, you know, at some point, it wasn't just Uber, I would say, but it was the sum of all of that entrepreneurial activity going on in our backyard, who were almost all of them, our customers that started to really propel the growth of the company, especially after we added text messaging, which was the service. This new whole category of mobile apps that was getting born really needed. And we were the one everyone turned to.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing back at it, Uber, it was not clear that Uber was going to be such a big deal, right? Because at the time they were like town cars. It was like fancy. And Uber, when we won them as a customer, I think the whole company was about five people. So it's very early in their history. But there's a funny thing. Like I look back at that period of time, 2011, 2012, where, you know, Uber was a few blocks away in that direction and Airbnb was a few blocks away in that direction. And the floor above us was Instagram. And like we would throw like an office party on a Friday evening.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I have always taken from my entrepreneurial endeavors, because most of my companies, like we did not have a lot of money. And so in the early days of Twilio, we set about, we said one of our values is be frugal. And sure enough, I remember we hired our first software developer who was not a founder joining the company, a guy named Adam Bellai. And I remember Evan saying, hey, Adam is great. We really got to hire this guy. But he wants a salary of like 100K. And I was like, whoa, you know, the sticker shock of like paying someone that much money when, you know, the founders had made nothing and then we gave ourselves a meager salary in the very early beginning. I'm like, wow, this is like, and I remember telling Evan, like, all right, like we're going to hire him, but like better be worth it, right? And started growing the team at that point. But it wasn't for a couple of years because we just started to stay.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly, you saw this explosion where, like, most apps that you downloaded from the App Store would text you to verify your phone number, or would text you when you order ships or when you have a friend say something or whatever. And there were all these ideas that were coming out of the woodwork of things people had wanted app developers had wanted to build into their apps, but just never knew how to do before, and now they could.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, that was the day after we launched. Like, I'm on the phone with a music promoter at Sony. And I was like, huh, there's like some real business needs are coming out of left and right here. But I remember like, first of all, it was a weird period of time because we launched. And I remember like the day we launched, my co-founder, John, looking at this internal dashboard we had saying, oh my God, like they're paying us, like seeing like, you know, credit card payments starting to come in. And they're like, they actually trust us with their credit cards. They will actually, you know, willing to pay for this. And that's the validation you're looking for. And immediately started seeing it.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember the day we launched Sony reached out. What did Sony do? And you sort of think about some big enterprise use case. Well, it was actually Sony music and there was a music promoter who worked at the record label who was like, oh, I saw your launch post. I want to build this service. There's a band called Lamb of God. It's like a metal band. He said, we've had this idea in our mind forever that we want to do what's called log rolling our customers, our fans where they can sign up to get a daily phone call and the band is going to record an audio from the road. They're on tour. They're going to record their daily update and then customers can sign up and will blast out. The phone call and you'll hear from the band every day.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had this very fateful meeting, I remember, where we said, look, investors have told us we're wrong, that this is stupid. These are smart people. These are dummies. They're smart. Like maybe they're right. Maybe we're on the wrong track. And so we said maybe we should either just give up. Maybe this is a bad idea. All right, let's just go get jobs somewhere. Or maybe we should just pivot and like build one of those apps they told us to go build, even though we're not that passionate about it. And I remember we said, yeah, but our customers like those developers who are early customers, they are loving it. They are building. They are using this. They're launching things and having all these ideas, I think we got to do is like we got to follow through on delivering for those customers and at least get a product to launch.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like meeting so many investors, and they all had basically the same feedback that at the end of that summer We had one investor that was really close. They got it. They were like, oh, the developer thing. I think they were paying attention to AWS. And they said, this is going to be amazing. Lehman Brothers collapses and they're like, sorry, we're not. And so we spent that whole summer and did not have a dollar to show for it from investors. We raised no money. So we're like back where we started. We have no money. We have no investor interest. We didn't even have a bank account. Because you need money to open a bank account, and we had no money.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The financial crisis is in full swing. I mean, they are like, many of them were just like our checkbooks are closed. I'm sorry. We're just not writing checks right now. So horrible time to be fundraising. But the second thing that happened kind of universally, like I go into these investors, I say, you know, we have this idea. It's this platform approach, software developers are going to build these services that use phone calls to go achieve all these business goals and we're going to charge a pay-as-you-go rate to make it super easy to sign up. We'd explain the whole thing and they'd say, well, yeah, I just, you know, it sounds interesting, but like software developers, you know, that's not a market. Like they don't have the checkbook. They don't have buying authority in their companies. Nobody knows how to reach them. Like, no one's ever built a business for software developers before. So why don't you go build an appuild a call center, build something in the cloud and come back to us when you've built that and we'll think about it again. And I remember.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, yep. And so every phone call would be like a penny a minute. And when developers embed these capabilities into their apps and interact with their end users, we're just going to make a little bit of money every time they're used, but those are going to add up over time. So the summer of 2008, we feel like we're rocking and rolling. We're going to go raise our first round of financing. And then later in the year, we're going to launch, and this is going to be amazing So I'm still in Seattle. My co founders live in the Bay Area, but I'm still in Seattle. I start flying down to meet with. And two things happen. First of all, it's the summer of two thousand eight.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, in the early days of a company, the two people you really need to explain yourself to are customers and investors if you're raising investor money. And so we talk to customers, you know, the developers, and they would like, you know, the gears were going. They were like chomping at the bit. Yeah, when can I get access to it? So we started building the early prototype of the service and started giving access to those developers. They immediately started building some really interesting stuff. And they come to us with great feature requests, and they were saying, hey, can I launch this? And we'd be like, well, maybe not yet. This is like super prototyping.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could I send a text message? Because that would be even more convenient. And we kind of looked at it and said, yeah, like, and wearing my consumer shoes, I'm like, I would prefer a text message in a lot of these cases. And then wearing my developer hat, I was like, oh yeah, a lot of those situations that I described before would actually even be better as a text message.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and people did do it via email, but there was sort of like a, it was actually they were coming to me with the idea as opposed to the other way around because they were saying like, if customers are calling me all day saying, did my package ship, did my package ship? Like, we almost forget about the early days of the internet when you would always be wondering when the thing was going to arrive. And it might be like weeks, like, you know, and when people would hunt for like the customer service phone number to call. And very quickly what customers started asking us was like, you know, the phone is the phone calls are great, but what about text messages?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like one of our early customers was Uber. And they came to us and said, well, actually, we want to let you know when your ride's arriving. Can we do that? Which will they always say? Of course you could. And they like a day later rolled out the first version of getting a text message when your car is arriving.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we first had this idea, we talked to a bunch of developers that were just friends or acquaintances of ours, and we said, like, hey, you know, if you had this idea where there's this service that's running in the cloud that with a line of code, you could hit it and you could make the phone ring and you could do all these neat things, would you have use cases for it? And a funny thing happened. The developers would first say, That's a, you know. How about the Mets? And I was like, well, okay, well, maybe this is a bad idea. And then every single time. About a minute later, Would say, Hey, wait, can you go back to that phone thing you were just talking about? Could I notify my customers when a package ships from an e-commerce I know is recently building? And I'd say, yeah, yeah, you could. And they'd say, oh, interesting.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like, hey, we no longer design a product and spend years building it. We look ahead the next two weeks and design the next sprint's worth of work, build that, and then reevaluate. And that's like the nature of agility has really entered not just the software development world, but like the business parlance, which is you're no longer embarking on multi-year projects because those always tended to fail. Instead, you kind of work more iteratively, and that's how you unlock value. That's think about all the apps on your phone. They're getting updated like all the time. But then you looked at the world of like, but if I needed a phone to ring, now we're back into the years and millions of dollars for all this. I said, why can't we fix that? Why can't that just be a line of code? And that was where Twilio started.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would kind of look at it and say, well, actually, you know what is even more problematic? It's like this two years idea. Because what I was observing was that everything in the world is software has gotten faster.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like I remember, I would call, I would say, okay, we want that fancy phone thing. So it'd be like, I don't know anything about that. I'm a software developer. I don't know the first thing about how to make a phone ring. So I called the people who it seemed like they did. Like I call like Cisco and say like, hey, you know, it seems like you people know how to make the phone ring. Like, tell me how thing about doing this. And they'd say, well, you know, it's going to take us two years and cost us about $4 million. But, you know, sign here will get started. And every time I remember having this same reaction, I was like, well, first of all, that's funny. Like $4 million, like, yeah, I'm a startup. I don't have that kind of money. But even if I did, let's say I was some big company.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I saw at AWS was this idea that, oh, now every business can have the most sophisticated technology. The same infrastructure that the giants, that the Amazons and Googles of the world are using to build their business now is available to everybody. And I kind of saw what Amazon was doing because I'd been there and they're doing it for compute, you know, for servers, for storage, for databases. I thought about my set of experiences and I was like, you know what, I would really want it for. It's like, how do I talk to my customer? Bet a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of software developers are having this problem too”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. It was incredibly complex. And, you know, in the skate shop business, I remember I would work in the store. I'd work in the front of house and I'd be at the register and the phone rang all day, every day. And you pick it up. And every time it was someone saying, hey, I got a question for you. Is my, you know, my surfboard repair, is it done yet? And I'd be like, well, okay, tell me your email address. And I'd like, you know, have the phone hunched in my ear with like my shoulder holding it up while I'm typing in a keyboard. Looking up in the system that I wrote whether the skateboard was or the surfboard repair was going to be done. I'm like, nope, it's still going to be ready Thursday. And I was like, why did I have to do this?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've always wanted the things that the big companies have I had always wanted. And I remember like I'm called an Apple store one day. And I got this amazing like, hello, thank you for calling the Apple store for hours, press one. You get the typical thing. And I was like, that's so cool. And how did they do that? Like when you call my store, like someone has to answer the phone and be like, hello. And I was like, how do they do that? And I researched it a bit. It was like very expensive, very sophisticated. Like you have to go buy hardware. You have to go work with carriers. You have to roll out copper wire to a carrier to your to your closet. You got to go buy software. There's people involved who are the experts and you have to.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I kind of float my resume out there to a few friends, and I'm like, you know, maybe I should just go work at a big company. I literally had no experience in a big company. Like I knew they had these big buildings. They had a logo on the top of the building and people walked in at nine and left at five. But I had no idea what people at big companies did all day because as a startup, you're just moving. You're just doing all day, every day. And I'm like, I feel like if I want to be an entrepreneur and succeed in building a great company, knowing what happens in one would be really useful knowledge. By the way, recharging my bank account is another added bonus.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually hate this business. I hate the customers. I hate the employees. I hate the stuff we're selling. And for a software developer sitting in the back of a skate shop trying to focus on writing code, getting constantly disrupted by everything going on, I again had this realization that I'd made the same mistake I made at Stub Hub, which is for some reason I'm building this business without a love for the customer. In fact, I had sort of grown to hate the customer. And I was like, this is a problem. Now, also, I had at this point gone multiple years without a salary. My bank account is drained. I've racked up credit card debt. And I'm actually not even meeting my minimum payments at this point. And I'm like, something's got to give.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, yep. And first of all, going back to school when you are in your mid twenties is a blast. It is like literally the movie old school. And I kept in contact with my co-founder who did actually that summer started building out the store. And I said, great. So when I finished college, I moved back to the west side of Los Angeles and we got hustling to get that store open. So did this thing, got the company off the ground, we opened the store. And we're running this store, this retail store. I'm sitting in the back of the store writing code for this point of sale system. I've got, you know, skate kids who are skating in every part of the store making all this noise with their skateboards because we made the whole store basically a skate park. You could skate everywhere inside the store. And so kids are skating everywhere. You kept hearing these like bang, bang, bang of like the skateboards landing everywhere. The employees are like these young skater guys and they're like running in like, hey, bro, do you know where the size nine shoes are? And I'm like, no, I don't know where the shoes are. I'm trying to write code here. And after a while, I realized.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is where we ran into the fact that retail is a brutal business. Our first store did very well, actually. We put a skate park in the store. Like there was a kids could skate in the store. We had a video game lounge in the store. We had amazing selection, great employees, knew the sports, inside and out. And the store was like the place to be. In fact, we put a half pipe in the parking lot and just drew people in the door. It was amazing. So we said, oh, this is great. And so we raised some more money and we opened store number two inside a mall in Orange County. And it was a dud. And so we had one store that was doing really well. One store that was not doing well. And so the average of both was the company was just basically staying afloat.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“West side of Los Angeles, and it took us a couple years to get the store open, but we finally opened it in basically Westwood and the corner of Olympic in Spolvida. And so I spent the next several years actually building a point of sale system from scratch to run the business on.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Luckily for us, Kevin was just getting into surfing himself. So he sort of understood the market and was really interested in this idea, and so he said, yeah, like I'll be your first funder. Let's go. We're going to move out from New York to Southern California, which is the home of all these sports. Let's open our first door out there. And I'll be your first funding and we'll go find more money, of course, but I'll be your first backer.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, you know what? Starting a bricks and mortar retail business from scratch in the year 2000 and basically this is 2001 at this point Could build whatever technology I want to make this a great customer experience. What would I do? What could we build? And I kind of latched on to that problem being a really interesting one. Again, going back to like, what's a great way to learn new things or discover new technology is just commit yourself to the domain and go figure it out.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT