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Leore Avidar

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58

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2020-10-15

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2020-10-15

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1

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1. “Fulfill that entire order within a weekend. That was like our first big break 30,000 mailings was over $30,000. That was a lot of money to us. That was like a big step level. I would say that was one. There was another one that probably happened within six months. But one time a company called Ubiquity, Ubiquity Networks, the public company, messaged us and said, hey, we are planning on launching this really big thing. Can you guys do X, Y, and Z mailings? And we're like, sure. And they're like, we're in South Bay. Can you come and kind of give us the pitch? And I feel like back then, anytime someone said that, we just, because we were working with so many startups, we didn't really give the, it never hit us in the head that this is a public company. We were just thought like we were going off to an office with 15 people. Lo and behold, we show up and it's literally a public headquarters like Ubiquity Networks. So that was our first really big deal. We had worked with a guy named JT Beck then and really kind of created our first enterprise offering.”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I'll give you a couple. I remember when we were starting off in the early days, and me and Harry really took the notion of fake it till you make it and just hack it together. So we were printing everything out of our apartment. So API requests would come in. I would check the database. I would go and print it. We literally would cut it with cutting tools and then we go to like mail it off. But there was this company in 2013 called Benefitter. I wonder if they're still around. And they were like, okay, they sent in an APR request for $30,000. So this was our first big break, but because it was the first time that we couldn't print as much and get it out within our SLA. I remember we actually attempted it, which was kind of funny. We went and we printed out 3. We timed ourselves. We were like, how long is this going to take us? Okay, we can't do it in a week. That was the first time we partnered up with a woman named Paulina in a company called Sir Speedy in the South Bay in California. She printed it out everything. And when we learned about insertion machines, and basically we”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Exactly. I always talk about there's this black box, there's an input and output. So the input that we take, we take content in the form of HTML and an address. The black box does everything that you need, and then the output is at a physical mailpiece actually ends up in a mailbox. And Talob does all that black box stuff. And you don't care. That's the magic of the API. All these companies, that magic is what's their secret sauce at.”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yeah, so basically, an API is a workflow process. Instead of doing something manually, it allows developers to actually get code, which is basically their skill set. It provides them a tool set to automate the workflow. So an API takes something that was generally manual. So let's just take physical mail. Imagine that people are actually taking an envelope, putting in, printing, putting a stamp on, taking it to the USPS. What an API does is it's a programmatic way to do that entire process so they can send instructions to some sort of service or system like lob and lob can do it completely for them so they can send us the instructions and then they still get the same exact result but they don't actually have to do the entire process themselves”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Really love sales and I love marketing. I think when you hone on what your product does, at least what an API does, I always say it does two things. So for a developer, an API can help them solve business problems faster. And so when they solve business problem faster, it allows them to, one, accelerate in their career. So that was like one really big value prop that I always pitched. And then the other one was just time savings. And for me, time savings meant, hey, you can go and solve this business problem faster so you can go and spend more time with your friends and family. And that really appealed to me back when I was 24. I was like, I want to go spend more time with my friends. So I can go and automate my job and then I can go and spend time playing NBA jam. And so that value prop saving time is the superpower. I always thought that now the developers have their kind of this tool set and just always imagine the Home Depot example, like literally developers have literally this belt and they're pulling out all these different APIs as they go and do construction on a problem. And I just really wanted to be that tool belt. That's kind of what.”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “And he kept telling me how to send out these really large direct mail campaigns, it takes them between 60 and 90 days, managing the partners was a really cumbersome process. Sometimes I even did it internally and brought in help. And I was like, this makes no sense. At Amazon, we have an API that if I want to send out a million emails, I write a Python script and it sends it out. You guys are Microsoft. How do you guys not have a tool that sends out direct mail at scale? And that was really like the Light Bulb moment. Wait a second, if it doesn't exist, maybe we can build it. And I remember we were so naive, we could sell it to Microsoft for $8,000 and then we can start playing live video games. That was the goal. It wasn't the company around it. Let's automate the work that you're doing so that we can play NBA Jam. And I think that's kind of where it got started when we started looking at the market and we were like, hey, if Microsoft has this problem, I wonder if everybody else has this problem. As soon as we started realizing everyone had this problem and specifically like enterprise customers, we applied.”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Origin story of Lob really started from my experience at AWS. I was like, This is going to be the future. What other tools exist in the market? And I remember looking around and there wasn't much, vaguely remember seeing Stripe and Y Combinator. It wasn't called Stripe back then. And then there was Twilio raising their series B and they didn't really talk about APIs. So I was like, okay, I got to do this. I got to figure out an API to build. What problems are people facing that can basically show people that I can go and build an API company? At that time when I moved to Seattle for Amazon Web Services, my co-founder for Lob Harry already lived in Seattle. He was working at Microsoft. He was doing a lot of product marketing for Microsoft. You know, remind yourself that we were 23, 24 when we started the company. Our goal every single day, we wanted to do really well in our job is also to come home and play video games most of the day. So there was this consistent pattern, I think it was maybe like February, March. Harry was not coming home at a reasonable time. And I was like, what's going 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

8. “Yeah, excited to dive in on everything. So, yeah, the journey to start lob is actually a long one. When I grew up, my dream job was to combine engineering and business to create this machine that would just trade all day long so that I could go and travel the world. So I started my career on Wall Street. And I remember when I was at the desk at Citigroup utilizing my engineering skills to be very transformative and progressive. And everyone kind of just kept telling me to just keep doing what I was supposed to be doing. I've always played around with a lot of new technologies, came around to this service called Amazon Web Services in 2010, 2011. And I just fell in love with it. I ended up going to work there. And I remember when I got there, I was like, wow, I'm in the business of selling superpowers to developers. This is going to be such a big thing in the future. Developers are finally going to be a front office of a company as opposed to what was considered back office or IT. Kind of the genesis.”

   2020-10-15 · Invest Like the Best · Leore Avidar - Creating and Selling Superpowers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.3] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source