YouSaid · the spoken record

Larry Liu

lines on the record: 92
first: 2024-03-18
most recent: 2024-03-18
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

“Dad once said, I'm the luckiest person in the world. Because he went through cultural revolution. He didn't have the opportunity to study. So he felt like my generation was the luckiest generation in China. And among those people, I was the luckiest person in the world. So I think luck has a lot of impact or maybe it's the destiny. Hard work is a given. So to me, I feel like maybe the hard work and the talents are just necessary, but how high you can go, how far you can grow really has a lot to do with the situations you are in, what happened to you, what people you met, and you can loosely say those are all luck or fate or destiny.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“US, but it's kind of this thing chose me to do it. And I was lucky enough to assemble a team that are passionate about solving this problem. So it's an amazing feeling. It's the feeling that you felt like your life is meaningful. You were brought to this world to do something that's meaningful. That's a really good feeling.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very amazing that we were able to do what we did. I asked myself this question when I listened to your show all the time. I said, okay, what made these people successful, right? My summary after listening to so many episodes is I think each of them were uniquely positioned to see the opportunities that they saw. It doesn't mean that they were the smartest people or they were the best problem solver. They were uniquely positioned to see the problems and they did something about it. So in a sense, you can say they chose to do those things or you can say history chose them to do those things. So it's kind of how I feel, right? I feel like looking at me, an immigrant coming to this country, I had no idea what problem I was going to solve here in the”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I use this analogy when people ask me that question. I said when we were small, we were kind of like, let's say a basketball team, right? We were playing with other. Basketball team. Then, when we get a bit stronger, we start to play, say, national college basketball, then we become a bit stronger, we play NBA. Which one is harder? Is it harder to play NBA? Is it harder to become NBA championship or it's harder to play a regional player? I think it's always harder when you raise your game to the next level. So all the success we had basically only earned our ticket to play the next game. And the next game is going to be harder. That's how I felt. I felt it's definitely harder than the early days simply because we have bigger vision. We have bigger dreams and we are competing at a different stage with much stronger players.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a very important expansion of the concept. I think for a startup business, one of the biggest challenges you can have primary market fit among a small group of people. How can you have a pro market fit with a bigger group of people, right? Eventually, any startup who wants to grow to a bigger company, you have to consistently tweak your offerings so you have the bigger and bigger product market fit. So for us, we accomplish that by expanding to more ethnic communities that share the same struggle, same problem as the Chinese.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the problem Chinese immigrants were facing was not unique for Chinese immigrants. It's actually the same for every immigrant group. They're the same. They are even more underserved than Chinese, right? For example, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indians, they face the same thing. It's a very, very diverse group of people. They're not just Latinos. They are very diverse and they all want to eat their own food. They all want easier affordable access to the food they love. That's when I started to feel like, oh, this actually can be a lot broader, much bigger business and can have much broader appeal. So we start to expand to other ethnicities to solve the problem for more than just the Chinese people.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that immigration actually changed the demographic shift of the US completely before 1965. Only people from European countries can more freely immigrate to the US. For example, people who were born in China before 1965, the quota was 100 per year to immigrate to the US. So that's why before that there wasn't many immigrants from Asian descent or Latino descent in the US. But that immigration act changed everything so people from Asian countries, Latino countries started come and by about 1980 all these offline brick and mortar ethnic brick and mortar stores start to emerge because there were enough immigrants to support some offline ethnic stores. So after I read the history, I realized”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, in the process, I ask myself why nobody was doing online Latino food delivery. So I started to remember I'm a student of US history. I learned that actually there was a very important piece of legislation past Congress. It's called the Immigration Act of 1965.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was very hard. So we had to add capacities constantly, meaning warehouse capacities. And wherever there's a warehouse, we just couldn't wait. We have to get the warehouse and move in to that larger warehouse immediately. And by moving the warehouse, we actually did not shutting down the business not even for a day. We shipped today's order that we put away the inventory, we disassembled the shelves. Then overnight we move the shelves and inventory to the new warehouse, we reassemble the shelf, put the goods on the shelf and deliver from the new warehouse the next day. And people from our community, they really appreciate what we did because they were like, okay, this is the only place we can actually get the products.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But that year was really surprising. The week immediately after Luna New Year was even higher than Luna New Year So we were like all surprised how could this happen. Then we knew just by reading the data that, oh, our community, people in our community is probably worrying about the virus.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Lunar New Year every year. Was always the pick right for us every year. But the week after Luna New Year was the really worst week for the first half of the year.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were not profitable, but we didn't burn a lot of money either. So without burning money and we're all 2.5x year over year, it was a good result.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we call it we points. So we give you some we points that can be used as cache for your next order. Basically, this is a way to acquire users. Other e-commerce companies spend probably $50 to $100 to Google and Facebook to acquire a new user. Instead of giving the money to Google and Facebook, we leverage our communities. We give our benefit to our customers. And it's much more authentic and our customers appreciate this kind of incentives. And they genuinely recommend we to their friends.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So WeChat was our main user acquisition channel. We did not have money to do any advertisement. So we had to rely on word of mouth. So the foundation we built during the group by days paid off because we still had those groups, right? We still had those group leaders who in each of the groups, there were hundreds of people. So they just Help us to advertise to those customers say, Hey, now we do delivery. And so we develop a feature we call it order share feature. So for example, if I place an order, I would be prompt to share the order with my friends. Usually people share into WeChat, right? So guy, you are my friend. You saw in WeChat that, oh, Larry just purchased these products. Click the link to get a coupon. So after you click the link, I would get a little bit money back as incentive”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there are aspects. They are Chinese mostly first generation immigrants living in the US. A lot of people have been here for some time, but their most comfortable language is still Chinese and their diet is primarily still Chinese food. So, in terms of language of choice, almost all the customers we had at the time prefer Chinese language over English language when they order food.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to grow every month, and our model. Work. So, our model did work. So the growth did happen. I remember summer of 2017. We were only doing $100,000 a week in sales. Year and a half later, we were doing half a million dollars a week in sales”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So the thing that did keep us motivated and hope very high is the moment we pivoted to this new model, the business started to grow. Started to grow very steadily, even once a week delivery people start to embrace that, right? Also, couldn't really have any hiccups in the process, right? Months we had to rise to a different level. Otherwise, the capital would try out.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, barcop was lower. Our warehouse operations, we have very few people. And from day one, we knew that we couldn't do the on-demand delivery. Because on-demand delivery is so expensive. So we did what we call schedule delivery. That way we can aggregate a lot of orders and we can do the route planning. In the beginning, we only delivered once a week. Then as the demand pick up, we started to do twice a week, three days a week, five days a week. Until 2019, we finally was able to do seven days a week delivery.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compete on price by being more efficient. Our purchasing price was definitely higher than these larger Supermarkets pay for sure. So we could never compete on the purchase price. But what we could do is we could run a more efficient operation.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is when our own experience as Chinese immigrants comes in, right? So every day we just gather everyone What do you guys want to buy? What other people are selling, but we don't have what do you guys want? We basically just ask our employees, what do they want? And we felt like if we serve ourselves well, we actually serve the customers well. So I think that is a very important advantage for us. We are serving people just like us.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I worked in the freezer, in the cooler, sometimes I was in meeting, for example, then someone in the warehouse came in and said, hey, Larry, we need you to receive the order because you are the only certified forklift driver. Still on site. Everybody went out to deliver, so I had to stop the meeting, go drive the forklift to get the pallets from the truck and receive the goods and then come back for meeting.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had about 30 to 40 people, including all the warehouse workers and drivers. So very small already. And everybody had to do everything. I remember every day around 11 a.m. I would come to the office and say, okay, everyone drop everything we're doing. Let's go to the warehouse to pick orders. So everyone picked orders for two, three hours every day. And in the afternoon, we do deliveries. So I deliver a lot of orders. I delivered more than a thousand orders myself. Because I had to figure out how to do delivery, how to write the software, how to design the driver experience, and how to figure out the delivery part. So it was a very, very tough period of time”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had to lay people off because all the people that were their job whose job was to recruit group leaders, we had no jobs for them. So that was pretty tough. I remember flew to LA. I had to deliver the news. I said I'm here to close down this site. And it was really, really tough.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely under $100,000. So I discussed with my wife and she was very determined, she was very supportive. Wizard together, we said, okay, let's do this, let's sell the house. And so we can Can't have our personal finance in order for some time.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had two houses. We lived in one, we had another one. So I was making very little money still even after I raised the 7.6 million dollars. I still made very little money from we.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had no other choice. So I'm really appreciative what Gold War did to us. That's kind of the cost we have to pay by not able to realize our ideas in the first time.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I think I tried a couple new pitches to new investors. Obviously, I expected no one believed me because the old idea didn't work. We had no credibility that the new idea would work. So my only hope was to turn to our existing investors. I pitched this new direction. Our investors were highly skeptical, of course. And I'm really appreciative that they decided to put in some capital, partly because they want to give us a try, partly also because otherwise all the investment they put in just Went down the Three co founders, we also put in some capital to show that we had faith in this new direction. So with that, we were able to raise a little bit of capital from existing investors.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe that to become the go-to grocery shopping app, we cannot be more expensive than brick and mortar stores. Had that belief very early on, maybe because the Chinese communities, people in that community is very price sensitive. We knew that no one wants to pay 20, 30, 40 percent more to get the product delivered to their home. We couldn't follow the InScar model because that model will More expensive than you buy from brick and mortar stores. So we had to create a new model.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So once I realized making Group buy better is not the solution, then I asked myself, what is the ultimate solution? So, I think the automatic solution is to deliver the food to people's home. And we have to dramatically expand the selection to cover not only the hard-to-find exciting products, but also the more staple products that can be found in Asian supermarkets It's very, very different from what we knew how to do. So we have to completely change the business and restructure the team.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's the right thing to do or not. So he said there are two ways to look at things. One is, is this the right thing? The second... You ask yourself Are you doing it right? So, if it's the right thing, And you are just not doing it right Should not give up. You should try to find a way to do it right. However, if it's not the right thing, Should not try to make it better because it's not the right thing. You should stop right away. You can never make it right. So I think deep down, I knew that I couldn't summarize as well as he did. But deep down, I knew that Was the right thing to keep”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After I started I start to understand this word faith Meaning of this word. You know, China, most Chinese people don't believe in God, right? So when we grew up, we never occurred to us or nobody taught us about this word. But I started to develop. Own sense of faith So I felt okay, since this is something I'm really passionate about, I started it. So I'll do my best. I'll give my all and let the outcome to show itself. But I'm not going to question so much every day whether I should continue or not. So I start to develop this faith. And also. Didn't know this. I knew this later from a very wise mentor from me. I asked him the question. I said, when should I give up? What's the criteria? If I pursue something, he said, it depends on”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fundamental reason why people were doing these group I's in the US was actually not because it was fun. It was not fun. The fundamental reason people were doing this was because they couldn't have easy affordable access to the food they love. I remember that's what I felt like the fundamental problem people were trying to solve using these group buys. But it was not the right solution. It was not the best solution. The best solution is to address the issue at its core, which is to give Chinese immigrants easy, affordable access to the food they love. That's the most fundamental problem we need to solve.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's probably the darkest moment of my life. We were running out of money. Couldn't do anything about it. Like many things, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For the first time since I started, Had a lot of time to think. I try to replay everything in my head, what went wrong, what started as something really promising, how come it went horribly wrong. Also, read some books. I reread Sam Walton's book. I read the IKEA story during that time. And all of a sudden, I don't remember which day, but I started to realize what was wrong about our approach. Try to make this group by thing. Work better”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So it was a rainy day. I probably had something on my mind, so I didn't pay attention and I slipped and hit my back on the stairs. I couldn't get up for a few minutes and it hurt really badly. But I didn't think much of it. I just went back to my hotel room. The next day it hurt even more, right? So I went to the hospital and they found I fractured three bones around my spine. So my co-founder then just took me to the airport. I was flown back to Wuhan. My parents lived in Wuhan, so I stayed in my parents' house for a whole month laying in bed and couldn't move.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said a bit different things. So US investors said, oh, this is a social thing, a Chinese thing that we don't understand. Chinese investors said, oh, this is in America. We don't understand what's going on in America. Although it seems promising, but we don't know about America. So, yeah, I had no luck. I couldn't raise any money from Chinese investors either.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was not absolutely convinced that much I know, but I wasn't giving up because from the very beginning I started the business. I always told myself, I'm not going to be the one who shut it down. I will give my last ounce of energy to make it work, right? So we were in danger. So I didn't give up. I couldn't raise money in the US. I thought, oh, maybe I can raise money from investors in China. So I flew back to China. I tried to raise money from Chinese investors.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think partly the momentum was slowing down a lot, partly most investors couldn't understand. Phenomena most investors couldn't understand why people would buy things in WeChat groups. It's just something sounded so absurd, right?”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less than $1 million left, and we needed cash immediately. So I was trying to raise money. Again, I'm good at coding email and cold calls. So I reach out to almost all the investors I could find in the Silicon Valley. I remember just driving up and down Sand Hill Road like every day, right? Meeting investors. But I had no luck to raise money in the U.S.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly people. So we had to hire business development people. These are basically people to recruit group leaders. We also had a small warehouse. We had people who have to deliver some orders. And we didn't think hard enough about the business model. So we didn't try to make money. We just thought, oh, you know, we just grow the users and we can raise more capital. And then with the more capital, we have time to figure out monetization.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking back, we were doing the exactly wrong thing, which is when something is not quite working in a smaller geographic area, which we try to make it work in more Area, right? Wider range, right? So we were, oh, maybe we need to find more group leaders outside of California. Maybe we should try to bring it nationwide and even internationally, or maybe some people do group eyes in Singapore or Australia We didn't know what to do. We just tried to bring it to a wider audience hoping to sustain that. Gross or momentum, but that didn't work at all. So, yeah, I was trying to raise money also by the time by mid of 2017, we were running out of money. We had less than one million dollars left.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the time we thought, oh, it's not so hard to start up a company. Stories were like, oh, you raise some money, and then boom, you became a huge success. That's what we expected. We just kept doing. We didn't really think a lot about the more fundamental things. We just, okay, let's just keep doing what we're doing. But then all of a sudden things start to slow down. It felt like we couldn't find enough group leaders and the growth just very quickly slow down to a halt. So by early 2017, we were really feeling the pressure that the growth was a lot slower.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, more than like 99.5% of the users actually use Chinese language on our application. So almost all Chinese immigrants.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, C funding, we were able to raise that. Amino was not from Code, was also from a customer who used Wii. So you see, like our seed round was all from the husbands of customers, so we were very lucky.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I went to all the early stage investors website. I tried to find their email. If I couldn't find their email, I tried to guess their email and just send a bunch of cold emails out.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not going to give you more money. You need to raise the rest to prove that you have the ability to raise money. Just do code email and code phone call. That's exactly what I did.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, yeah, hotmail, right? I grew up using hotmail. So I was like, wow, that's huge, right? So I said, yeah, of course. So I went to his office. When I walk into the meeting, I felt like he probably wasn't very interested in the beginning. But two hours later, he committed to write the first check we ever received, 250,000 dollars because he really liked the scrappiness and the creative ways that we approach this. I also asked him, I said, but Jack, his name's Jack Smith. But Jack, $250,000 is not enough. I want to raise more than $1 million. Then he taught me a lesson, right? He said, look, Larry, raising money is the most important skills a CEO needs to have. So”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't want to raise money until we achieve some scale. So my first investment actually came to us. She reached out to me on WeChat. She said, do you want to talk to my husband? He may be able to invest. I asked him who is your husband? She said, he's one of the co founders of Hotmail.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. And because we add value to the group leaders, so we basically pitch to the group leaders, hey, you don't need to organize group bias all the way. You can use our software. You can create a very simple HTML five page. Then you just send the page to the group chat and people can click your link. People can place order on the link. We also help you find suppliers. So once one group leader sign up, hundreds of users in that group became our users, right? So we had this pretty strong growth engine in the beginning.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We made some money when the wholesalers didn't want to deal with the group leaders. For example, I remember one of the things we sold really well is pork belly. You wouldn't imagine we can sell pork belly this way, but you walk into any American supermarket. You cannot buy pork belly. They just don't sell pork belly. Then during wintertime, Chinese immigrants make sausages. They need a lot of pork belly. So then we talk to a wholesaler. Pork Valley, we say, okay, do you want to sell to these groups? And they said, No, we don't want to sell to these groups. But we can sell to you. Say, okay, then you sell to us, we resell to the group leaders, right? That's how we got into like handling some of the products ourselves. So we start to have warehouses we can just be the intermediary between the wholesalers and the group leaders.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But for minivans, we don't make any money, right? We basically turn around and just tell the groups that, hey, here's the deal. It's a way for us to attract users. So people, oh, see, oh, you can buy minivan in such groups. We love pianos. You know, we talk to like Yamaha piano. We talk to Kauai piano. Chinese people like to buy pianos, sold a lot of pianos that way.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT