YouSaid · the spoken record

Leore Avidar

lines on the record: 58
first: 2020-10-15
most recent: 2020-10-15
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

“There's going to be consolidation over the next five years as more of these companies go public. Once you have that MSA sign, people trust your API documentation, your customer support. They're looking for you to solve more and more of their manual problems internally and automate them. So I always talk about how in the API space, you're either going to get consolidated or you can be one of the companies that starts consolidating. Obviously, to consolidate, you need to have a pretty large balance of cash to be able to go and do that. So again, I think Twilio just went public a couple years ago. You're going to start seeing the next generation and then there's going to be a lot of movement in this space. I believe the next trillion dollar company in 10 years will be an API company, will be an infrastructure company.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love comparing and contrasting right now from Alt to Lob. I talked a lot about in the beginning about maximizing learnings. I feel like I'm maximizing learnings but twice as fast right now. I kind of operate both businesses. I've learned how to be very disciplined on my time, be really good at delegating and trusting others by having those in the focal point when I hire somebody. I'm really honing in on what does it mean to be the right person? What am I looking for? I'm just excited to see how both companies evolve. I want to get Lobb to an IPO state by 2024. And so as that gets bigger, I love being able to buy companies, maybe do some things through M&A. I love financial engineering. Nothing compares to starting a company in the early days. There's a sense of camaraderie from the team, the relationships that you build early on. You're making lifelong friends. Like the amount of friends, and I would consider them close family now that I've made through Lob wouldn't trade anything in the world for it.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love running businesses. Right now, it's a little bit more fluid. I've been doing Lob for so long that it's really my primary focus, and I always want to make sure that I want to take that company public. I want to be able to prove myself that I can do that. Part of starting alt, I think it's two parts for me. One, I want to prove to myself that Lobb wasn't just a one-hit wonder, that I actually have the skill set to do it repeatedly. The second part is Lob, it's like a passion project of mine. Like this is my decompressing from Lob. I plan on doing a lot of A-B testing and even I've actually hired a really strong management team that runs day to day. So this is for me, I'm just kind of shaping the vision. Sometimes I'm doing some of the IC work just because that's what decompresses me again from Lob. It is pretty fluid, but given how large Lob is, it does draw the majority of my attention.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a precious metal has its own utility. This just has a utility in a different way. Imagine the things if there was a pop-up museum in your neighborhood, what would they have to have for you to go and pay mission to? And I'm sure in your head, you could probably come up with a couple of things right now.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the original Mario on Super Nintendo actually the Game Boy. I remember getting that Game Boy back in the day and having an unopened one. Imagine someone gave a kid this cartridge and this kid did not use it for 20 years. The discipline that that kid had to go through or whatever the story is of how this cartridge became to not be opened is really interesting to think about.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And the reason it appeals to people is because it's a part of their culture. And so people want exposure to that. It has to do with storytelling, which is part of our civilization. People want to tell the story of something. And so we are basically a value of stories. I know it's like a really weird thing to think about, but I do think that's very impactful in our culture.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you a glimpse of it. Let's just take ARP. What is the intrinsic value of art? Here's a very specific example the Louvre house is the Mona Lisa. If you remove the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, how much would admissions go down? Again, I'm not saying that they're going to do that, but the intrinsic value of the Mona Lisa is it's basically it's, let's call it like its admission value or its appeal. So if someone were to loan it out, the amount that they would charge for the loan would be should be in the long run equivalent to the profits that they would generate from sharing admissions to it. Technically, every product, and again, you'll have to derive them. There has to be a function to be able to go and do that. Everything has an appeal and the appeal can literally be correlated directly to a value. So I believe that that process that I just articulated is going to be a lot more fluid and transparent in the future. Every product will have a transparent value and people will be loaning them one to one.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think one is that someone will crack the code, and I think I've cracked the code on there is an intrinsic value to collectibles. So once there is an intrinsic value, then basically you can do a GCF and you can price out an asset. So it literally should yield some passive income.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think people are going to start thinking about it as real estate a pure asset class. So when you're going into your 401k, you have your equity investments, you have your bond investments, you have your real estate investments, and then you're going to have these precious metals and physical goods now that are going to be collectibles. So I think it's going to be a staple. Everyone is going to want to have exposure in some way or another to this asset class.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in the early days still. I'm always trying to sharpen skills. I have my skills as a CEO and as an investor. I think marketing is something that I just haven't had time to dive in. And it could be from, hey, I've had a lot of really great people around me who have led marketing. But I just over the seven years at Lob, I have run almost every function except marketing. I find it super interesting. And I think it's one of those things that people don't give enough credit for. Right now, I'm really trying to understand like modern social media. I love product marketing.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is very different. I look for complementary skill sets because at the end of the day, I believe that investors want to be able to help. And so you have to give them room to help. So I'm working with one investor right now. My weakness is marketing. And so I'm looking to learn from somebody else on marketing. So that makes it a really great partnership. I care a lot about kindness because at the end of the day, you're going to be in business for a really long time. You want somebody that you're going to enjoy working with for a really long time. Some of these relationships are longer than the average marriage.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If someone just takes a ton of risk, they should be outperforming the market. But that doesn't mean that they did better. I think a good investor quality is a specific person, I think it requires a ton of discipline. That's probably the number one kind of key quality. You have to remove your emotion. So when you're buying, you have to be very disciplined about your entry port. And when you're losing, you have to know when to exit. I find that really good investors are really comfortable exiting positions, even if they're losing money. I know that a lot of early investors or kind of young investors, they're going to hold on to something until it's either break-even or make money because there's internal feeling that they can't lose on something. Good investors lose a lot. They just know how to exit the position when their thesis is disproven. So I'm reading this book right now, thinking in bets. It's less about the end result. It's about the decision making. So if you have very disciplined decision making in the long term, you're going to have better results. But you can't always wait for the result to happen.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually have a very specific thing, and I can tell a story around it too. One of the things that I realize, and I try to help people understand, is to understand the concept of returns versus risk. A lot of people quote, I made 40% this year and 40% on the market beats 7%. But was that fund manager better than the S&P 500? You don't know yet because you're missing out some other information. The sharp ratio, which is a financial measurement that a lot of people utilize, but what it really does is it tells you the amount of return you did for a unit of risk. If a fund manager took the same amount of risk that the S&P 500 did and outperformed it, that is a good investor because for the same unit of risk, they got a higher return and an objective manner. I always want to look at how much return per the unit of risk that they took. That is like my single metric that I ask people that helps me evaluate if someone actually did better because theoretically”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly for something to be collectible, there has to be this standardization of what that collectible is because if it's so unique, then it's really hard to put a collection together and you need this competitive nature for something to be a true collectible. The video game cartridges is a really good example. Someone else can build a set. So you can try to go and get the equivalent of a investment grade set. I think Vintage Books is going to be something that people are going to be going into. collectible wines art has a very unique thing because it just always evolving in our culture. So I think art is going to consistently be there as well. I think shoes is going to be a really big one in our culture.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think trading cards in general are all going to experience explosive growth. I think video games, again, the nostalgia factor.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, technology is just how you build out your product. So technology companies solve problems with software first. A non-technology company solves it generally with people. I think that's the most binary way to think about a technology company. Every time we have a problem, we are solving it with software first. So we are a technology company. If we were saying, hey, every time we need to go do something, let's add more people, then I would say, hey, we're not a technology company. So what you will find is that the makeup of our company will generally skew heavy towards product engineering, data science, as opposed to operations and other functions.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking bets on specific players and setting up a portfolio based on a system of bets that we theme is going to have an outsized return based on the risk that we are taking”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's two parts. There's some things we can't disclose because outside of just having direct beta exposure to the market, we actually have a lot of alpha strategies that generate size returns for us. A lot of people who have heard about my returns, my return over the last five years has been in excess of 150% in IRR over the past five years. And that's due to a lot of arbitrage opportunities. So one is now that we have this alt value, we can buy cards that basically are substantially undervalued in our opinion. That's one. Two, we are basically building out diversified market portfolio. So very much taking things that we've done on Wall Street that have been done on Wall Street. For example, we can't predict who the next hot quarterback is going to be. We don't know who the next Mahomes is going to be, but we have a very diversified portfolio that allows us that whoever is going to win that next MVP or that Super Bowl, we will have outsized returns because we're going to have a diversified portfolio or less.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a really exciting day for Alt. One of the key things that we are trying to change in the industry is we want to be known as a trustworthy company. We take possession of your cards. If you're sending it to our vault, and so I wanted to make sure that people knew that, hey, it's not just that we're taking all your assets, but we have no skin in the game. We went out and bought the most expensive card in basketball history, and we put it into our vault and we said, hey, your cards are right next to our LeBron James card in our vault. That's the goal of that card is for people to have this sense of security and safety and that this company has skin in the game. Besides that, I actually love the card. I think for me, I'm very bullish on the industry. You're talking about buying the card in the industry. And so it's basically buying the Apple if you're thinking if you want to have market exposure to tech. So there was in an investment thesis around it and hey, we want to be a trustworthy company. This is how we think we can provide trust.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be less than 2%, if not zero. So that is good. That's liquidity physically like a transaction cost at the bid asks spread. The bid ask spread right now is 10%. We're going to see that go very, very low over the next year”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of players coming into the ecosystem. I'm really excited to partner with all of them. Our goal is to not be in exchange. We want to be an open platform, so we're providing the infrastructure that allows all these other companies to succeed. I love that Rally Road is securitizing assets. That's a great way to provide liquidity. Hopefully you can take your Rally Road shares and put them into alt and easily. We can have a nice integration with a company like Rally. There's companies like Masterworks who do something very similar for art. I think over the next six months, probably right now, a lot of companies are fundraising to build ideas in this space. I think if people need to find their niche, otherwise they're going to be competing in a space that basically is going to drive transaction prices down. And we want that. So right now, for example, if you buy things on eBay, it's 10%. That is the cost that you have to pay to transact on eBay. I will put a prediction that in a year from now,”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, I call these new fluid business segments. So, even Lob, you can be a developer and send one API request, or you can be a company like Capital One, who's the biggest mail sender in the world, and you can utilize Lob, similar for Alt. We want to power the ecosystem, so we want to provide the infrastructure. So on the partnership side of things, we're doing a lot of enterprise type deals and transactions, but also this is a place where I'm trying to change the nomenclature. Everybody, the fund manager, who is basically collecting cards. And so I want you to be able to go and run your fund on top of Alt. So whether you have five cards or you have a thousand cards, you should be going to Alt because that is your brokerage account these days.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a company called Open Door, and basically we can look at those historical transactions. We can look at how the market, we can create our own version of the S&P 500 for sports cards, and we can actually triangulate what the price based on the data set is of that card. So we basically have a mechanism to go and you can choose any type of card. There is a way to go and price that out by breaking it down into its components. The card doesn't necessarily have to have a data point for us to be able to go and price it.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Lob has a very succinct vision of making the world programmable, Alt has a very succinct vision of increasing the transparency and liquidity of these alternative assets. And so when you think about liquidity and transparency, the first step is transparency around prices. There's a lot of noise in what something is worth. There's a lot of manipulation in this industry. If you go look at eBay sold items, you're going to find a lot of things that either were bought then cancelled because people are trying to bid up one another to just inflate the price. There's also just some false positives. Someone actually bought something at a discount, but then eBay just reports it incorrectly. What is the true price of a card? It's something that we want to clean up. We've been basically going around partnering with different, we call them exchanges in our verifying transactions. So now that we have a set, the world's largest database of verified transactions, we can apply a lot of modern principles on valuation. We have a lot of Quants from Wall Street and people who have been pricing home.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It started with true hobbyists, just like any industry does. So you're trying to people who collected when they were kids kept doing it over the last 20 something years and maybe entered the market because of the nostalgia factor and the sports card world. They just have a genuine interest in the players, the artistic value of the card, the collection. So they're literally trying to put together a collection. That what I would say is the epicenter of the industry. Over time, you're starting to get these hybrid people in who are thinking about it both from like a hobby perspective and from making money that drives in a lot of institutional money. So we have a lot of institutions coming in. You have people who are raising these funds. Alt has a fund in which we buy cards because you start seeing it as, hey, this is actually an investment at the exact same time.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very standardized way to get a piece of something that people grew up in, and now everyone is starting to get that disposable income. So this is where they actually want to pour some money in. The fact that it's also an appreciating asset makes it even that more, I guess, lucrative to go into.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is I think as our society gets more comfortable with gambling on sports, this is an indirect way of actually gambling on players. So imagine that you've been watching Luka Doncic play in Europe and you're like, man, this guy is going to be really great. How can you capitalize on that bet? And anything, every financial security is you're taking a bet. You cannot do that these days. The sports card is the most direct way of actually investing on the upside of a specific player. As gambling becomes more commercialized and legalized, I think this is another alternative way in which people can get exposure to players. The second part is our culture. Every generation has the set of assets that it is a representation of culture and people collect them. That is why collecting exists. And I do think that these cards or these collectibles are the next generation's culture. And so every once a piece of their culture. And so this is”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we just talk about the five that I just mentioned, it's 160 billion dollars plus, and some of these markets are doubling year over year right now. And that's not going into anti-cars or antique furniture or anything like that.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History where something has turned into a financial asset. There has been the stock market in the 70s and 80s, there was FX, and then there was cryptocurrency. I really believe that this collectible industry is going to start turning into a financial asset. So Alt is basically a gateway of people actually thinking about this financial asset”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given that the market value is changing every single day, you're communicating with the insurance company every single day in order to make sure that your fully insured to the market value. So you come into a rhythm of every single morning or evening basically talking to an insurance company. And then the last part is a lot of people have made a lot of money in whether it's art or let's call it shoes or wine. And when it's time that you actually want some liquidity, people want to get liquidity, but they don't want to give up possession. Figuring out a solution for that was something that I got really excited about because I don't want to ever sell my basketball cards, but I would really like to get some liquidity so that I can go and do other things, especially with some of my cards I've appreciated over a thousand X over the last five years. Is there a mechanism? Is there a financial mechanism in which that can happen? So basically I kind of dove into my old days of trading derivatives and leveraged securities and I'm like, okay, I'm going to start thinking about collectibles as this new age financial asset. There's been a couple of times in”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone says something is impossible, or when it's a headache for somebody, I'm going to do that over the last three years, I've run into a lot of problems and headaches that people experience outside of just sports cards, but I would say anyone in the collectible space kind of seeing that headache, I was like, okay, I need to solve it for myself because now I've amassed a pretty large collection of sports cards and a big part of my net worth. I need to do it. So why not solve it for more people? Similar to Lob, one of my big things is why just solve the headache for yourself? Why not solve it for everybody so that no one has this headache ever again? Alt is solving three core pain points. One is that everyone keeps track of all their collectibles in Excel. There is just no easy way to basically have like a brokerage type account for carbs. The second part is insurance, given that these are physical goods, insuring them is a really hard and cumbersome process because there's no one in the market that is deemed expert in appraising. And without an appraising, you're the one who has to define the market value.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so starting, I think when I was like six, seven, or eight, I was really fascinated with sports. I really loved cards. I loved the stats. I loved the art. Again, the trading or the negotiation with my friends around cards. Fast forward to 2016, I got really nostalgic and I was like, okay, I can finally afford buying some of the packs or cards that I wasn't able to afford when I was a kid and I had to save up all my allowance. I started buying cards. Part of it was just kind of the nostalgia factor, but two, I started seeing a lot of different arbitrages. And I always talk about arbitrages in the wild. There's just so many arbitrages all over the world. And I started seeing a lot of arbitrage plays in sports cars. And so 2016, I just started buying them. And I would say early 2017, I became very, very serious about it. Over the last five years, I have a master really large sports card collection. And one of the things that I am known for is that”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you miss out, you're going to start paying for it massively later on. So, I think scarcity even trumps leverage, to be quite honest.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what you're saying with time is like if you need to do something in a short time frame, I think that just generally translates to leverage. So let's just talk about leverage and scarcity. If you have leverage, you always have the upper hand because your best alternative to negotiating antics is always going to be stronger. Because you can just walk away or you might have like a second option. So it just gives you more optionality. So obviously optionality is going to help you in the negotiation side. Scarcity as well on some things I think scarcity works. In collectible scarcity is a really strong leverage because if there's only one thing, and I've noticed this with a lot of cards that I've purchased, maybe I'm negotiating with this person for, and we're off by like $2,000 on this rare sports card in which there's one of in the world. And then I lose out. That next person is not going to sell to me until it's like 2x. All of a sudden, given the scarcity, everyone wants their return, if there's only one thing in the world.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The stigma that you have to be like a hard negotiator, uncomfortable, and almost stubbornness. And I think that's actually not true. I think that's a myth. I find that when you approach it from kindness in both sides, there's a way to negotiate where it's win-win for both sides. I find that when there are negotiators where the other side needs to win, they need to know that you're going to win. It generally does not lead to the best outcome because people don't want to do business with you. And so maybe it optimizes one win, but you got to think about negotiation as the long term. And so you may have gotten one short-term win, but you lost out on everything else because your reputation for negotiating makes it so that no deals come your way. You have to look at it less about a single negotiation, one data point, and more of the holistic nature of all your negotiations. And what is the reputation and how do you want to think about that?”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things I do every single day is I buy and sell stuff on eBay. I call these the ad bats. I probably have the most ad bats of Nicole than most people, but you learn how to negotiate. You see the different types of people out there and you learn the different negotiating styles and how to respond to them. And I would say those reps have basically translated to real business. I remember like early on, I'll use Comcast as an example, unfortunately. People always assume that like, okay, at the end of the month, you have to call Comcast because they overcharged you and you have to negotiate and you have to yell and scream, otherwise you're going to get your way. And I remember like seeing people do that. And I learned really early on from all these at bats that yelling and screaming does not yield the best outcome. Actually, being a really kind person in a negotiation can actually yield higher outcomes. Again, you only learn this by doing a lot of reps and recording what the negotiations were. Again, the tactics I negotiating.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came in, I was looking at what everyone else did in the Bay Area, and I was like, okay, everyone's keeping people for 1.x years. You got to do something different. And so most of the things that I brought into the culture have kind of stemmed from personal experience. So I think one is impact. I remember when I got up to Wall Street and one of my first jobs, I was a trader, they got me this stool and they said, just sit behind me. And I just remember thinking I was super capable. Let me make some impact. And then I remember one day one of the traders Max Yeager was like, okay, I'm going to actually let you help me out. And I think that empowerment, I got really excited. So I want every person, no matter how tenured they are, to always have that feeling of impact. You always want to make sure that people can connect to the mission and really understand. And I talk about this linear story. What they are doing is going to help us accomplish our mission. So that's one. I think the second part is being your authentic self.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem and really thinking about them as partners was a learning curve. And one of those, I guess, pivotal things, both from a culture standpoint and from just a partnership standpoint, that once we realize, hey, we're in business together, let's go and change the world together, we're able to move a lot faster.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physical world part hasn't always been tough. It's more about understanding it. I had no print experience beforehand. You really have to be open-minded to kind of dive into something like manufacturing and understand the intricacies of it. I like that part. So that's like type of challenge that I get really excited about. Like I love learning new things. What's coming to mind just in scaling the company is really culture. I care a lot about culture and culture not only as something internally, but it's externally. It's the values in which you kind of communicate with your customers. It's the values in which you communicate with your partners. And getting those right definitely was a learning curve. I think in the beginning story that comes to mind, we had this woman, Monashika, who came in and we used to call all of our partners vendors. The word vendor was they work for us. It was very transactional. And then when we shifted it to partner, it really shifted our entire mindset as a company as they are equally important to our success. It's not like we can trade them in and out.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the boring thing, the things that no one thinks about that just takes up a lot of time because those things you shouldn't have any mindshare on, but they should just happen. So those are the things that I think about that are just so tedious. They happen every single day. And when you automate it, you'll never really think about it again. So Uber doesn't completely fall into that example. I always think about back office productivity workflows.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always loved Amazon Web Services. I think they're great. Quillio and Jeff Lawson. I always look up to them in the work that they've done. Laura, as I mentioned, my peer shippo, I think, is a really great business. I really love, when I say making the world programmable, I really specifically like the software that actually interacts with the physical world. So I think there's still so much opportunity to honestly make some changes there or maybe make an investment or opportunities to start new businesses. But those are probably the ones that just come to mind right away.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually were able to float people, and so we've turned this into more of a software expense of the post to what people have thought about as something different.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were going to do 100,000 mailings. We made you pay for the 100,000 mailings up front, and I would say that optimized really well for Lob. We had SAS, but what it didn't do is it created a really negative experience for customers because at the end of the month, if they didn't utilize all of their mailings, they felt like we owed them something. It's almost like back in the day about these rollover minutes. I bought too high of a plan and I want my minutes to roll over. So then we started really thinking about, okay, if people are going to see it that way, maybe even though it's better for Lob, our North Star is always building what's best for the customer. Let's actually figure out what do we do that's best for the customer. So we said, okay, we're going to keep the license fee paid up front because we need to make sure that we can invest in the business long term. And then on the usage side, we'll actually charge the customer at the end of the month when they actually have accrued all their usage. It's like pay as you go, which is what they're used to. And it's actually better than commercial printers because commercial printers made them pay the day of.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Models, we actually separate it out. So, what traditionally was all inclusive pricing, we separate out a license for our direct mail pieces, our license for our product, and then the purely commoditized product. And therefore, when they looked at, hey, USPS charges 45 cents, they see that we are charging 42 cents, so we're actually cheaper on the commoditized products. And then on technology side, they're like, oh, these are the value-added services that if you went to a traditional commercial grade printer, they wouldn't be able to offer you. And these are the differentiators that's why you're coming to love. So not only are you getting cheaper print and postage, but you're actually getting these value-add services. And then I can have a really productive conversation with the end customer on, hey, do you actually find use in our value add services? And it's okay if it's not, but now we've separated it and we've quantified it and we've qualified it. That's been the business model for the second, third, fourth variation. I mean, it's more about like how we've actually priced that out. So beginning, we actually made you commit to everything up front. So it was just pure SaaS.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a dichotomy. My big thing is, I like simple pricing and I want to price it in a way that customers really like. And then I also want to price it in a way that's going to create a sustainable business. So in the early days of Lab when we started, it was wanted simple pricing and it was all usage based. So in the past, people priced out print and postage separately. There was always these labor charges. So our big thing was going to be all in one pricing. So I remember we started off a dollar for just a single page letter, 60 cents for a postcard or whatever it is. And so that was kind of like the usage-based model. And what we learned from that is that everyone always asked us like, hey, you guys are charging 60 cents for a postcard, but when I go to USPS directly, it's $45. Why are you guys more expensive? So we always were perceived as the more expensive solution. And that was because we provided all these added services on top of the commodity product that people didn't appreciate or weren't able to connect. So the next variant of our price.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale. I think what's relevant right now a lot of people are talking about the delays about USPS. And I was actually talking about it with the CEO of Ship O'Laura, who's one of my good friends. And Shippo does all the packages, big market share of actually producing labels, so they track packages. Lob obviously has all the data on the mail pieces and the letters. Everyone is asking us, are there actually delays? And both of us look at the data and we're like, there are no delays. I think the sheer scale that USPS operates in, no one really understands how much mail they are delivering every single day. It's way excess of 100 million. When people are talking about the election right now, is the Postal Service going to be able to deliver all the ballots? They do that every single day.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimized for speed, so we print it as close as we can to that destination. But this routing engine is basically, it sits in front of our, we call it like our print delivery network. Once it gets routed to a printer, it's basically a print ready PDF. They're basically doing their own version of control print at a much higher scale. They print it, they insert it, and then they basically hand it off to USPS, and then we have a direct partnership with USPS that allows us to extract metadata as that piece of mail goes throughout the system so that we actually have the insight, just like you do with a package from FedEx as mail actually is going out through the world. One of the cool parts about LOB is that we live in a very data-driven world and direct mail was not data driven in 2013. And so we had to build all the infrastructure so that people can actually think about this channel just like they do any digital channel.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always talk about leveling up. So we've leveled up many times over the last seven years. So we went from a home printer to what we'll call a local mom and paw printer to then regional commercial grade printer to now public company printers. So now we actually have deep partnership with commercial print partners all over the world. They are experts in basically the manufacturing of print and mail, and we are the experts at software. And so we have built software that actually sits on some of these HP Indigo presses, iGens in conjunction with these print partners, we are basically helping them route the mail. So one of the things that we created is this print delivery network. And so the way it works is an API request comes in. There is software at Lob that takes in that request. And there is a lot of different dimensionality when a request comes in. Was it black and white? Where is it going? What kind of content is there capacity at which one of our printers? And we basically figure out who gets that letter. And so generally we're trying to”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's critical because that's how you actually get growth. Growth is actually getting customer feedback, responding to that customer feedback, and getting that loop to go over and over and over again.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my big things is I optimize for learnings over making perfection. I actually think in the early days, you want to maximize learnings, not to maximize being perfect. So actually making mistakes in the early days is a key part of growing, just having that mentality. The reason we did everything ourselves is we want to understand the intricacies. We want it to feel the problem. So when we were actually building out the solutions, we were building it for ourselves. So growing responsibly in the early days is actually taking ownership of the problems so that you have the customer empathy as you're building out the product and turning it into software. I think a lot of people start over optimizing and immediately building with a scalable state solution is and not going that organic iterations. For example, at Lob, we've had four different business models on pricing. It's important to get that first one out, even if it's not perfect so that you can start getting that customer feedback loop. So I always preach, growing scalably in the early days to grow scalably, you need to get that customer feedback loop going really, really early on.”
2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source