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Manish Chandra

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2024-02-26

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2024-02-26

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1. “Was still a VC, still a prominent VC, ended up calling us out of the blue and saying, hey, we're very interested in talking to you. And within sort of two, three weeks, they decide to write as a term sheet. Now, I'm like, you know, feeling like I'm on top of the world. We just seed funding. Now we get a top-notch guy. So I'm like super excited. I take the term sheet for my board and the board looks at the term sheet and says, this is a terrible term sheet. I think we should look at exit options and you should think of selling the company.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “So I went, drove around, most of my investors in Silicon Valley, and collected small checks like $10,000, $15,000, enough to make one or two payrolls at that time so we could survive. Then one of the investors stood up and said, you know what, I see this pattern that this traffic is going up. I see how passionate you guys are. Let me help you get a bridge round together. So he ended up doing a bridge round $1.7 million bridge round at that time. And that money ended up giving us runway for nine to till 12 months. So we got this money done. And suddenly our traffic was now starting to become vertical in the sense that we were starting to, at that time, the rankings were measured through Alexa and we were climbing rapidly in the Alexa ranking for shopping sites. And so we got noticed by investors. One of our early investors was a guy by the name of Ron Conway. And SoftBank, which was not the Soft Bank of today.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “So we came to the conclusion that we have to go back to where we started the year. We have to be a shopping company for women focused around social shopping for fashion. And we have to somehow get ourselves out of eBay and condenast at this time. And we were also starting to run out of money”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “And some subscription money. It was like basically I was trying to do too many things at the same time. And being an entrepreneur, I was just going wherever the money was and wherever the distribution was instead of sort of saying that all distribution and all money is not good for the business. So by the time Kandan asked what's happening, business was slowing down and we went from being a hot startup to suddenly sort of figuring out investor conversation started to disappear, investor said, you know, come back when there's growth. And I had to lay off a couple of people.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Well, so we were still in the growth mode, so we were still not monetizing the site. And coming from an enterprise background, I said, you know, the way I should grow this business is create distribution partnerships. So I approached a bunch of media and commerce companies to say, hey, we could build something for you. And so we created white label solutions for eBay. I remember in May of 2006 launching something called MyCollectibles. eBay.com, powered by Caboodle. And it was a collaboration engine for collectors to come together on a single page. We ended up doing a partnership with Condinast called Condenast Traveler. We created something called a suitcase, which was a travel suitcase where you could bring all the travel pieces together.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “So a lot of people ended up using it for either food. So they were using it for recipes and restaurants or fashion. But as we started to talk to our users, because we picked up the phone and reached out to these users, what we found that almost all of them were women. And there was no women on Shopping and fashion will be our focus. We're going to walk away from recipes and all of that. And that was turned out to be a very good decision because social shopping was something in the early days that had a lot of following that didn't have a solved problem and sort of closely resembled actually the pain point which triggered the product creation. So it all came together by early 2006.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “That was, I think, one of the things I hadn't deeply thought about, unfortunately. We were very much a tech product driven guys, and we thought we're going to make it big. And then ultimately, the meme at that time was that you could just monetize through advertising. And Google AdSense was just starting to take shape. So the dominant form of advertising was still banner advertising and sort of non-content advertising. But we were very much focused on usage and growth in the early days. And the engagement numbers were very interesting early on. Now, remember, we were enterprise guys. So even our metrics and measurement systems were very weak in the early days. So we kind of intuitively knew that there was a lot of engagement, but we were using very crude analytics. This is 2004, 2005. So it's very, very early days of even data.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Yeah, you know, the discussion we had was, okay, how much money do you have in the bank? How much money do I have? How much money Chaitanya and Kiran? And can we survive for six, nine months without funding? And after nine months, if the idea doesn't take off, then it'll take us maybe three, four months to find a job. So basically, we said, do we have 12 months of cash in the bank? We were lucky that we were able to raise the money in the first three, four months and didn't have to burn much more than that, which was a series of interesting and wonderful circumstances that raised the money. And so we were, by month four, we had a million and a half dollars in the bank. And we had started payroll and we were able to start to pay a little bit to the company and start recruiting engine for the company.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Is how we want to position our company as a social shopping company. I mean, all of my investors had a very negative reaction because they said, how's shopping social? You go there, you shop, you sort of compare, you make a decision, you go, why do you need shopping to be social? And of course, I realized I was in a room full of men and our product was predominantly 90%, 95% being used by women. And so that sort of was the genesis of Caboodle and its positioning as social shopping.”

   2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “It was exactly Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest, when it started, there was a lot of connection to Caboodle. And we started in home. But as we went through the first year of that journey, we realized that the real sort of attraction was women shopping for fashion. And so we ended up focusing a lot of our energy on fashion and women and coined the term in 2006 social shopping. Those are the words. And when I described that,”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Think you should do it. I can see that there's no way you're not going to do it. You have to do it. So I came back and I was energized. And then I wanted to have one technical co-founder and one person for the consumer space. Unfortunately, all the consumer guys backed off. And two technical guys came forward and said, you know, we want to do this with you. And I like both of them and they had slightly different skills. Chaitan and Kieran were the two guys and I ended up sort of saying, hey, let's divide this company three ways. I'll be the business guys. I'll take half and you guys, if you guys are willing to share the technical half, we'll divide it between the two of you. So we divided the company between the three of us and reserve 5% for a consumer person that we're going to recruit in the future and started Caboodle in my garage in 2005.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “So we could go to different websites, get the information summarized. If it was a single page, you could look at all the information, unless you were trying to make a decision on sofas or lamps, you could put them all together. You could have a comment on them. So the basic prototype of the product was working. I said, now is the time to really make a decision. I want to find out who wants to jump in and quit their jobs and put their lives on the risk. Who wants to sort of be an advisor kind of a thing? Who's going to contribute and only join us when we have funding? And I had to sit down because I had two young kids. I was in a secure job. I had everything. I had a mortgage and I had to sort of think it through. So I went back and it just so happened that my mom that winter was visiting from India because there was a cousin's wedding. And so I got a chance to talk to her. And my mom said, you know,”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Wife would make a snack for them, I would make the chai, and then we would brainstorm on the ideas. And if they ended up taking the journey, then we'll talk about equity, et cetera. And through that sort of recruiting process and creating a very good group, we had eight, ten people who were starting to meet every Saturday. And then we started to assign projects. Somebody was doing user research, somebody was doing a little bit of coding. We had a guy who was a UX design guy. And so we kept evolving it. And by end of 204, we had come to a point where our end-to-end prototype was working.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Yeah, I had a product spec, right? So I had a three, four page product spec at that time. And what I did was I started to tap into the natural network. So I started tap into my IIT network. I tapped into what was called the Indus Entrepreneurs, the Thai Network, and started to meet with some people who were in the consumer business because I didn't know naturally anybody was in the consumer business. And so to talk to them and bring my idea to them. And that's where I got the advice that, hey, the best way to do it is to incubate at that time. We called it a kitchen sink cabinet. Get a few people together and start to brainstorm. And so what I did was I started to meet with people and invited them every Saturday to come to my house. We signed an NDA. So my IP was protected. And my commitment to those was you show up at 10 o'clock or 9 o'clock and we would give you hot Indian chai.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “My kids were very young, but yeah, I'm talking to my wife, I'm talking to my friends, a couple of friends, because most friends were in. And I'm excited and frustrated at the same time because I'm excited because I like the idea. I'm frustrated because I have no networks there. I don't know anybody in this space. A couple of VCs I talked to, he said, hey guys, if you did something in database, we'd look at you. But consumer, I mean, stay away from it. And again, you have to remember, we are just coming out of dot-com, so consumer is still not a very exciting space for a lot of investors.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Well, it wasn't even about the purchase. What I wanted to do was to make sure that there's one page. So if let's say there's a project, let's say we were putting together a room for my daughter and my wife, me, my mother-in-law, our designer, we're collaborating, there should be just one page where we could put what we want, discuss it, and then throw out the things and just collaborate and have a single page, like even a small project like our kitchen stove, which had so many different decisions to be made, and everyone has different opinions, and people are arguing, and you're really passionate when you get into this project. You're focused on that doorkab and whatever, like, and that little knob, and at the end these all sort of dissolve. But at that point, they're the most important things and you're passionately discussing it. So any kind of collaborating decision making was painful. And that's where I started to see the potential of this idea in multiple places.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Yeah, so we would literally print out pages. So I would have like these thick folders of printouts, pamphlets, physical brochures, and circle them and then sort of stick them together onto pages. It was very manual and hard.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Do was to create what I call a kitchen sink cabinet, get a bunch of people, incubation, and start to get them together and put this idea into work. And that's what I did to start my first company.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “Yeah, I mean, the basic stuff that we take for granted, like storing, liking, you know, sharing, we're just not available at that point in time. So I kind of put this idea together of what I want to do. And the way I did that was I wrote a three four-page document visualizing a product. And I put it aside. I said, this is a consumer product. I'm an enterprise guy. I have no business doing it. I have no background, nothing. And just kept it in one direction, went on for a few months. And you know how a great idea, it sort of started to take over my mind. Everywhere I looked, I felt like I could solve this problem. I could solve a travel problem. I could solve a fashion problem. I could solve a holiday gifting problem. And after six months, I just couldn't resist it. So I sort of went and talked to some of my mentors and said, you know, what do I do? I'm an enterprise guy. I'm a database guy, but I have this idea and it just can't go away. I see this, this, this, this, this. They said, calm down. You should take a step. And the step I was asked to.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “Yes, I was frustrated and I ended up putting a lot of my energy into a home we just bought and remodeling it. And as I was doing it, I realized that the products that we had on internet for shopping, for collaboration, we were working, we were working with my mother-in-law, designer, my wife, were just terrible. And I felt like the entire process of online shopping was broken for home shopping.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “I was 22 years old, and by'92, we were a public company. And that IPO, even though had very tiny share, I was an engineer, it ended up creating the down payment for our first house. In that two or three years that I was at SyBase, I ended up meeting my wife, built some really great friends, and grew very rapidly in the company because in that time period they'd taken out the middle layer. So I was an engineer and very soon I was a team lead and very soon I was an architect. So there was a lot of progress. And the company started to grow very fast. When I joined them, there were 80 people. It became 600 people in a year and just, you know, there was a lot of growth ahead”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “Was just, yeah, I was just database guy, I was programming, there was beer, there was live music here, I was just coding. I was working 8, 10, 12 hours. I had no idea what was going on.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yeah, Cybus was a small company. There were 70, 80 people company, but they had the best in class technology. So they offered me a job. I accepted it. The job was in Berkeley. I was ready. Believe it or not, you can't see from my hair, I actually had a ponytail at that time. So I was ready to live the life and, you know, sort of move from Santa Clara to Berkeley on this company. And then the very first town hall they did that Friday, the CEO, Mark Kaufman, comes and says, hey guys, you know, it's been hard to raise money. We are working on a venture bridge round right now. But don't worry, we'll work hard. And so I had no idea what he was talking about. It was like completely mumbo jumbo to me.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Yes, Ayn Rand and her philosophy of sort of empowerment, individualism, freedom was very appealing. And America was sort of the symbol for me in my mind at that time. And my vision for America, you know, because the information was all spotty was much more New York. Like everyone lived in an apartment, people were living in high rises, you know, fountain head, Howard Roke. That was sort of my vision. And it was much more about that you can really carve a life which was very self-driven and based on your values and you don't have to conform to normal standards. And sort of that was sort of the focus for me. And so when I arrived, I went to UT Austin, arrived in Texas, and the reality was exactly the opposite. There were no high rises. People lived in bigger homes. There were wider streets. There was a little bit of a culture shock to me, not because America itself was a culture shock, but it was a culture shock because my vision was New York and I landed.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “You get in, it's kind of like getting into a school here. If you don't keep up, you can really fall behind. And I remember one year I felt like I might not even pass my classes and I had to work very hard to pass the classes. So first two years, I would say I was much more just expanding my horizon, learning different aspects of life, learning to participate in civic life. And I was the youngest kid in the class. It was kind of a little bit interesting. It wasn't until third year or sort of what would be called a junior year here that I started to get focused on what I wanted to do. And at that time, my focus became singular, which is coming to America for further studies.”

    2024-02-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Poshmark: Manish Chandra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “We launched the app with $5 shipping 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. And I didn't want to build a business where you were losing money on every order. So we were like saying, hey, the discount is going to finish. The welcome discount is gone. We're going to move the shipping to $9. I kid you not, Guy, within 24 hours. Our mailbox and Twitter was flooded with hundreds of people saying, you are going to make us bankrupt. 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