YouSaid · the spoken record

Niraj Shah

lines on the record: 39
first: 2018-04-16
most recent: 2018-04-16
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

“Know serendipity and luck always play a little bit of a role, right? So I think that definitely is a piece. You think about it, we happen to be in college at the last semester of college happened to be the beginning of the commercial internet. The commercial internet has created a huge amount of opportunity. Well, if it was a different point in time where there had been no opportunity, no. But there would be opportunity. Would it be as big? Maybe, maybe not. Would it have been different? Possibly would it have been as well suited to us? I don't know. So I think there's a mix in there. And I think just... I do think a lot of it is how hard you go after something and how pragmatic you are”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to be prudent, right? So we know all those folks. You, of course, would have conversations with anyone who wants to have a conversation. Last year, when we did 4.7 billion in sales, we grew 40% from the year prior. Well, so if you take a number like 4.7 billion dollars in sales and you grow it at some decent sized growth rate, some high growth rate, the company's getting bigger at a fast rate. And if you believe you can do a lot for the customer, that is more than anyone else can do. Well, why wouldn't that continue to grow at a fast rate Was really super early days, if in fact we can be the best. So it would be very premature to think about selling it if we think we can win.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you look at that, you'll then see money. Well, international is much smaller. We're certainly investing a lot of money to build that up, and we think it'll be... Very big and successful, but we're in a very fortunate position. We have $600 million in the bank, we have the ability to invest in these very ambitious things that help customers. I think in that case, you're actually better off being an aggressive investor into the experience and making the experience better and better because you'll earn more loyalty in more customers.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, obviously, a company needs to be able to generate cash. If you run out of cash, you go out of business, right? So that's really important. I think what folks confuse is a company that's willing to reinvest in smart ways with one who fundamentally has a business model problem and is not going to be able to be successful. In our case, the United States has been profitable. If you read our financials and we break out the adjusted EBITDA. So U.S. is 90% of our business, and that's been profitable for the last five quarters.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one thing I would say, you know, home, the beauty of home, most categories people want to all buy the same thing as each other, right? So, you know, A. There's only a couple categories where a huge selection is really a key piece where visual and aesthetic considerations are very paramount, where people want unique items. And the two are really fashion in home. And we basically, by focusing on home, where the logistics are quite complicated and different, where there are no brands, where the visual merchandising is critical, where people have a very unique style. There's a lot of value you can add as a retailer. If you're in any of these other categories, certainly there's a big business there, but that's effectively the business that the Walmarts and the Amazons and the Targets and the Costco's, that they're all in that business, selling the same exact items to everybody. And you can fight that out and try to find an advantage, but typically the advantage is either in price or speed. There's really no other way to do it. And so the beauty in home is that it's more multifaceted and it doesn't...”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Consumers didn't know that brand. It wasn't. You want a brand that when you think, hey, I need to shop. I want to redo my living room. You want someone to think, oh, I go to Wayfair. You want it to be a top-of-mind brand for a category, right? And that's not easy to do. And even if you figure out how to do it, it's not inexpensive by any stretch, right? We wanted to be able to do that.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're definitely ones who would rather just funded ourselves or self-fund the business and have it fund itself. The challenge became in 2011, we believe, the big opportunity to continue the trajectory and to really capture the big opportunity we needed to build a brand. And the amount of capital we thought to go through that migration and to build a brand that it would take was not an amount we could self-fund”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the two key things that I think have always helped us. One is that we gravitate to different areas of the business and the second is we definitely have always found each other to be very hardworking and very committed to it. I think those are not to be taken for granted because I do think those traits may not be as common as you would think.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But now they've gotten into a 20 minute conversation with you, and you sound very rational, and you're carrying a bunch of good brands. So now they're like, well, you know, I don't really do much e-commerce business, but maybe this does make sense. Let's have a little more of a conversation. So the generic name helped you get deep enough into a conversation for them to really consider and understand you, which was really important in those days.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, what happens is when your badge says CSN stores and where you're based, or in Boston, oh, we're in Boston, oh, we're right in Back Bay, oh, we have an office on Newberry Street, oh, great. Oh, what do you guys focus on? Oh, well, we're really focused on entertainment furniture. Oh, what do you carry? Oh, we carry this brand, that brand. So the brand. Oh, great. You get into a conversation. And they say, well, what are you interested in? Well, we'd really be interested in this selection. We think it would do well for these reasons. And they say, oh, well, you know, how big is your store? At that point, you'd say, you know, you'd be honest. You'd say, well, we... And if you had to discuss online too early in the conversation, you get kicked out of the show”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It helped with two key things, basically. One is we needed a company name that sort of implied we had a lot of stores. Sounds like CSN stores. You didn't want to just name it after one of the names, right? The second is a lot of the suppliers are very traditional companies. And so when we would go to the High Point Furniture Market and approach suppliers, you wanted to be able to get into a conversation with them. And during this timeframe, 2002, 2003, 2004, they're still not very keen on e-commerce. They're not dead set against it, but their experiences have been poor.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, oh no, no. So high doctrine. No, no, I'm not a doctor. No, I just sell furniture. Because if you say you sell furniture, no one's interested. There's no”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember one time I was very uninterested in describing what we were doing, and a lot of Indians in the United States are doctors. They assumed I was a doctor.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we started hiring as early as January 2003, we hired a couple people then. We probably ended that year with 15 people or something like that. And then that became the model to grow. We would be reinvesting aggressively by hiring people so that we could keep expanding the selection and expanding the categories, which then gave us more things to advertise, which then would get us more customers. And that was the virtuous cycle. And we would take the money that resulted and we would invest that into growing the team to keep driving it.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so 2002 was our first year. We did about 700,000. 2003 was our second year. I think we did about 7 million. And then the following year, 2004, I think we did $27 million”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the traffic was primarily driven by the advertising we would do, the paid search and then other forms of advertising that we would do. So the key to the name of the site wasn't so much that it was something someone would type in or that was memorable or they'd pick it over other items, it was more that it made sense as a place you would go for this item.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, our timing on that was quite good. So we saw this huge sales sort of start kind of momentum. So then we built a site just for that to have every type. What was it?”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were surprised. So, what happened in that time frame, also 2002 timeframe, is two different things. TV mounts were not widely available. So if you had a gym and you wanted to hang some TV mounts like you didn't know where else to buy them, so on and so forth. But the other thing that happened is flat screen TV started really becoming more popular. And so people wanted to hang those on the wall.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the biggest leverage that we didn't need to pay ourselves and that we knew how to also build the software and do that work. We didn't need to hire anyone to do that work.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Racks and stands, and we grew to be one of the largest or the largest online seller in the category. And what happened is our suppliers started telling us, hey, you know, you've become my biggest online retailer of TV stands or speaker stands or what have you. But you know, my other online guys sell more of my beds, or my other online guys sell more of my desks. And so we started learning that, in fact, these other furniture categories that we hadn't focused on, but that they were doing quite well online as well”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. We launched it at the very end of August, so September, October, November, December, the fourth month in business in December of”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Write your text ad and you'd basically pay per click. And we would track every time we got an order which advertising unit drove it. So we'd either bid those up or bid them down if they were non-productive.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the beginning, what you do is you'd go online and you'd look for companies that made them. You'd also look at what the other online retailers were selling, what brands did they have.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same thing about just selection of only two or three, and you can't find a good selection. The furniture stores want to focus on living room bedroom dining furniture. So where would you go?”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know what you find in those days Yahoo on Yahoo's search, you could type in terms and it would tell you how many searches a month there were for that item And on some of the product comparison sites, they would tell you their top 100 categories. And so both of those terms were in the top 100 search product terms”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I can order whatever I want. I save the time of the trip to the store. It'll show up in the mail. Super easy. And so about a month's worth of research kind of helped us figure that out. And so what we ended up doing is we ended up deciding that there was a big opportunity in buying these businesses. So the first website we ended up launching, we launched a site called Raxenstands.com at the very end of August of that year.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly And they're pretty basic styles, right? Because they're only going to have three or four, right? And so all of a sudden, people started to realize, well, I don't have to be stuck with that. I can go online.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The theme we found was really simple. Consumers had realized they could go online and search for any product category they wanted. There were a lot of product categories like birdhouses that are just not really available locally with good selection. If you want to buy a birdhouse locally where you live today, where would you go if you want a decent selection?”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember there's one lady who was selling birdhouses. She was storing them in a garage. Every day she was taking all the orders and collecting all the items out of the garage and packing them up and taking them to the post office.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think there was even at that time, there was a lot of skepticism that Amazon was going to succeed. There were a lot of people talking about Amazon's imminent demise. And so we got fairly methodical. We said, well, okay, we should start looking at internet ideas. We know internet. We know internet software. We should look at internet ideas. And then we should look at other ideas that we think are just good business ideas or good operators. And so we started making lists of ideas. We started looking at businesses that were for sale, thing that maybe there's something small that we could buy and we could really grow. And through that, we ended up tripping over these e-commerce websites that were for sale. And we would talk to the owner-operator and they would tell us how they're growing 20 or 30 percent year over year.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we bought the groceries. And that only lasted about two weeks though before she decided that we really should get our own place. So that was the end of the free rent. But what happened after Simplify Mobile, what we decided? We spent basically the first couple months of 2002, we ended up talking to a lot of different business owners, and there was this theme that emerged because if you read the New York Times and if you believed what the journalist said, you would have been left believing that e-commerce was dead. That was what all the articles talked about.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And then my girlfriend at the time moved up. From New York, and I'm like, honey, this is a great deal. We can just live here.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was looking quite good. And then unfortunately, what happened in 2001 was September 11th was a huge impact for everybody, and particularly for financial services companies, in the case of Merrill Lynch, they lost use of their headquarters in the World Financial Center. And their priorities obviously had to dramatically change. So with that, we lost sort of the flagship customer that we had anchored around. And so the combination of everything caused us to become much less bullish on this idea. The odds of it succeeding was just not high enough.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that takes us. So now we're at the beginning of 2001 And we're like thinking of different ideas and we're not sure what we want to do. Long story short, we came across this idea around mobile phones. So 2001 was still pretty early for mobile phones. But we found that a lot of companies were starting to have a lot of mobile phones, but they weren't really managing them well because they'd effectively have thousands of phones, but they were each on different contracts and they were on the wrong ones. They're paying too much for some, too little for others. So our idea was we would build a software platform that would allow these companies to better manage all their phones and their contracts. And we thought over time we could build that in to basically being a virtual carrier focused on enterprises.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we got equity that was worth a few million bucks that then kind of with the dot com boom kind of went up tremendously and then came all the way like all the way back.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it might have been a little more than that. I think we might have each gotten like half a million cash. And then, um...”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About four years, so we started it in the summer of 1995. So I guess that's three years or the fall of 1998, so maybe a little over three years when we sold it. So a little over three years, we were about 40 people when we sold it. Wow. And the internet had heated up a lot. And so there were starting to be some much larger consultancies doing the type of work we were doing. And we didn't think we could scale as fast as these other ones, so we opted in the end to sell to one of them.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're working 100-hour weeks. I mean, we were basically, we set up the living room, we got an apartment, and we flipped coins on who got the bigger bedroom. I want it. Yeah, he won it. And the living room was basically the office, right? So it was just desks with a computer. And we worked. I mean, which was fine because you're working from like 7 a.m. to midnight and then you're sleeping for a few hours and doing it again.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what happened very quickly is it sort of was clear well, Ithaca is not really the right place to be. New York, in theory, would be very logical as a place to be, but we both had more of an affinity for Boston, and we thought from Boston we could easily work with New York clients or what have you. So we actually decided to move to Boston at the beginning of that summer.”
2018-04-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT