YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Byrne

lines on the record: 43
first: 2015-10-06
most recent: 2015-10-06
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

“Weight or worse is going to happen. And with each disruption, people will shift farther into online and then it ratchets. We just made it through in 08, but nothing's been fixed since then. It's just been more and more Novocaine. And eventually, I think the financial system faces something bigger than 08.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's there is absolute value in tech. Somebody actually said this in the first dot-com bubble, something about, you know, an answer to the people who saying everything's a bubble. It's all overvalued. I remember somebody saying, well, most things are and some things are going to turn out to be wickedly undervalued. And so if you take a step back and look at this just at a secular level, the stuff that's being created here in Silicon Valley is going to change or is changing human history. It's immensely valuable collectively. 50 years from now, people will be looking back and still this tech boom isn't over. We're remaking all kinds of institutions and gosh, you only have to look back 20 years, how differently things used to work. I also think there's going to be quite soon a big in the next two or three years, a big disruption in our economy, I think.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff. But more importantly, he would teach me about life and character and decision making and such. And he was, I call him rabbi. He was my great rabbi in life. While I was in college and I saw his name appear in Baron's for the first time, his name was in the press. He wrote this essay that his name's Warren Buffett”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely value to be had. I had a mon I've had an extraordinary set of tailwinds in life. But with the parents that I drew, I won the ovarian lottery. My parents, my family lived sort of the Horatio Alger dream. And from when I was born, my dad was a GI Bill grad student and such to the town I was about 20. Somewhere in that process when I was about 13, this funny guy from Nebraska started showing up and staying with us. And he was incredibly generous with his time with me. I don't know why, but whenever he would visit, he would send word ahead and schedule two or three hours to sit with me. So we would just sit and talk and he would teach me about things. And I thought he was kind of a farmer because he would teach me about, you know, if, okay, now, Patrick, if I've got an acre of land that produces 440 bushels of corn a year and this is the cost of the land and interest rate, it would walk me through this.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pillows and blankets and such. So I don't know if that means that in the household the woman is using the guy's Bitcoin account or if the Bitcoin guys are buying something, I don't know, but the accounts are skewed towards owned by men.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. They tend to be, we can tell from their shopping patterns. They tend to be more technology oriented. They tend to be more male. We're significantly our customer base is larger female than male. They end up generally spending about the same, but because women shop more carefully and men come in and plunk down 200 bucks on their first visit and such. But anyway, we've generally are more female-oriented site, but with Bitcoin, it's tend to be more, the purchasers are more male still. So more male and more technology focused. Although, oddly enough, they're buying things that women normally, well, I mean, when you get talking marketing, you sound terribly sexist or whatever, but it's just there are men buy different things than women buy. They're buying are products that women are more prone to buy.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlike Al Gore, I was not here quite for the beginning of the internet, but I was five years later, and it was we knew we were doing something as revolutionary as the Gutenberg Bible. But I think the crypto revolution is even bigger than the internet. It's political implications are so profound because there's all these centralized institutions that people tend to think it's like they came out of a burning bush. It just has to be this way. You don't need them, including many of the functions of government. So we're going to be disrupting the crypto revolution is going to disrupt all kinds of political institutions that you really, we just have to wake up and remember they didn't come out of the burning bush. They didn't come out of stone tablet. They were institutions we created to accomplish some end that we can now.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whisk into existence with a pen. So that really goes to my other reason for getting involved with Bitcoin is I'm a pro freedom guy. I'm a small L libertarian is another way to say that. Basic dilemma humans have always faced is when you get into consensual exchange, do you go peer-to-peer, in which case trust is an issue? Or do we have some central institution? I don't need to trust you. I don't know you, but I just, if we each trust this one central institution. So take the issue of land titling. You could come and say, well, here's, I'll sell you my piece of land here, and here's a piece of paper. I'll give you. But I don't know if I can trust you that you own this. you know years and years ago civilization adopted this method of well let's have a central office that keeps the titles and then we all go there and that way the trust issue is solved what the what the blockchain does is for the first time in man's history lets us have peer-to-peer exchange which is trustworthy you don't need the centralized institution that's why i think it is”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was first I knew that there was a value in being the first that you just the publicity value, the global publicity. Also, there was, it makes such sense that this, so at the time it was maybe a tenth of 1% of sales. And it's grown to be, let's say, a quarter of 1% of sales. I think it's very early stage. I actually think I'm kind of a gloom and doom guy about the economy and the financial system. So I think when it all cracks, you know, there's going to be the guys back in Washington are going to be able to be pushing us to adopt the IMF. There will be a global currency and the powers that be want that global currency to be based on the IMF SDRs, the special darling rights. I think that that's just the right time for civilization to make the switch and get off of a kind of currency that any political authority, any political mandarin can”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zipped around the world. I started getting, you know, there were things from South Korea and Thailand and stuff. There were articles about this. And I realized, wow, this is no longer some little cult. There really are people paying attention. And I called one of your companies, Coinbase, who was super responsive. I called them on December 31st of 2013. And on January 2nd, they flew a team out to help us with an integration. And we were integrated. They stuck some people in a room with, we put a few dozen developers, and no, it wasn't even that much, maybe a dozen. And basically slid pizzas under the door for a week. And on around January 10th, so not much more than a week later, we brought live a Coinbase as our processor. And we're the first. I knew by...”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, it happened. I somewhat stumbled across it, although I was reading about Bitcoin and probably by 2012 or 2011 as a curiosity. I was reading it. And then I will never forget December 19th, 2013, a reporter interviewing me said out of the blue, you're going to take Bitcoin anytime soon and I operating on the Dilbert principle of nothing's too hard when you don't have to do it yourself. I said, yeah, sometime in the next year in 2014, sometime we'll take it. Well, I said that as an offhand comment figuring, well, you know, sometime a year later, if we had some free cycles in our development team, we'd throw the project at them. That little mention.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the Wall Street Journal wrote a story at the end of 2008 saying, okay, there were five guys who figured this out and Nassim Talib and Patrick Byrne. Bloomberg actually did an Emmy nominated documentary In 2007, half hour show about me saying there's this, basically there's this crazy guy you've been hearing about in Utah and he sounds crazy. But if you look at his data, there's actually seems to be something to what he's saying. And they were really the most progressive of any of the East Coast media. And then after 08, yes, there's no, yeah, there were a bunch of vindication stories and associated press and other things like that. And then, so that to me, in my mind, that whole fight was over.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each other at a distance for 10 years. And he sat me down and he said, first thing he said was, Patrick, I want you to know you're the single most hated man I've ever known in my life. You used to be kind of a golden boy on Wall Street, but now you could kill people and we wouldn't hate you like we hate you in this town.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Society sets up regulators to protect us from certain industries, but it's a standard feature of regulations since the first regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, that they become captured, they become towboys for the industry they're supposed to be regulating. And so I started talking about that. And the East Coast press was running photos, you know, photoshop pictures of me with UFOs coming out of my head. This is some conspiracy theory that they, what, Wall Street's in bed with the SEC and the SE with this doesn't make it. This is a crazy conspiracy theory. Hell, I think anyone who's awake hasn't been living under a rock gets that now I think our SEC is better today than it was Frank under Chris Cox and that it was in the last decade and they're more sparky and more open-minded. But anyway, in January 2007, this well-known hedge fund guy asked me to come see him and we had known.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is what happened. We went public in 02. And when you're a public company CEO, you're out there swimming in the mix. You're out there with hedge funds and prime brokers and regulators and bankers. And between 02 and 04, I became convinced there was a whole bunch of no-good nicks on Wall Street. And in 04, I came out very publicly, just started saying it and explaining. And in 05, I did a press conference, 500 people online. And I explained, well, Wall Street's full of a bunch of criminals. This is who they are by name. This is what they're doing, how they're doing it. And by the way, no one's ever going to sue me because they can't take discovery. That's how sure I am of what I'm saying. And among my claims was the SEC is what economists call”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the fellow who said it himself, not such a bad guy, so I don't want to use his name, but he's a well-known, kind of a graybeard of the hedge fund industry and well-respected guy and himself not tanged up in anything untoward.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System is driving them to things they're interested in. So the recommendation algorithm spans some of that distance, but at the end of the day, if you want to go and be shopping among tens of millions of products and anything, there's other sites for that, like eBay or Amazon. In our departments, we have real buyers just like you would have at Nordstrom who have a vision of who our customer is and they want to what they want to be getting and what kind of a department they want to have. And so that's something that's different with Overstock versus the other big retailers.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly where the world is. And we realized about six or seven years ago some of the real value we could bring would be in the curation. We went from seven years ago, we had about 50,000 products. We moved up to a million. But they're hand-selected. We have buyers. We're much more like a department store. We have buyers who are talking. We don't allow anyone to just come up and put anything they want on our site. We're designing categories when we get into bridle gowns. We've got a specialist in bridle gowns who's talking to the suppliers and choosing the right things. A lot of analytics drive that. So on the border between curation and non-curation is your recommendation system. Because you recommend recommendation system if it's good, it means you can offer more products and people don't feel like they're lost in a bazaar because you're.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, getting things ironed, it's just unbelievable. We keep looking around and still seeing dollar bills we can pick up off the ground, places we can just keep squeezing costs out of our supply chain. And a way you can look at the business as it's erased, who can do that faster? And as you can do that faster and pass the savings on to the consumer, that's your moat.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was about war, but the same thing is true for it's really, a lot of people take for granted how that it's easy to do some of this logistics, it's actually really hard. And finding places to just shave nickels and dimes all day long and have a set of continuous improvement processes, that's really, I think, been our secret sauce is logistics. And it'd be really tough to break in from scratch into that, into, for example, our corner of the market because it's just so you need some scale, but it's also a matter of getting”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is a tight margin business. We operate at basically a 1% net margin, about free cash flow is more like three or four percent. The truth is those margins, it's awful tight to break into ETA. Now the rise of cloud means that people don't have to make the huge upfront capital expenditures that we did. But the way you compete is it's all about supply chain. Marketing is sexy and people come out of business school and they want to talk marketing. They want to talk strategy. But Klaus Witz said amateurs talk strategy professionals talk logistics.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“E commerce and much of retail is a really small margin business. And the pressure on retailers is squeezing their margins even more. So how do you either maintain margin or have such scale that you can make a business sing with the margins that you can get?”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of that is to some degree, yes, we're having products that aren't showing up anywhere else in the supply chain or there's model some difference in models. But more and more we are, or less and less we are a true overstock closeout business and more and more a general inline retailer whose products are salted with closeouts and bankruptcy and really good buys”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were always 30 or times her size. We've kind of stayed around the same relative proportion here in the US. We've gotten much more upscale and we're not called inline now where it really isn't all bankruptcies and stuff, but there's a lot. And in many ways, we're like Amazon, except I like to say about 10% cheaper on average and with better customer service as several industry groups have certified. And we have 2 million products. They have, I don't know how many, tens of millions.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of other people with good high end products came to us and we crawled out of dealing with a drek and turned into dealing with really higher. We had one supplier. At the time, we were buying all this stuff and bringing it into Salt Lake and selling it. But we had one supplier who was selling vacuum cleaners or something. And every week we were buying a truckload of vacuum cleaners. And we finally said, let's say he was in Chicago, which is I think where he was. And we finally said, you know, instead of buying these and moving them down to Utah and then to our warehouse and then selling them, why don't we just open a little hole in the back of our database? You can upload every week what how many you have. And then you can ship them right out of Chicago. And thus began our partner program. We were the first to the market with it. Amazon followed a couple years later. And now 90% of our business, we never actually touch. It's we've got all these suppliers all over the country. It's a good platform for them.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changed the mix of inventory, which triggered another change that people, suppliers, stopped seeing us as the folks who were selling low-end drek. And because we got, say, Miadora, which was a Miadora.com was a jewelry company that just about a mile from here that went under. And we got $7, $10 million worth of their diamonds and watches and all this stuff for a few million dollars. And we started selling that. And then other higher-end companies went under. We started liquidating. Well, that greatly improved the quality of stuff on our site. So they sent Wall Street liquidity begets liquidity. As we had that stuff, more suppliers with really good Cartier watches and people like that started coming to us and we started liquidating their stuff and Seco and so it all fed itself. Once we started having some really good high Products”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just smiling. Maybe this is the wrong place to be telling that story, but I have a huge respect for your firm. I really do. It's such a premiere”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About six months later, we were sputtering along and trying to get the business model working, dealing with these little products. And this wonderful thing happened called the dot-com collapse. And as all these companies went out of business, we found that the supply chain that we had built to deal with overstocks and canceled orders worked really well on bankruptcies too. And we went in and liquidated 19 companies that had been funded by the same fellows who turned us down.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's changed. We started with a hundred products that you would find in the flea market industry, Chotch and Drek is what would be known in the retail trade, just drek, just, you know, Epiladi, which was one of my bad buys, just really cheapo stuff. And we got going with it. And then one of the things that happened was we were turned down when I were turned down by 85 venture capitalists.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“House and all these other costs build up without inventory cost. And if you just look at the cost of having the trousers on the shelf, you're not really seeing the full cost. And I'd say it's the same as absolutely true about IT, that if the people doing the comparison are just looking at, well, what's the cost of having this box versus point of having something in the cloud? They're missing the real cost of having, it's all the staff and everything associated with that gets missed from a conventional analysis.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would tell a story that my great mentor, who will, I suppose, will get to, to told me, I was working from 16, 17 years ago, and we were talking about inventory control. And he said, you know, Patrick, and the financial people don't really understand the cost of owning inventory. At the time, this was inventory, some apparel. I was in the apparel business. And he said, you know, when your CFO and stuff looked at it and they talked about cost of capital and involved in inventory, in general, they underestimate what the real costs are of having a warehouse full of slow moving inventory. The real cost is not just the stuff that's sitting on the shelf. It's the cost of the personnel who are there cleaning it and counting it and dusting it and the cost of heating and lighting.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was territoriality. There's been a real turnover in leadership in our tech department in the last few years, and the new leadership is embracing the cloud, but the old leadership was quite resistant to it. And I think it was by nature, territoriality, people in any organization start measuring themselves by how many people they have and what their budgets are and things like that. And I should make clear that starting around 07, we got We got good enough that we could we didn't need as much of the third party anymore. We got good by four or five years ago at our own recommendations. So we started doing that and our own internal search and all kinds of functions. So we started displacing a lot of the third parties, but really ultimately it was two or three years ago, I had to remove some people who were quite obstructionist to moving into the cloud and the new leadership has been much more receptive.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's really only been in the last three or four years that we've made a push into the cloud. So parts, as much of we can, I want us to push as much up into the cloud as we can. There's some natural resistance within our tech group, but I'm always pushing because, again, it's just the nature of things that people, when they analyze the cost, they're missing all the overhead costs associated with it's not just about the boxes, it's about all the toilet paper and the dusting and all that kind of stuff.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we've not made as much of a transition to the cloud as we should have, but it's, and I'm a huge fan of the cloud. We do have parts in the cloud. We think we're at the size where a lot of our technologists say, well, we have the scale that it wouldn't save us any money to do things in the cloud. I'm not completely convinced of that because if all your comparison is, well, if we did it in the cloud versus if we buy these boxes, what it costs, that's one thing. But you really got to remember that unless you're doing things in the cloud, you've got, you know, it isn't just that you have to buy the boxes, you have to have the people who run the boxes and dust the boxes and plug them in and off. And those people need secretaries and you need toilet paper and there's light and heat and electricity. There's all these other costs that multiply. And I'm a big fan.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get us because if they could get us to integrate, then they could get 100 other customers. And so we became quite good at doing third-party integrations, and that's the way we leveraged having a very small IT department. But in retrospect, I say this as a cautionary tale because if I had to do over again, I would go back and”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we did not do the things in house, and there was no cloud back there. We became a great third party integrator. And that's how we say, well, we did data warehouses and such with Terra data. But what we didn't have the, we actually didn't have the skill sets back in 05, 06. We had 13 developers. We were $500, $600 million company with 13 developers and we were, you know, I was fighting people who were saying we should take it down to seven to save a few pennies. And I was like, no, we should be taking it up to $100, $200. So we integrated with a lot of 30 third parties. And I think that we became known among third parties as the biggest of the e-tailers who would do these external integrations to handle things dealing with, say, recommendation, a recommendation system. And so it became something of a feather in people's.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Scott A. Divert all power to the shields. We had to divert all just a hand. I've given her all she's got. Just to keep it in the Christmas season with all the traffic, we would have to turn off the financial system. We would even have to turn off reporting. We'd have to turn off departments. There was a point we had to actually turn off products on our site just so we had enough power to support the Christmas wave. And then finally around 0405 we said this is silly and we raised $120 million and we went out and built big enterprise class systems over the next few years.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the company grew, and probably as I grew, as the, but as the company grew and we kept, our first year was a million eight, then it was about $30 million, then $75 million, then $115,000, $200, $350, $500. And the very simple systems we had put in place to begin with, everything was at risk of breaking at the seams. In fact, we used to have to, it was turn off parts of our parts of our company, our financial system and such just because our computer, our entire company was running on an HP N-class box, sort of a $300,000 box about the size of this little table in front of us. And that was okay when we were, you know, 10, 20, $30 million, but you turn around a few years later and you're $500 million running on this one box. It became like Star Trek.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, the original thinking was we had to get the retail part right. We didn't want to be a technology company trying to do retail but not knowing we wanted to get the retail part right and then amplify it with technology. So I used to say tell folks in our company, look, we're a lemonade stand that has a computer in it. Let's not think of ourselves as a tech company. Let's get the lemonade right. And once that's right, then we'll work. So that's where we got started. And then once we had that, that's, and I probably, if I had to do over again, I was probably wrong, or at least my emphasis was on the wrong syllabal. I should have been more focused on the technology to begin with.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I seemed old fashioned to them. They would say things like, well, what, okay, if we put in $10 million, what are you going to do with it? And I said, well, we're going to build this out as inexpensively as possible and just how business people used to talk. And the VCs and us would say, no, no, if we do this, it's all about lambrab. Everything's a land grab. So it's just about getting as much sales as you can or getting. And it was nothing about sort of running a disciplined income statement and balance sheet. And so that's why we never saw eye”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was heretic. What prophets? No. What do you? I mean, I literally people, I got, I was up here on Sandhill Road. I was turned down by 85 venture capitalists at the height of the dot-com boom when folks were dropping out of Stanford Business School on a one paragraph business plan raising $100 million. Here I had run some companies. I thought I had this great, but I went up and down Sandhill Road, met with 85 venture capitalists and 85 VCs turned me down.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, we that's absolutely correct in'99 there was a lot of craziness going on and crazy thinking about the internet. A lot of people getting involved doing I'd been a normal businessman. I'd run a couple old meat space as I call it, their cyber space and meat space. I'd run a couple meat space companies and so there was some crazy thinking it seemed to me about the internet. And then so when we started I just I didn't want to take part in any of that and so we were really about revenue and expense control and trying to cover our expenses and generating positive cash flow and profits and such.”
2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2015-10-06 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source