YouSaid · the spoken record

Manish Chandra

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-02-26
most recent: 2024-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it's definitely luck is a big piece of your journey, but luck is something that has to be married with hard work, but also values in the sense that There are a lot of temptations along the road, and sometimes you do succumb to the temptations. The key is to wean yourself off and continue with your core values. And a lot of times, you know, not given to your fear, not given to your greed, but proceed with love. And ultimately, I think the key to all of this is surrounding yourself with amazing people. I think if you do that, luck, hard work, tenacity, love all comes through that. And I am just blessed to be surrounded by amazing people at Pashmar.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It poshmark 3.0. If posh mark 1.0 was a private company, Poshmark 2.0 was the couple of years as a public company. This is sort of the third phase of Poshmark growth and they're still all very excited about building and growing it.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Neivur has acquired the company and they are Think of them as Google and Shopify of Korea, but sort of they're into many other businesses, they're into AI, they're into robotics, et cetera. And their vision is that they believe the space can be an independent company in the future. So they want to grow this company. And at some point in the future, make it an independent public company owned by neighbor but also public. So the journey we are working on is to grow this business over the next few years and make it into poss 2.0 as a public company. So that's sort of the journey we are on. We launched live streaming in April of last year and it's really growing very fast. The core business is starting to grow as well and we continue to gain market share. So we are sort of feeling a lot of momentum. But the best part of this journey, guys, is that literally all of my team is here with me, still energized and wanting to go, let's call it.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into that. And we're sharing obviously what our strategy is with Naver because we're in confidentiality. And suddenly they actually put an offer on the table. And by January of 2023, we had become part of Naver.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were coming out of COVID, but kind of in a weird, funky way, inflation was skyrocketing, so consumption was going down. In between, because the business is going through all this turmoil, the stock has taken a dive, we start to get inbound inquiries for acquisition. And in January, we got a call from Naver where they said, hey, we love what you guys are doing. We love this whole area of consumer marketplaces, social commerce, and we'd like to make an investment in your company and learn from you guys. And so started the conversation. And suddenly one of the big things that started to shine for me is that one of the big growth areas for Poshmark could be live streaming and live shopping. And so I started to put a lot of energy”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we hit profitability a year ahead. In April, government started release stimulus and turned out people really did want to buy and sell clothes in the pandemic. In fact, they cleaned out a lot of closets and used our platform to buy and sell a lot of stuff and things just started to move. And by June of 2020, all the bankers were at the door and we were starting to think of filing for a public offering.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are having our board meeting on March 12th or 13th and it's exactly the day the government is declaring COVID nineteen to be a pandemic. In every day the sales started to go down. We didn't know if anybody would buy used clothing, right? Because it's touched and go. We didn't know if anybody would buy clothing, nothing. So things are going down. We are cutting down marketing, marketing, marketing. Yet at the same time, every day the revenue is going down. So I was like, every night I'd go to bed, I said, how do I change my mindset? And when I went to bed and I woke up, I'd visualize rinking the opening bell of New York Stock Exchange. So literally, that was sort of the way I would psych myself up. I said, you know, there'll be a day. We'll go through all this trouble. This is March of 2020. Things are going down and just wake up the next day. And then by March 31st, we actually had our first net EBITDA profitable month.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It turned out it was a major friction. Just adding that sales tax caused the transaction volume to drop, the business growth to slow down, and everything sort of moved down, derailed our IPO. We could no longer be a public company because we didn't know what was happening at that time. Literally, we had to stop the IPO process, take a step back. And so that whole 2019 timeframe, we were growing, but we started to burn a lot of money because suddenly we were doing new category expansion, new countries, new things, and suddenly we went to our investors. And we said, you know, what do we do? We have this much money in the bank, et cetera. We were not out of money. We had like money in the bank, but it was a very small amount of money. This was February of 2020. And the feedback was become profitable, right? And we knew how to do that because our single biggest expense was marketing. We cut down marketing, we'd become profitable. So we were going to present a new business plan to the board in Mars.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So we were going to initially be class of 2019 public company. But at that time, the United States government decided that marketplaces should collect sales tax on behalf of their sellers and remit it to them. So we implemented sales tax on our platform. We thought it'd be a minor, there'd be some friction, but won't be very big.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not just for women. And so women are still a biggest dominant thing, but all those categories are a meaningful part of our.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't. So actually in 2015 we were growing very well. In 2016, there was still a lot of hesitation within the leadership team as we talked to the community to go beyond women. But we ended up launching men and kids. And I remember when we announced that we were going to launch these things, we got hundreds of emails in our inbox saying, why are you letting men in our community? It's not the right thing to do. It's terrible. It's going to be. And anyway, it ended up that men became after women the fastest growing category. And the way men's shop was great for our women sellers because they are faster shoppers. They had sort of different characteristics. And of course, they could divert their inventory. They could sell more stuff that was in the closet. And then I started to get hundreds of letters of thanks. Thanks for launching men. So it ended up being a very good decision to support all the different folks in your house.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Onwards, we had to restart growth, rebuild the infrastructure, and grow the business in a much, much more gritty way, if you may.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I fear that we would have lots of failed transactions. Our customers would have churned and gone away. And ultimately, we could have crashed. We could have completely crashed instead through this whole process, marketing, I hired some of the key executives. Our head of growth joined us in spring of 2014. I shared with him. I said, you know, for six months, I can't give you any money. He said, no, let me help join our head of data joined at that time. And so I felt like we build the management team as well, besides sort of building the infrastructure, but we built the management team not fair weather friends, which we actually found foul weather friends who would actually stick around. And luckily, none of my co-founders left. They're still all here. And so we actually ended up forming a lot of grit and characters through that sort of year. And I think form a lot of bonds where we all sort of almost kind of had a second startup from 2014.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it kind of delayed by funding by almost a year and a half before I could raise a real proper round. But in hindsight, I felt like it was probably one of the most bold, painful, but probably correct decision that I made in this journey of Pashmark.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had a very sustainable model to begin with, but we were obviously caught up in this frenzy of marketing. And so I went to my board members and I said, and these were both VCs and VCs are ultimately focused on growth. I said, I'm going to cut down growth massively for a year by saving money and using that money to rebuild the infrastructure. And we cut down growth by taking our marketing and bringing it down pretty close to zero for almost a year before we restarted it while we rebuilt the infrastructure. The hard part was that this year of no growth ultimately meant that to get a real funding round was delayed by a couple of years, we had to bridge it the company for more than a year, year and a half because when people would look at our metrics, they saw this time of no growth and they could not wrap their heads. Even though we kept saying it was because we cut down marketing, investors just had a hard time. They needed a long runway of growth before they would fund the company.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this was middle of 13. We were growing like a rocket ship. But in those six months from January through July, competition had massively increased. And there were many companies in the fashion space that were spending a lot of money in marketing and actually were starting to declare bankruptcy.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through a miraculous set of licensing, and this whole area is quite complicated, they were able to onboard us. So the combination of PayPal and Raintree at that time saved our life, and then we became their partners and still are huge partners of PayPal and Raintree.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The payment processor calls us and says, you know, the way you're structured, we can't handle your payment process. You've got to move to another payment processor. We went to every payment process, went to PayPal, we went to BrainTree, we went to Stripe, we went to Wells Fargo, we went to First USA, we went to literally every payment processor. And even when they would agree to take our business, their compliance chief would just throw them out. And it was kind of very bad because we had actually the safest model because the money was never at risk in this whole sort of transaction. The money would go to the rightful owner. But they didn't understand it. Now we were like a few months from shutting down because all the payment processes had rejected us. Around that time, PayPal ended up acquiring Braintree. And somehow”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an amazingly good problem to have, but the speed of growth was so crazy on a system where a lot of things were still very weak in terms of the payment systems, the shipping system, but all sort of untested. So suddenly our volume exploded. Think of if you're doing half a million dollars transaction, we're now doing five or six million dollars of transactions, which is not much, but the speed was very high. So we started to hit alarms in every single one of our partners. We started to hit alarms with our payment provider, with our shipping provider, infrastructure. We hadn't built some of the distribution scaling. We were starting to hit the problems. And meanwhile, in 2013, the app is growing like wheats and rockets. And people are loving it. Everything is sort of working, but our systems are just blowing apart.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so by Q4 of 2012, Facebook had retooled their app to be a mobile app, and they had done a partnership with Apple to create an ad forbat where you could click and get an automatic mobile install of the app, right? And we somehow were good at getting ourselves into beta testing. So we got into the beta testing of that app. And it turned out that in the first two months it was an extremely successful product. And we just grew three to five X in two months.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I explained to them, I said, Yes, you're right, that there's a bunch of labels that we are underpaying, but here's a bunch of labels that we are extremely overpaying for because of the thing they're saying. We don't care about overpaying, we only care about underpayment, et cetera. So a lot of back and forth finally made me sign some things. And, you know, we are now growing very fast. We are consuming a lot of USPS priority labels. And from there, a series of conversations start that.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in middle of 2013, we get a knock on our door in the morning and two men walk in and say, we need to speak to Manish Chandra. We are from USPS. We are postal inspectors. And so our team says, you know, I'm Olivia, I'm the head of Marketplace Operations. No, no, we can only speak to Manish Chandra. And so I sit down with these two postal inspectors. They, sir, we are here to inform you that you have millions of dollars of fine because you've been underpaying or overcharging for some labels for these things and you have to pay the fines, otherwise we can actually legally put you in jail.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say a pair of shoes or whatever we knew, we would generate the right label, priority mail label from USPS. We would pay for that label and only charge you $7 for that label. So some labels we were losing a lot of money, some labels were making a lot of money, but we were simplifying the job for the seller. So they didn't have to think of weighing the item.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heavy boots, the boots. So at that time in 2012, we wanted to make sure that the seller didn't have to worry about how much the item weighed, what they had to do, keep it very simple. We didn't want them to think of them as a seller. They should just be two people exchanging products and everything, just shipping. They don't have to worry about anything. Just list the item and price it and ship it. So what we would do is we would ship them the right label for their. So if you were shipping from Minnesota to Texas and you were shipping”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find you after a lot of thought, we said, okay, we'll change the shipping fee to $7. And even as we change to $7, we got so much negative feedback from the community. But we were still losing money on every order, but we said we can afford $7. So we started with $7 shipping in 2012 and 20% take rate. Just to give you a sense, today it's 2024. Our take rate is still 20% and our shipping is 797.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kid you not, Guy, within 24 hours. Tracy and Railbox and Twitter was flooded with hundreds of people saying, you are going to make us bankrupt. We won't have any clothes to wear. You guys are crazy. How can you change the shipping? And it was a revolt by our community for us to move our shipping from $5 to $9. We had never seen this level of passion ever in my life.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we launched the app with $5 shipping at that time. And our cost of shipping was turning out to be $10.50 on an average. And so we were basically losing money left and right on every order. And if you remember, having come out of Dotcom, I didn't want to build a business where you were losing money on every order. So we were like, what do we do? And our shipping fee was $9 at that time. We had discounted to $5 for the launch. So we said, you know what? We'll just take the discount away and go back to normal things. So we put a little note in the app in May of 2012 saying, hey, we are, the discount is going to finish. The welcome discount is gone. Move the shipping to $9”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But two things happen. When we first launched the app, we saw amazing engagement. You know, the 100 people who downloaded the app, most of them were actually creating listings and many of them were buying. 80, 90% of the people were coming back week after week. So there was amazing engagement. But the biggest thing was through our data and our data systems were still early, we saw that average user was spending 15 to 20 minutes a day in our app. 15 to 20 minutes a day. You know, my belief having worked in five, six years in consumer, I was not a guru, but I was sort of in the early days, is that you can buy growth, you can buy anything, but you can't buy love. You can't buy engagement. Engagement is very natural to whether your product works for the consumer. And then I knew that this business is going to work.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was and it wasn't in the sense that the expectations for a very moderate, I think we had like 100 users in the first day. It was all through PR and we got an article in a pub at that time, which was very popular called Refinery 29. We had a couple of articles in San Francisco Chronicle print. And we started to see some users come in. There wasn't any cost efficient acquisition engines. It was really, really expensive. So we started to experiment some online advertising, but app installs were not there. So you still had to sort of click through, discover something, then go to the app store on your own and try to download the app. And so that whole funnel was extremely expensive, complicated, et cetera. We couldn't figure out how to scale it.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of things. I think the fashion part was very critical. I think the part that was very exciting for people was it was very empowering and very stylish. So our product has something, our still does, has something called a cover shot. So you don't just create a listing. You start the listing with a cover shot. So the first shot is you posing with your clothes on or you sort of making it very beautiful and then you add other photos to kind of describe the product. So it felt like you're creating your little magazine article. And so it was just fun to browse as you were looking at it, fun to connect. There was a community forming. And sometimes you build a product and just, you know, the four or five things you build end up.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, that was one of how our community formed. So a lot of our initial alpha testing was we would host a weekly get together, the district wine bar and other get-together at our office in Menlo Park, and that's how sort of the product got started.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I We were big believers of putting the product out into the customer sands very early. So we got funded in February. And by May, we were starting to test the product. Of 2011. And by August, we were starting to see transactions happening. But we hadn't gotten our payment processing set up. We hadn't gotten shipping set up. So we were still just a content site. And so people would literally write a comment. And Leanne, who's our first employee in our today, our SVP of community, was heading up the community management. So people would just email her and she would say, you guys want to buy this thing, please bring your money or payPal me the money and then meet us. And typically our meeting was at the district wine bar in Soma in San Francisco. And that's where the product would happen. It would be almost like a little physical product exchange and half the time it was cash and product being exchanged there. We were not making any. We're just trying to facilitate the transaction.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea was that somebody would come, buy it from you. We would take care of all the transaction money movement. Once you ship it using a shipping label via email to you, once the person received it and said that they received it and they're satisfied with it, you get the money. You would keep 80% and you would get 20%. And that's it. I was tired of people hiding a lot of fees. Like, you know, if you sold on other marketplaces at that time, you had one fee, another fee came, and by the time you sort of got your money, there was nothing left. So here, our idea was day one, we would reveal to you, if you listed your item for 50 bucks, you can get 40 bucks and not up anymore, not up any less. You can get 40 bucks. We would not charge you any hidden fees, et cetera. And then that's sort of how we launched it in 2011.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We raised $3.5 million in that first round, quite a bit of money at that time. And we raised Mayfield, but I also give room to my investors who had supported me in Caboodle and carved out room for all of them. So all of them joined the round.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. So Naveen Chada, who was the Mayfield General Partner, who's the one who his team had connected me to Tracy, was very keen on at least putting some money into my next company. And then we went and pitched to the partners. And after that, he said, you know, we're ready to invest. And so that first investment from him came very quickly.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of, but the idea was that over time you could fashion, new fashion, everything. It becomes sort of this social hub for fashion. And we actually had a lot of people using Caboodle and hacking it to create a marketplace where people would post and say, I have these Jimmy Chews. Do you buy it? Can you payPal me the money? So they were using Caboodle for transactions. And this was sort of transaction built into it. So it was a very simple model.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and talk to her, talk to another person. Everyone sort of immediately started to like the idea. Tracy went and mocked up something. Another guy started to prototype something. And soon this idea caught a momentum of its own. And the thing I was very regimented in my mind was, we're not going to do anything on the web or laptop. This is going to be a pure mobile iPhone thing, which was very hard to push to the investors because nobody thought people could actually shop on the phone.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea was buying and selling clothing should be fun and simple. The use case we wrote up was you'd gone to a wedding, you come out, that dress is now seen by everyone, you quickly take a couple of pictures, you list it, somebody buys it, you don't have to worry about shipping because we've taken care of all of the things you just ship it and you collect the money. And I met my co-founder, Tracy, through Mayfield, who's one of our early investors. And her background was all fashion. She grew up in the New York fashion scene. She had worked on a small brand there. She had an MBA. She had a fashion background. And she had moved from New York to Silicon Valley to do something which Murt Fashion and Tech.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I was at my son's high school game and the high school homecoming queen was wearing a yellow dress. And we know her parents were talking to her parents. And they said, you know, she's just thrifted this dress. This is she's bought it used from a thrift store. And then I came back home and I was in our closet. And they were like bags and bags of clothing just unopened, lying, you know, not returned. And so suddenly all of these things just clicked in my head. And I said, the right idea is to empower everyone to have this phone. A girl can literally take her clothing from this phone, list them very quickly, put a little filter, make them beautiful, and sell them. And all of these things kind of came together. And I wrote a two-page paper on what posh marks should be. And I called it Gosh Posh at that time.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I remember I was on a trip with a bunch of my friends and this guy had this little iPhone. It was iPhone 4. And he takes a picture of these birds and shows us it looks amazing. And we are all here with our SLRs trying to take picture of these birds. And then he quickly uploads it on. At that time, a hot platform called Facebook. And we suddenly see his picture on Facebook. And I'm like, I have to now take my SD card, shove it in the... This mobile is coming of age, like something massive has happened. I had iPhone 3 at that time, which was grainy and photo quality was mediocre, et cetera. And this was high quality stuff. And so I said, you know, I need to do something with mobile.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I did. So I would say, as Malcolm Gladwood calls it, spending time in Caboodle and then spending two and a half plus years in Hearst was my 10,000 proverbial hours in fashion. And so as I left Caboodle, I knew I wanted to do something in fashion. I don't want to touch inventory. I realize that Silicon Valley, we are good at a lot of things, but managing inventory is not our forte. We think of things as very fluid and consumer and bits and bytes. So I said that's Not that inventory is not a great thing to do, but just we are not good at it. And the third thing I wanted to do was build something where monetization and engagement were just one, right? So I didn't want it to be disconnected. I felt like the Kaboodle journey had given me enough experience and appetite. And, you know, we'd got a few million users. And I wanted to create a community of at least 100 million users. So that was sort of like my thing is I want to hit something with 100 million people.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time Kabul was acquired, I felt like Kabul was still a baby. So my attention and my focus was still growing Kaboodle. I was not thinking beyond it. But as time went on, it started to become clear that as even if we create a tremendous amount of value, the journey has become completely different. And I was getting very frustrated because I felt like I was working with some constraints. I was working with something where I didn't feel like I had the full ownership. But financially, we were doing very well and life was in a groove. But I was just unhappy personally. And so I was talking to my wife. She goes, you know, I haven't seen you this unhappy in years, even when you were struggling with Caboodle. You were so much happier than the thing. And I said, you really need to do something. But I don't want to jeopardize the security that the family has. And we will be all supportive. Why didn't you just leave? And that's when I started to think of leaving”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was never profitable and it needed a three or five X growth before it would be a scale to have enough monetization and its own ad engines at that time. So really the focus of the property should have been less monetization and still much more growth for another year before you got to monetize it.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overly focused on it, but on the monetization side, we didn't have a choice. We had to put those ad units, and that was something that none of us really liked in terms of how they manifested in the site.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was largely advertising. So they were selling advertising to big companies, whether it's a brand or a retailer, and they would advertise in the print, and they would also have a significant digital presence through Caboodle. But the advertising we were doing was not directly tied to the engagement. Some pages were over monetized, so there were pages we were running where there were three banner ads running on a single page, which made it very, very hard to sort of load up and work with. And so that led to sort of one of the principles by which I looked at anything I create wherever you have love, the money is sort of synergistic. So engagement and monetization had to be 100% synergistic in any business I created. So the more you focus on engagement, the more monetization you get. That was not the case with Caboodle. We were sort of pulling in different directions based on how the advertising was there. But otherwise, I would say they were very, very healthy partners as an owner of Caboodle. They were never...”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a very, very lucky thing that happened from a timing perspective because we were not monetized. We were growing, but we were not a massive property. So had we hit 08 without an acquisition, no matter how much cash I had, it would have been a very tough time. We would have to be enforced to be a profitable company. And so being acquired in 07 was serendipitously one of the luckiest thing that could happen. the ability to sort of get that liquidity turned out to be a fantastic thing because so much, particularly non-monetized companies went down under in 08 and 09. Overall, whereas we kept growing through that and ended up monetizing and becoming sort of an interesting property within that 0809 time frame.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no idea of the media business. I didn't even know that Hearst was on the East Coast. So I was, again, to some degree being naive has helped me in being able to just go talk to these people without knowing that who I'm talking to or what sort of is on the other side.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think their strategy was digitizing the magazines at that time. They had a new CEO and he was focused on taking all of the magazines and creating engaging digital properties. And also they wanted to have a presence in Silicon Valley. The last thing is Hearst as a company was basically made up of a series of acquisitions that they acquired at small stages and then grew and made them meaningful properties. So that was sort of their business model as well. bunch of things aligned, unknown to me at that time.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and so it was just a tricky time. And what ended up happening was one of my co-founders came to me and said, but Manish, you're doing all of these things. What do you really want? I didn't know what I wanted. I hadn't decided whether I want to sell the company or I want to keep the company and build it. I wasn't thinking for myself. I was just doing what my board was asking me to do. And he created this question and provoked it in a way that forced me to think about what do I want. And so I sat down and cleared my head. I wrote down all the pros and cons where I was in my life, sort of what was happening. And I wrote down a number. I said, if I get this number, I actually want to sell the company.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just, I think it was 2x of the last round, but it was like not three, four, five x. And, you know, again, I was so tunnel vision. I was like building the company, trying to manage it. I had two young kids, et cetera. I only remember that I was so happy to get the term sheet. And then it was like getting cold water poured. And I was like, How the hell do I figure out how to sell a company? I mean, I barely know how to raise money. And again, remember, we had very little money. So I had 1.7 million dollars, even a flight in a hotel was super expensive to use those tiny resources.”
2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT