YouSaid · the spoken record

Mariam Naficy

lines on the record: 69
first: 2019-12-09
most recent: 2019-12-09
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

“Yeah. And then to start a company, I basically took a white sheet of paper out and started drawing a website on a white sheet of paper in my kitchen, along with another sheet of paper where I was trying to come up with metrics as to what I would call different things like people coming to your site and what would you call the metric where someone converts into a customer. And everything had to be invented literally for the first time. Then we went through a really insane year. So I graduated in 1998. We immediately started fundraising.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, first of all, nobody wanted to sell online. We would have to go in there and convince them that the internet was not bad. We also actually hired a woman from Macy's who was formerly from at Macy's as a big manager of the cosmetics business, and she ended up being our river guide making introductions for us, helping advise us. If you go to Chanel, wear the Chanel Nellnell polish, for example. That one stood out. They'll recognize their colors on you.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, if you hear that as an entrepreneur, you've got to discount that massively because trust me, it's been everything, all of those things have been said.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, women don't shop online, and nobody will ever buy makeup online. And I'll just say in my career that has happened repeatedly, right, where people will say, no one's going to buy paper online. Yeah, who's going to buy that? No one's going to buy shoes online. No one is going to do this. No one is going to do that.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, so the idea was to create a replenishment brand for cosmetics. We thought skincare, meaning things that you want to replenish skincare, hair care, you know your favorite and you just want to replenish it because at that point everybody was telling us nobody was going to buy cosmetics online that they'd never tried”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And she slept on the couch in our studio apartment, or our one bedroom apartment. And in the morning we'd get up in our pajamas so we wouldn't wake up my now husband and we'd sit on the couch and call all the New York cosmetics companies from our couch in our pajamas and convince people to sign on with us, to distribute on this thing called the internet, which most of people had were extremely suspicious of. So that was an adventure.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Varsha And so we decided to pursue cosmetics because I thought, sure, why not? I want to work with you and I need to convince you to come out. So let's work on cosmetics. I've used cosmetics before. We can figure this out. And so I convinced her to move out.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I started in the second half of the year. So, first of all, second half of the year at Stanford, I was taking every entrepreneurial class I could and trying desperately to get into the best classes. I was auditing some sitting on the floor of others and then working on plans. And one thing I knew that I wanted to do is find a partner that I really liked. So I called a friend of mine in New York and tried to convince her to come to San Francisco and start something with me. And we had two ideas and she said, well, I'll start a company if we pursue my idea, which is selling cosmetics online. And mine was to do market research online, sort of like a survey monkey.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the reason I did that was I thought, well, one, it's a market need. Know how to fill this need. I have done so much recruiting at the two firms I was working at that I knew that there was a need for the book. I wanted to experiment to see what would happen if you create a consumer product that you know that there's a need for. Can I actually put a product together and sell it? And I also thought it would be a good project to demonstrate that I had some, I guess, hutspah to be able to get into Stanford. So I sold the book right and then I knew I had sold the book to a publisher Broadway before I, as I was applying, and I think that helped differentiate me as well. And then I used the advance to pay for business school, which I needed to pay for.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who was a Stanford grad, and he became a key mentor to me. He was starting our chain of restaurants in Palo Alto and all over California. But I was so inspired and bitten with the entrepreneurial bug during that experience. And Maurice importantly said to me, you really could do this. You could start a company. I think you should really consider it because we would spend hours talking about entrepreneurial ideas, venture capital, and just becoming completely obsessed to the point where I thought, why go to business school? A real entrepreneur doesn't go to business school. I'm not even interested anymore. And at that point, I thought, all right, I'll apply one more time because my boyfriend, who became my husband, was applying, I thought, all right, I'll throw my hat in the ring one more time and then Stanford accepted me.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was at first was just thinking about going to business school because I'd actually done investment banking and management consulting. And I thought perhaps I would want to go into consumer products or retail. But I didn't get into Stanford the first time I applied for business school. And so I decided to take a year off and try to boost my resume with something that was a little bit more differentiated and went to work for an entrepreneur, Maurice Wertigar, in the restaurant business, actually.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I was doing was working. So I was 20 and I was eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office. I was actually selling, I had a desk on the bond trading floor, and I was selling bonds as well as working with clients. So before I could actually drink, I was selling bonds. So before I could drink legally.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't say that I love being a financial analyst, that it is sort of like loving boot camp. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but you end up working very, very long hours. But I will say it's a great training ground as to what work ethic really means because you can't imagine working harder than what you actually physically pull off as a financial analyst.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's where I did do the expected thing. And some of my fellow classmates who were in economics and polyci were interviewing for jobs on Wall Street and in management consulting firms. And those firms had these huge processes on campus recruiting processes. So I just... So I went to Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst in their investment banking division.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, my parents come from a completely non-business family. And honestly, you know, with the Iranian upper class, you didn't set up business as sort of the vaunted thing that one goes into, things that were, in my family, very admired were things like being a doctor, going into foreign service and the government, for example. So when I was growing up in Chevy Chase, not once did business cross my mind, I was thinking law. I do remember my mom on the first day of first grade. Sort of bending down to say to me something, and she said, I want you to go to school and I want you to beat all of the boys.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was. I was that nerdy girl who sat at the front of the class with glasses on, who everybody wanted to get help from with their homework.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, really honestly tried to Americanize and fit in as fast as I possibly could. I really wanted to integrate. And when I came here, I actually had a strong accent. I was two years younger than everybody in my class all the way through basically school. I was two years younger, so I was small, young, and foreign. And I just, I really wanted to be American. And honestly, I sort of feel like the whole time, even when I was in Iran, I felt like a little bit of a An outsider there as well. So you're always, if you're like me and you move around a lot and you're of mixed cultures, you're never really going to feel like you belong to one place or one culture, right? You're always going to feel a little bit like the outsider who's traveling through time and space as an observer.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the environment was unstable, and we did not, you know, it was very unclear what was going to happen. I think that we were really worried about what would happen to us. In the new regime. I guess my dad thinks of us as refugees, which is when you leave unwillingly. When we got here, it was the, you know, soon after we arrived, the hostage crisis started And that was not a great time to be Iranian in the US and being a kid in school was really difficult.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was not a sale to be had. It was terrifying and horrible, horrible. And we almost, I really contemplated that moment, this is a failure. We need to shut this business down. We need to give whatever remains of the money back to investors. Because it's a total failure”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT