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

“Well, you know, I was asking myself that same question. I immediately said, okay, well, like, why am I doing this? Like, I'm not doing these sports.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think REI. Think like there's a climbing wall in the store. They've got great selection. The salespeople are knowledgeable. The salespeople do the sports.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My co founder, Matt, had had this idea like five years earlier for a like what was called the category killer retailer for extreme sporting goods. Because what he observed, he grew up in Santa Barbara, and he observed that these sports, you know, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, they were exploding in popularity. Think about the X games and like, this is like the clothing brands everybody was wearing. And Tony Hawk and all these things. But if you're going to carry, you know, 300 surfboards. And a thousand skate decks and BMX bicycles and all that. Like you need a big footprint store. And we looked at it and like we were looking at retail in this time and saying, well, everything seems to be either be going online or is becoming really experiential.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, pagers were going out of style. People didn't need them anymore, but yet every city was blanketed with infrastructure to do two-way paging. And we said, well, if you're always losing your keys or your car or your whatever, couldn't we put a GPS chip and like a pager radio into a small package and let you just keep track of where things are? And this was in 2000. The thing locator. And so we did a bunch of research, and what we found was that the power requirements of both of these things, GPS and the pager network, would be the form factor of this thing would be pretty large. And so, like, you wouldn't put it on your keychain And so while I'm sure we could have pursued some other things like, well, you know, trucks or whatever, we kind of abandoned the idea because the original problem we were pursuing was more for personal use.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you brainstorm, you'd say, Well, if a business needs to acquire new customers, can Bluetooth solve that problem? Well, I remember my favorite one. Called the thing locator. And the observation was that you had pagers, you remember pagers like doctors would have? There's always doctors and drug dealers, right?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might allow us to go solve some problems. So you brainstorm the web or at the time it was like Bluetooth or GPS or all these different technologies. So a long brainstorm of that. And then we narrow it down to the most promising ones. And then the really interesting part was you did a matrix. So you get on a big whiteboard and on the horizontal axis, you would write all of the new technologies. And then on the vertical, you would write a bunch of those problems.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you brainstorm, okay, well, like they need to acquire customers, they need to accept payments, they need to do marketing, they need the security, they need all this sort of, they need to get their store online, all these lists of things that they might need to do. And then at the end of this process, like we spent a few months, maybe like a month, and we had a list of like a thousand ideas of problems that needed solving. Okay, then we moved to the second phase of this. Which was okay, let's brainstorm new technologies that are emerging.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there's nothing else. Okay, so we spend the first week brainstorming different groups of human beings that might have interesting problems. Doctors, small business owners, single parents, you know, teenagers, whatever, like just groups of human beings that when you think about them might have problems. Okay, so we come up with Different groupings of human beings. And then we rank which ones we thought were most interesting or most promising areas to go explore. So once we settled on like the top five, like small business owners, then we brainstormed what problems do they have.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I grabbed one of my other co founders from Versity or one of our, actually one of my key hires at Versity. And we came out this guy named Matt Levinson. So we moved out in the middle of winter. And by the way, this is desolate. Like there's nobody in the Hamptons. We would order packages on Amazon so that the UPS truck would come and plow the road for us.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I'm like, well, that sounds nice. And so I move out in November, middle of winter. And it's kind of this old beach shack. Like it sounds great, like the summer home in the Hamptons, but it was like this old beach shack with very poor electrical infrastructure and everything else.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Kevin O'Connor, who was the founder of Double Click, who had invested in my first company, I was in New York and I was having lunch with him one day while I was still working on Stubhub. Know, he said, what are you doing, or what are you thinking about? And I was like, you know, I'm not sure I'm going to be long for the subhub idea. And he said, well, why don't you move to New York and we'll start a company together? And I said, okay, like doing what? He said, I don't know. Let's brainstorm and come up with an idea. He's like, why don't you go find another entrepreneur that you really respect and move, you can live in my summer home in the Hamptons, which is like empty most of the year. And we'll just brainstorm a bunch of business ideas and we'll come up with something”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. But, you know, I just, it was sort of like what just happened, right? We had this whole internet bubble. It burst, and no one was really like it felt like nobody was. Like, you know, manning the door. Who's in charge here of this internet now, right? If everybody agreed that revenue didn't matter and now suddenly it does That's a harsh transition, but one that you look back on, you're like, well, of course. Like, how long can companies go without having any revenue before you start to ask questions about the business?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. You know, I remember conversations with some of the employees because we moved down to San Diego and people were kind of moving at various times. Right when we get down there, they basically start saying, Look, we have to lay off basically your whole company. And I was like, are you serious? So, like, yeah, we've been burning $50 million a month or some ungodly number. And now that we're not going public, we don't have the money. And so we've got to reduce our burn immediately. And so they said, you need to go talk to all your employees and play them off. And it was just devastating. I mean, Talking to folks and having this whole thing unwind so quickly.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we went from nothing, being college students, to like raising this small round of friends and family investors to now having this thing that's going to be public and worth hundreds of millions of dollars in about two years of just furious like 22 hour days, not because we had to, but because we loved it, because it was like the time of our life. And then we get to college club. And they move us from Silicon Valley down to San Diego, which is where they're based. And they filed to go public in April of 2000, but the market has basically just closed.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And think about it. Yeah, 21 year, I don't think you're really thinking about mansions. You're more like, that's a lot of like subway or something.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think when it was the expected value of their IPO, the number was even much higher because, you know, the numbers they were showing us were like, this is going to be worth, you know, a few hundred million in a few months, right? So we're all saying. Hey. Wow. Wow. Look at that.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think they were paying like when they took their whole marketing spend and they divided it by the users, they were paying something like $50 to acquire a customer. And so that's a lot of money And when you took the entire cost of operating our business, including paying these note takers, we were like a dollar. Acquire a customer that was so much more efficient. So they approached us, they said, Look, you know, we've got this community. Why don't you join up with us and together we'll go public and we'll obviously like make a lot of money because public companies are like, you know, to the moon and you're going to help us bring down our costs and we'll keep scaling this thing together. So we did it.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, so we were all about academic content. And I remember there were these other companies at the time who were like social websites for college students, but they were not based on academics. They were based on like just social things. And one of these companies was called College Club.com. And I, you know, I said, I remember at the time, I'm on the record as saying there is no purpose for a social network for college students. Because college is the ultimate social network. You don't need to go online for it, which then later came back to bite me when Facebook became one of the largest website, right? But so I made this bold declaration. Well, meanwhile, the college club company, they had been acquiring their eyeballs. They were in the eyeballs game too.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, we kept building more capabilities into the product, but never once was the conversation about, and we're doing it to make revenue. Was always about more eyeballs, more hits, more page views. And in the course of that, we made a total of about 26,000 dollars of revenue in the lifetime of the company.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“11 million, and they said, You need to move this to Silicon Valley. So we picked up that whole office. On Friday, everybody was at work in Ypsilani. And on Monday, we were all at work in Silicon Valley. And just picked up going out here and we then expanded from, I think, the 10 campuses that we were on to 50 the next semester. And then after that to 200.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Ypsilani, this town right outside of Ann Arbor. Where the rent was like negligible. Like we paid nothing. And we had first a small office and then bigger. We ended up taking over a whole floor in the key bank building in Ypsilani.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. Our parents were horrified by this whole thing. Like, you know, why aren't you finishing school? You got to become professionals. You know, you got to be doctors and lawyers. And that's what their generation really valued was those professions. This idea that you drop out of school because you're making something on the computer, right? Seemed kind of foolish to them. But, you know, as we got more and more traction and as like, you know, there were stories written about us in newspapers. And, you know, we're raising money from investors. I think they started to come around. And I remember we opened an office. We had an office in.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, because at that time, this is like 1990, maybe eight at this point, like every dentist and every, you know, everybody is being told you got to invest in this internet thing. And so people just throw money at us. And so we raised a million dollars and we expand from like the University of Michigan to, I think, the Big Ten. And then we raised a true venture capital round of financing. Again, we're still basically full-time students. And we raised, I think, $11 million And that sounds super small by today's standards.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we raised first friends and family rounds. We raised money from people we knew and Kevin participated and a few other folks like that. And that was while we were still full-time students. We raised about, if I remember, a million dollars.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and that led to a meeting actually the following week. Where I flew out and Michael flew out, and we met with Kevin in his office. And he kind of says to us, look, you know, this internet thing is like a once-in-a-lifetime event that's occurring around us. And sounds like you guys are working on this interesting thing. And you have the whole internet. Why are you focused in on like, you know, a one square mile radius of potential customers? Like, why don't you go use the internet for what it's good for? Which is scale But to do that, you need money, so you should go raise investors are throwing money at internet companies. Why don't you go build a real company here?”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like someone had to take the time to actually go there and tape it up. That person was probably standing right where you are, and it makes it all very human and like small scale in a way that we don't actually get often these days”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we so the sweet spot where these courses, you know, that like every freshman and sophomore had to take the one. Yeah, right, because you'd pay You paid the note taker the same amount of money, but you had either dozens of potential buyers or thousands based on which classes you picked, right? What we started doing is we got a little smarter and we put up flyers around campus and say, Are you an Econ 101? We'll pay you for your notes. And it was like every week”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That to me was the why we were doing it, right? Like we actually didn't care that much about like lecture notes. It wasn't about the lecture notes. It was about the challenge of figuring out how to do these things, really.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, great question. If we gave him away for free, which was the prevailing business model of the internet, which is everything was free, and put advertisements on it, well, then really the sky is the limit. And if you think about what people were talking about in terms of internet businesses in that era, it was eyeballs. It was page views. It was hits and”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're saying, well, why should you walk across campus in the snow, remind you, this is Michigan. To go pick up after every lecture to get a copy of these notes, when the internet, you could just sit at your computer and download it seems like an ideal use case for this thing called the web. Why don't we just pay note takers to put their notes online? And so we started this as just a very small idea. We had no idea what we were doing. I remember we came up with a brilliant name for it originally. It was called Notes number four.com. So notes. Mind you, this is like 1996. We could have had any domain we wanted. Google was available. And we picked.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we looked around at a variety of things that we could do and realized that there was on every campus there were these lecture note companies and they were often run out of a copy shop like the local copy shop where they would hire a college student to essentially drop off a copy of their lecture notes after every lecture and it was this little cottage industry that seemed to form up around every college campus and we looked at it and we were like, well, when you say...”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you know, funny thing happened. I get to college. It's the fall of 1995. And, you know, most people, when they go to college, the thing they're most excited about when they first get there and get dropped off by their parents is like, oh, well, you know, party or you're going to go find some alcohol or, you know, go start dating and go to whatever. And I'm like, there's a fast Ethernet jack in my dorm room. This is amazing.”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 aren't dummies. They're smart. Like, maybe they're right. Maybe we're on the wrong track. 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. See what happens”
2023-04-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT