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

“For minivan, for example, we just call all the Honda dealers in the Bay Area. We just call, hey, we can have an order of 20 minivans. What deal can you give us?”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For group buying, we didn't set to just do food because people were buying different things. People were buying pianos together. People were buying minivans together using our application. So we wrote the first version of software. Using our own money that we made from the eBay business. So we gained traction very quickly. So we released the software. I remember it's January of 2015. Mid 2015, we had tens of thousands of users already using our software to organize group buys.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we wanted to create a different type of e commerce experience. We felt like there were two important components. One is it's a social thing. People buy together. So that's why WE means social. Then the second thing is people were super excited. And I have three kids. And whenever they slide down a slide, they were like, we So I thought, oh, that's a very exciting sound. So that's why we picked this name. So we want to create a company that's social and exciting.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I think deep down, by the time we had three kids already, so we didn't just have one kid. We had three kids. It's expensive to live in the Bay Area. But we felt like, I think it's important my wife and I are very aligned all the time is that what kind of life we want to live, right? What kind of adventure we want to have? So we were aligned that we wanted the opportunity to do something significant and meaningful. So we were willing to take the risk together.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife still had a full time job, I think by the time she probably was working at eBay or LinkedIn, I don't remember which one.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't quit my job because I didn't have a green card. So, in 2014, I was very fortunate that I finally got my green card. So I quit my job in September of 2014. When I quit my job, we still had no product at all. We didn't write a single line of code yet for the group buying thing.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So living in Silicon Valley, obviously everyone was familiar with startups and raising money. I remember at the time I knew that my background was not strong enough. I'm not this whiz kid from MIT or Stanford. My track record was not impressive enough to raise money. So we decided to run the business using our savings from the eBay days and to self-fund the business until we see significant traction, then we can try to raise money. That was the thinking at the time.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't know how to make money at all. So, first of all, I saw a lot of pain points in the group buying process. The organizers had a lot of work to do. And they didn't make any money, so they couldn't just do this as a volunteer for very long, right? So our initial idea was, okay, let's create a platform to solve these pain points, to make order super easy to find vendors for the group leaders to enable the group leaders to make some money. And by making them match, we can also make some money in the process. That's what we thought we could do. But we didn't think through the business model at all in the very beginning.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, I saw this happening in many different groups, right? Not just this one group. And also I talked to my friends in other cities in the US. People were doing this in Boston. People were doing this in Seattle. So Chinese immigrants were doing this everywhere. My eBay experience taught me something about e-commerce, right? My understanding of e commerce was always it's going to be a search-based model. What I mean by that is as the customer, you have to know exactly what you want. So I thought that is a completely different e-commerce model. This really intrigued me because this is something new. Like, no one was doing this. So I felt, wow, this could be a big opportunity.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so she named the prize roughly how much per pound and the Pacific plughouse like 10 to 20 pounds each. So she asked, okay, do you guys want any? So people just text in the group. I want one. I want two and just more than 100 people sign up very, very new to me. So I was very surprised to see that. And it was like just incredible. And then after people got the fish, the whole WeChat group exploded again because everyone loved the fish. They said, wow, this is the best fish I've ever had in the US. When can we buy again? People posted recipe, posted pictures. It's just such an incredible experience.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you guys want to buy together, I can actually ask the fishermen to go out and catch the fish and then deliver to our local community. And then in one night, right, she got an order of like $10,000, like hundreds of people.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember in 2014, early 2014, seemingly overnight, WeChat became super popular among Chinese immigrants. And WeChat in the early days allowed you to add people to groups without their consent. So not only I was on WeChat, I was added by my friends to So many different groups. For example, I was in this attitude, like a San Jose mom's group by my friends. And then I saw something really interesting. I saw people were trying to buy things together in those groups. I remember one night a mom in the group posted some information. She said, oh, I went to this harbor called Half Moon Bay. There was a fisherman's market, right? She said, I talked to this fisherman because I really like the fish, the Pacific Black Cod.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was able to get Chinese food, but I had to drive like 20, 30 minutes to a Chinese supermarket. The closest American supermarket Always one minute away from me, right? But the closest Chinese supermarket was like 30 minutes away. Quite inconvenient.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Carol is just this amazing author. So he wrote Lyndon Johnson's life more interesting than a novel, right? And also the complexity of him is really fascinating. I felt like by reading the book, I felt like I was living the life. And also, I think Carol basically wrote the entire US history from like the 30s to the 70s, right? I remember Any character that appeared in the book. It was a huge chapter about it, right? Sam Rayburn, Dick Russell, people I have never heard of and were not known by probably non-Americans at all. But I was able to learn their stories as well”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started to read books when I was 25. So in 2005, I started to read a lot of books. I actually listened to a lot of books. I Business books. I like entrepreneurial stories. So I also start to get interested in U.S. history. I really like Robert A. Carroll's The Years of Lyndon Johnson. That became my favorite.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, correct. We can probably 10 exit if we're doing it full time. Again, deep down, we didn't feel like we created much value.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a business, you have to choose something you're passionate about and you're good at. So for me, I think it applies to your personal career choice as well. I wanted to choose something I'm really passionate about. I also want to choose something I'm good at. And also the third factor is this industry I'm choosing needs to be so much bigger and has a really bright future 30 50 years down the road, right? So e-commerce.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I did. I actually remember exactly which date I had this. Epiphany, it was January 2nd of 2012. I had this epiphany that I really wanted to start my own company and I wanted to pursue e-commerce specifically. I remember watching this video by Jeff Bezos. It was a very early, I think you can still find it very early TAD talk Jeff gave, he made the analogy. He said, oh, now the e-commerce is like the electrical. In the early 1900s, right? So he just basically said e commerce was in the very, very beginning. So I really believe that. So I felt like e-commerce would have a really bright future. And I also remember I read this book Good to Great. So it had this concept called”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we thought this was a fun project, but deep down we knew that this was not going to be something significant. It's a good vehicle to probably make some money, but we fundamentally did not solve any problems or create much value.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I recruited them. So one of them came to the US also to pursue PhD. The other one stayed in Shanghai got his master in computer science. So the three of us, two were in the US, one was in Shanghai. We were doing this together.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, I thought my idea was quite original. But after I did that, I realized, oh, some people were doing exactly the same thing.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. You can still do that today, and you can do like Even more, right? So now there are like cross-border companies. You can actually scrape those companies and list them on eBay.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kept this hobby up fast forward to 2012, I had this idea that I realized, oh, how about just automating the whole thing because it's very easy to write programs to scrape the internet. You can find the price on Amazon of the same thing on eBay, on Walmart.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. I worked for two companies three years each in the finance accounting function after I graduated MBA. I chose finance for the reason which is I need to have visa sponsorship if I want to stay in the US. So I could have chosen marketing, but at the time, if you chose marketing, your chance to get a job in the US was almost nothing because no one would sponsor visa for marketing position.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a scary thing because all of a sudden you are not just responsible for yourself, you're responsible for this human being. I remember I was thinking to myself. Do I teach this child? That's the thing really got me thinking about my own life. Up until that point, I still felt like I was pretty much following the playbook for a lot of Chinese immigrants, just apply for a graduate school here, you know, find a job. Having the child really made me think what I wanted to do for my life.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was decent, it was not insignificant. And I was pretty good at it. So pretty quickly, I became one of the top sellers in the Sacramento area. And eBay even sent me a black. Yeah.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$130 each, right? So I would apply the coupon and then sell them on eBay. And the coupon can be applied to on-sale items also, right? So when they were on sale plus the coupon, you can make a profit.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I bought them either online or in local stores. That's very early days of e-commerce. So a lot of the companies were not very savvy. So they would give you coupons that can be reused many, many times, for example. I remember OfficeMax had this coupon 50 of $250 and can be used over and over and over again. I bought online. I didn't even need to go to the store. They had online. So I bought online. I would, for example, buy two cameras. That's like...”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started to sell a lot of electronics, for example, digital cameras, even iPods, Nintendo Wii. I sold a lot of Dell computers.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned about eBay already when I was in China. So when I came here, I started to sell things on eBay. I remember I went to Costco and I saw this backpack jansport backpack. These backpacks were super expensive in China. And I saw, oh, it's only $15 in Costco. Then I look it up on eBay. Oh, the lowest price on eBay is around $40. So I just bought that backpack and I sold it on eBay for about $40. That was my first transaction on eBay.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you walk into Panda Express, everything was pre cooked. Can choose from like 10 different options. It's just very different. And the closest Asian supermarket, Chinese supermarket to Falsum was in Berkeley, the 99 ranch in Berkeley, which is about two hours away. There was a Vietnamese supermarket in Sacramento. It still took us 40 to 50 minutes to go there. So that Vietnamese supermarket became the place I went a lot.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually had my very first meal there in Panda Express because one of my colleagues the day I arrived, he said, okay, let me take you out to a Chinese restaurant. So we went to Panda Express. I actually like Panda Express food Just different and also the selection is very limited. Any Chinese restaurant you walk in in China, they offer you at least hundreds of choices, any Chinese restaur”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very quiet and very clean. That's my impression. People were super nice and polite. Intel took very good care of us. So I didn't feel like the generations of immigrants from China before me, right? They had to probably went to New York City and got into the basement on the first day. The only thing I felt a bit uncomfortable was about my inability to find the food I like to eat. The only thing remotely Chinese in Folsom is a single Panda Express.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my English was pretty terrible. I remember going to McDonald, I just couldn't understand what they were saying. They asked me a question for here or to go. They said it very quickly, just for hero to go, for here to go. I asked five times, they repeat it, the employee repeated at the same speed for like five times. I still didn't get it. So I had to learn the practical English. And also, when we were in China, the English we learned was like. Know it was British English or something, just a lot of expressions were very different from the American English today.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not much. We didn't make money, we didn't lose money. It was more like a hobby. We never thought, oh, we're creating a business or anything. It was more like, oh, it's interesting. Oh, you can sell things on the internet. It's cool. So let's try it. At the time, three of us actually now they are all the co-founders of We. So that was like more than 20 years ago. Three of us, we were just having fun.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a very small scale. We were just a bunch of kids. We didn't know what we were doing. We were just having fun. We thought, oh, this is interesting. We have never seen this kind of thing before. And there was no e-commerce in China, only each net.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so each now was created by one of the alumni of my university. So they went to campus to recruit. But I didn't apply. Instead, I became a seller on Ethernet. I thought it was fun. So we didn't know what to sell. So we started by just posting putting posters in those apartment buildings, asking people, oh, do you want to sell some used goods? And then people call us, for example, they would call us, oh, I have this microwave I want to sell or I have this refrigerator I want to sell, then we list it on each net and sold those secondhand electronics and appliances.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so 9 11 happened. So the year after the visa rejection rate was extremely high. I don't know if it's true everywhere, but in China, it was extremely high. So my visa application got rejected like many other people in that year.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. I think most kids were. Not like the kids today. They didn't know what to do. When I was a child, I did not know what I wanted to do. So we all kind of followed this pattern our parents or teachers told us, right? You just be really good at school, then you apply for a good college. It seems the past was drawn for everyone. So we, as kids, we didn't really think a lot about what we wanted to do in the future. If you really ask the kids, they all told you, oh, I want to be a scientist, this kind of generic answer, right? So it's very, very different from America where kids from early age are encouraged to think about what they want to do.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. That was the first years that China started to broadcast NBA. So a lot of kids became really fascinated about NBA. And there was not other American sports broadcasting, right? There was no baseball, no football. It was just basketball. So that's kind of our impression of America. And we all felt like all these players were just so amazing and best in the world. And yeah, a lot of people were like me. We really admire those stars.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My legal name is actually Min M-I-N, last name is Liu, but I go by Larry. Started learning English when I was 12 years old so English teacher asks us to pick our own English name. So we got to choose. So I chose Larry because I was into NBA at the time and I really like Larry Bird. That's why I chose Larry.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably the darkest moment of my life. We were running out of money and I couldn't do anything about it. But like many things, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For the first time since I started, I had a lot of time to think. I tried to replay everything in my head, what started as something really promising, how calm it went horribly wrong.”
2024-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Weee!: Larry Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT