YouSaid · the spoken record

Selina Tobaccowala

lines on the record: 98
first: 2019-11-11
most recent: 2019-11-11
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

“It was a web app. We just put it out, and it was called Evite right from the beginning. And the first Evite was my indoor soccer team, which goes back to the fact that I'm not that athletic, but I always love team sports. And I invited my team. And then we actually had to go back to our consulting because we had to make money.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not when we first launched, there was nothing that we knew like it. And then after we launched, there was service after service after service. See you there, time dance, wen.com. There was so many competitors that came. What we believe was after us.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So you as the creator would pick, you know, your category, and then that would trigger a whole bunch of other stuff.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you'd go to the site and there'd be these different channels like baby shower, happy hour, sporting event, fundraiser for schools, and that made it easy to kind of, that was a template that made it easy for you to just pick some graphics and then send it out.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you would receive an email, and one of the learnings we had was you couldn't put the information in the email because then nobody would click through. So we put enough information in the email to entice you, and then you would click through, and you would come to this page to RSVP. And that was the main function, was finding out who was coming. And we built other features on the ability to do potlucks, the ability to take different payment from different people, to give a gift. I mean, there was a lot of it, but at the core base, Evi was always a place to find out who was coming.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to kind of be clear, like Evi was and is, but then, I'm assuming it's similar to what it is now, which is you could get a template and design a cool digital invitation that would kind of be emailed to somebody and then they would open it up as an attachment”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. When we started selling their businesses and we just knew we said, this is not the people we want to work with. We want to be consumers. We want to scale. And, you know, the part of what I've always loved about technology is this idea that you can use technology and reach millions and millions of people. And just that's why I've always been focused on consumers.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you had gone to businesses. You were thinking this is going to be a B2B product. And when you get that pushback, you both sort of decide to hell with these businesses. Let's just put it out into the world and see if just ordinary people want to use it.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're sitting outside, and we said, Oh, well, what if we take this web calendar thing and we let consumers do it? Let them organize stuff with their friends. And that was the birth of Evit, and this was July, August 1998.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we go to the grocery store, which is where we had lunch most days, because that was the easiest place to find cheap food.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was almost like the calendarly and Google calendar. And so we built out these apps. We put on dress clothes. I still remember. We got, both of us got a suit. And we said, okay, we're going to go sell this to people. And we went to this big consulting shop and we did the whole pitch. And this guy says to us, he says, so you're telling me if I want to schedule a meeting, I have to send it to Boston. We're like, send it to Boston. He's like, well, that's where my computers are that run our servers. We're like, no, it goes over the internet. He's like, no, no, if it goes over the internet, what does that mean? That's not going to work. The servers are in Boston. And so we go back and forth in this discussion and we leave there. And as we're leaving, Al takes off his tie and he throws it. And he says, that's it. And Al's the calmest person you'll ever meet in the world. And so this was like, he said, that's it. We're going to figure out and do something for the consumers.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is in Palo Alto. And we started to think, we said, okay, how are all these consultants scheduling their meetings and scheduling their tasks with all of their clients? Because this time there wasn't this like web-based mail, web-based calendaring. Everything was just internal to your company. So we built this product, Web2 and WebCal. And we were going to go sell this product in a company. This was going to be a”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Summer of 98. We were in this small office space on California Avenue, and a lot of the people in our building were these small consulting shops.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had gone back to the drawing board much earlier because we saw that, okay, we signed this business deal. We can keep trying to get them to do it. But in between, we need more ideas. We need more products. And so that summer, before even the November, we started building more products.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love this period in Internet history because like Some of these companies were massive, and then we don't even remember them. All right, so you and Al go back to the drawing board. It was clear that they were not going to put bring collage out into the world.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, so eventually, when the expiration date came around, I called and I said, hey, you guys owe us this money. And we had no money. And so it meant a lot to us. So every day I'd call and I'd call. And this poor admin started to feel bad for me. And she said, okay, I see your agreement. I'm going to go into my boss and I'm going to try to get your check. And eventually she got the check for us. And I think I sent her flowers because she was so excited that she got this check for us.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because we had signed this agreement that it was exclusive until November of 1998. So we said, okay, we need to let that go until then, and we need to work on other things. And so this was in the early summer, and we started building other products”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing this final review with the executive team, and at this point now they have a lawyer, the lawyer comes in the room and says, you can't just steal this content from all these different websites. Like, you have to go license this content from people. We have to go have these business conversations. And then all of a sudden, it was just dead in the water.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was literally going there every day, and I would talk to the different product managers who were in charge of the homepage and I would show it to them and I like got to know people there and we kept moving it forward to try to get it out the door and we were very close.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to get for the licensing when it lost. Sounds like insane money. It was huge for us That's like an amazing amount of money So you guys signed this licensing deal with Excite to give you a $50,000 check, which is more money than you've ever seen in your life.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the check was like 50 or $55,000 that we were going to get for the licensing when it launched. Sounds like insane money. It was like, oh my God, that's like an amazing amount of money. And so we signed. And of course, later, you know, when I talk to my dad about it, he's like, you signed what? What were the terms? But we had no idea. Like we were just so excited about it.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we go ahead and sign this business deal with them, which in retrospect was horrible, but we licensed our technology and product to them exclusively. So we gave them this huge window of time that they had exclusivity. And that meant we couldn't actually go work with slash sell it to anybody else in that timeframe.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I will always remember this day there was the Stanford Job Fair, and I was at work and we were renting this, you know, tiny office space. And I called my dad. And whenever I have issues or questions, even to this day, I call my dad. And I said, hey, dad, you know, I don't know whether to go to the Stanford Job Fair. And he said three things to me. He asked me three questions. He said, do you like working with Al? And I was like, yeah, it's great. You know, I learned a ton from him. We challenge each other. It's fun. And then he said, do you enjoy what you're working on? I was like, yeah, I really think we're going to like help people use the web better. I love the product. I love the mission. And he said, are you learning? And I was like, absolutely. Like I'm learning faster than I think I would in any other situation. And he said, what's the harm in taking the risk? Like, don't look back. Go put your whole heart into it and go after it. And I have used those same three criteria, which is people first, you know, product slash mission, and what am I going to learn in every...”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we walked them through what we created, and their reaction was like, wow, this is really cool. We can see our users would love this concept of personalization. And that wasn't there yet on the internet. And it's just obviously so foreign to what's there today. But if you think about the internet in 1997, 1998, it was mainly content sites.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, yeah, we approached Joe Krause, Craig Donato, like all these guys, and we said, hey, we want to talk to you about this product we've built. And we want to come demo it for you. And they're like, sure, come show it to us.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the beauty of the Stanford network. These are the things that you can't discount when you think about privilege that people have is like you reach out to an executive at Excite and their executive at Yahoo and you say, I'm the senior from Stanford, we'd love to talk to you about a product we built, and they take the meeting”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, no matter who you were, you would get the same article on the front page. So we thought, oh, our homepage is way better, right? We're letting you customize it for you. And so let's go talk to them and see if they'd be interested in buying our product.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we created this site that you would go to. You'd create your collage page, and then you could bookmark it and you could every day, you could come back or a few times a day and you'd get updates on it, whether it was your stocks, whether it was your weather, whether it was your local news, the national news, and we started to get some consumers on it, but we also started to see the portals. We started to see Yahoo, Xite, really those were the two big ones really starting to take off. And we thought, okay, this is really interesting because these are becoming people's homepages, but they're not personalized. They're generic.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we had spent $299 on a fry server, and that was our only cost. And then our little tiny office space. And the rest of it was just time. And we're, you know, living with a, I was living with a bunch of roommates. And we used to actually have like a $5 a day budget we set for ourselves for lunch for both of us. And we would try to game it to like get enough food.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea behind collage was that you had now all this information on the web. You would go on Netscape and you had your hometown newspaper, you had ESPN Sports, which you might love. You might have the latest recipe of the day on the food network. And the idea was that you could clip together stuff from all over the web, create your own homepage, and then algorithmically we would update it for you as things updated. And this was before my Yahoo, before that concept of creating a homepage. And that was our vision and our idea. And the concept was is you'd wake up every morning and you'd come see the information that was relevant and important to you.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would brainstorm and we would go back and forth and talk about different ideas. And then, yeah, then we'd like sit down and we just code and we'd code all day and then I'd go to class and then I'd come back and code. But we had just a few different ideas. And we landed then sometime in kind of late 97, early 98 on this idea called collage”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had at the time a pretty terrible idea. Our company was actually called Oodleworks, which stood for object-oriented template language. And we had this idea that we were going to help other people code using graphics. We were going to democratize coding to everybody. And we tested it with a bunch of our other friends and just said, okay, you're not a computer scientist. Like, can you use this? Can you try it out? And so it was kind of that early form of user testing. And it was very clearly and quickly that it wasn't that useful. And people who weren't computer scientists weren't actually that interested in coding. But we weren't ready to just give up on starting a company because there was so much excitement about starting the company. And that we had really little to lose at that time. I mean, I was still in college. He had just graduated. You know, our expenses weren't high. And so this idea of we're just going to keep working until we find an idea that works. And that was the mode we.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought and I looked, I said, There's so much going on in Silicon Valley. There's no technology going on in Berlin. There was no internship I was excited about. And I said, yes. And I came back to Stanford for the winter and we started planning.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I kept in touch with Al. We weren't actually computer partners. He liked to work alone. Most of our projects he did with three people, and Al definitely was somebody who said, I'm faster doing it by myself. And so we didn't necessarily work together on projects in our sophomore year. And then in my junior year, I went and studied abroad in Berlin. And I was supposed to be there for two quarters. My fall quarter and my winter quarter. And your winter quarter is supposed to be an internship. And so I was talking to all these German companies. And I get this email from Al and says, hey, I'm thinking about starting a company. You're the first person I thought of. Do you want to do it together?”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ann was really then my sophomore year that I went full steam ahead on CS. It was once I saw using computer science in the real world and I saw I reaffirmed that I was good at it. You know, when you walk into Stanford and all of a sudden, you know, you have been the valedictorian and you've been the best student in your class and then you walk in and all of a sudden your average. And it makes you question in the sense of like, oh, am I going to be good at this when I get out into the real world? And having that summer experience, I saw I can do this. I can make this work and I love it.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a little blip, which was I took a computer science class in my freshman year, and I didn't do that well. And I got a little nervous, which is is this the right field for me? And that summer, I got a job, which was what I thought was going to be dabbing activity in the mall. And it turned out I was the mall greeter where I would literally stand there and say, welcome to Paramus Park. And I was complaining about it to my friend's dad. He ran the IT department for an investment bank called Warburg Pincus, and he said, quit your mall job, come intern for me. And I had the most amazing summer experience. I helped build one of the first websites for this investment bank. We built this application called Morning Meeting Notes to help them record all their Monday meetings. And I fell back in love with computer science.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I lived in an all freshman dorham called Branner and two doors down from me was this guy, Al, and he was from Wisconsin. He was a swimmer, but he loved computers. And he was always building stuff. And this will age us. We worked on the first yearbook that was going to be digital instead of physical. We put it on a multimedia CD and distributed it to all the brand refreshment.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't remember the exact moment I used the web for the first time, but I remember that my year 1994 freshman year was the first year everybody had email. All my high school friends had email. And it just changed everything. Like that time in computer technology was just this mass shift to introducing that consumer to all of this content and communications that nobody had access to prior.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That energy of starting a company and the company starting around you and that.com boom, I mean, that was all around you, especially by 1996, 1997. I mean, there was excite, there was Yahoo, there was so many different companies. And that idea that you were a computer scientist and you could go start a company was absolutely in the air.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. And if I look back now, I think about that. You know, I remember I took the AP Computer Science class in my high school and I'm pretty sure I was the only girl in class, but it never occurred to me at the time.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm pretty sure it was logo and basic at the time. And then I do remember learning Pascal. When I was in middle school.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really from the influence of my dad. He started off as a punch card programmer for a company called EDS, and he was there for, I think, about 25 years, and he rose from being this punch card programmer to multimedia president a couple levels away from the CEO of this huge organization. And he always exposed us to technology when he would take us to work every so often. We would see that entire, you know, it was a huge mainframes and servers, and you'd walk in and you'd see all the computers and the technology. And it was just always exciting to me. And so he brought a computer home probably when I was, you know, eight, nine, ten years old. And I got excited about coding and starting to build things. And then my mom schlept me to summer coding camps in all different places across New Jersey to expose me to it more.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. It was on the Omni Pro database, and I used to come home after every game and database who shot from where and then print out a sheet the next day and give it to the good players. And they eventually decided that they wanted me to be their captain, which was very funny because I'd only play the last two minutes of the game, either if we were really up or really behind.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents' perspective If you ask who I was, I mean, I was always that person waving my hand in the air with the answer in class, which I think annoyed a lot of my teachers most of the time. I love to read. I am a terrible athlete. But I always love team sports. And it was something that was important to me. I actually was voted basketball captain of my Ramsey High School basketball team, but not because of my athletic ability, but only because I built a stats program in high school to help the other players shoot better.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invitation business, e-bite. And for a time, Evite was a darling of the dot com bubble. Within two years of its founding, it was valued at around one hundred fifty million dollars. Of course, when the bubble burst in two thousand, so did Evit's value. But unlike other dot com era companies such as Cosmo or Pets dot com or Lycos or GeoCities, Evite hung in there and it's still around today. In fact, invitations from Evite reach more than a hundred million people a year. The company is now owned by Liberty Media, and while it has tons of competitors, Evite is still one of the biggest players in online invitations. As for Selena, Tabakawala, she's still an important name in Silicon Valley. She's become a kind of role model for women and girls who want to get into tech. In fact, back when she was a kid, she loved”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you were to write a business idea in haiku form, it would go something like this. It solves a problem, super easy to explain, people will use it. And back in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were a lot of problems that were ripe for solving, including paper, or rather how to use less of it. Think about the last time you wrote a letter on paper or filled out a registration form with a pen, or filed a physical document into a metal filing cabinet, right? For the most part, email and electronic documents have replaced paper. Same with invitations. Most of the invites I get, and I'm pretty sure you get, come in an email. And for that simple convenience, you can thank Selena Tobakawala. Because back in the late 1990s, Selena and her friend Ali wrote the code that would power the first online”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that the dot-com was at the time was eyeballs. It was like everything was about growth and the traffic and there was no discussion or talk about revenue. And then the bubble burst and all of a sudden it went from spend, spend, spend to, oh my gosh, we need to fire the team.”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2019-11-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Evite: Selina Tobaccowala · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT