YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Armstrong

lines on the record: 102
first: 2019-03-23
most recent: 2019-03-23
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

“Also helped us. She's the first conversation she actually knew, not only knew about our platform, had been using it and had been thinking of integrating her fashion line into the platform. And I thought, I don't know, but actually was all true. It was not just sort of just love being shown. She actually had been doing it and has been using it and also knew many postures, as we call our users firsthand and knew their stories in terms of how they are thinking of quitting their jobs, full-time moms and doing it. So it was like someone who was very authentic. And for us, our community is super authentic. We've sort of generally shied away from people who are just... Spokesperson, and Serena is the real thing as far as posh mark is concerned. And of course, she's amazing”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we just announced that Serena Williams has joined our board of directors. The thinking to me was to really bring someone who can bring a bunch of trace. Number one is a very, very deep thinker and sort of has an experience in both. Second is understands our consumer. And third is understands entrepreneurship. And I was looking for someone who brought all those things together. The thing that surprised me in the very first conversation is how much...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think our men's business right now is just embryonic. It's just growing. In fact, I was at an event in Phoenix last week and it was the first time I had 10 or 12 men that I could stand with and take a picture. So our men sell a stylus is growing. I would love to tell you a year from now that most of your clothing, Jason, that you're buying is from Pashmark and many of the men here.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so if you add TV, those are sort of the three big channels. But we have fairly diversified set of sources overall in terms of how we reach. And a big part of our reach is very organic. It's really our users going out and spreading the word, doing a lot of physical events and talking to other people. So having a social community that becomes one of the very powerful ways in which you grow.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly regional right now, some national, but it's been a channel of tremendous growth for us. Disappointing wise, I would say, middle of last year, Facebook really started to have challenges. We've seen some...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Selling in our sellers kind of become influencers from that perspective as opposed to influencers becoming sellers. The powerful part is that people are looking for that. People are looking for those spontaneous conversations. People are looking for that curation. People are looking to find and be delighted and be merchandised in a way that the stores are not giving them. So it isn't just about resale in my opinion. It is really about curation and merchandising, the fact that the sourcing of that merchandising in large part today comes from closets allows the merchandising and the products to be quite diverse. And that's what's delightful. And that's sort of what we see is people wearing a beautiful dress that could be high-end and then they could be wearing a necklace or a pair of shoes that could be 10 or $20. And that's sort of what if you look at what I'm wearing here, there's something that's $20. It's something that maybe $300,000, $400.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for us, one of our core philosophies is you focus on love and money comes. And it's really all centered around user engagement and really empowering our seller stylists to curate, to merchandise, to sort of focus on it. The transaction piece is entry stakes. You need to make the transaction work very smoothly. You need to make sure shipping works smoothly, make payments, payment distribution, dispute resolution, customer service. And that's the stuff we spend the first three, four years really working through fought many battles and won most of them. And that became the core infrastructure. And then it's all about creating a fair playground where 5 million people can come and play and sort of enjoy. And for most people who are selling, it's part of their sort of enjoyment, not just money making. And then it also certainly makes money on the side. And for some people, it is the core money making, but they still enjoy the process.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really think that to be truthful, I think a lot of the work we did early on was getting a bunch of core infrastructure done, getting sort of the technology part. And at this point, we're scaling. In fact, our last financing was almost 18 months back overall. So the business is scaling. And I think in the grand scheme of things, if you think of sort of Nugen of retail and everything, 150, 160 million is a decent amount of money, but in today's world, it's not massive amounts of money.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And new school brands are struggling to figure out the right model. And similarly, you sort of have this whole area in retail where micro brands are rising and people are trying to figure out how to play with microbrands. Do I place microbrand in my store? Do I sort of do that? And by the time they decide that that microbrand has evolved and another microbrand has more. So in this whole sort of world, how do you play it? And we believe sort of the approach that it has to be much more platform oriented as opposed to a specific niche or a specific sort of point.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think When you start to think of super disruption, which is what resale is doing beyond sort of social commerce, I think it's caught everyone by surprise. To be honest, even though we built a resale-based platform in social commerce platform, the scale and the speed of it has even caught me a little bit by surprise. I feel I knew that we'd be successful, but to see how vibrant the space is and how pervasive people are using it is, and there's lots of reasons that happening, Marikonda is not the only reason I think the whole sort of social platform and growth of social is really driving it. And I think when you think of the life cycle of a product and you start to extend it in a meaningful way, particularly clothing, it changes the entire way of thinking. So I think not just retail, but brands will have to respond to it. I think the challenge is how do you sort of disrupt yourself? And that's always been the problem whether you look at media, right, where old school brands are sort of shrinking and disappearing.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, we've never really focused on a zero-sum game. I mean, really, we don't believe that in this world, I think zero-sum is there's disruption happening. If you think about physical stores shutting down sort of many, many traditional brands, either getting marginalized or disappearing. So disruption is happening. I think for us, we believe that this is really a new approach to shopping, but really not so new. It's really enabling an approach to shopping, which is very human, which is very personal, that existed 50 years back, first came the big department store, then came the big websites, and pretty much took away the human from the experience. We're bringing back human. That's pretty simple. I mean, I think people are important.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, you effectively, it's almost like at the source, you put a data layer and everything processed through the data layer. So everything you see. So let's say you were selling a whole bunch of different things in your closet, men's clothes, women's clothes, kids' clothes. If I enter the kids' market, I'd only see kids stuff. We have something called a posh party. If I visited a posh party, you'd only see kids stuff. So it's very immersive. You just switch back and go to men. So we've launched plus size. We've launched kids luxury. So that's sort of one area of expansion. Second is continue to grow our network effect and build out bigger business. We publicly announced that we are expanding to Canada and we'll be launching in Canada this year. So that sort of another way of driving the growth. And third is to look at other lifestyle categories like home, which allow our seller stylists to participate in things that they love to do anyway.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Waikondo has definitely been a great sort of advocate of really recycling and looking at your closet in a new way. For us, I think we continue to grow our user community. And we've been growing that at a very fast rate, as you can talk from an app store ranking perspective. We also continue to launch posh markets. And Posh Market is sort of a new innovation we did last year, which is effectively creating a very immersive app-like experience within the platform. So you can shop for men's and the whole app transforms to men, or you can shop for luxury, and the whole app transforms to luxury. And so that is really a category expansion, but from a mobile native way. And that creates a very strong discovery social commerce experience where traditional tabbing or searching doesn't work.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have an expectation setting that's there on the listing, but no promise. There's no guaranteed delivery within that two, three days yet because it also depends upon how quickly the sellerships that item.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not yet making promises on, since you're still relying on the seller to decide when they can actually get that out. You're not yet making promises, like an Amazon type promise that order within so-and-so or buy purchase within so-and-so.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard thing to replicate overall and to have that entire system working and functioning without touching the goods with a very high loyalty in the platform, that to us over the long term becomes something that you can take it down, you can take it down, just think about it if you have 2,000 physical stores. Imagine if you could use our infrastructure to turn those stores into many warehouses so when the salespeople are not selling, they can actually be shipping out those items which people are buying from that store sitting in some other part of the world.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most buyers, you know, I would say expect, depending upon the distance, a couple of days of service, in fact, we have buyers who expect to order on a Wednesday and wear that item on a Friday or a Saturday for an evening out. That's sort of the expectation which exists. Having said that, I think we are far from an Amazon SLA and there's a lot of work to be done between now and then. But that sort of the core infrastructure around shipping is something we thought through and actually fought a very hard won battle with USPS to create this simple shipping system. And that also creates a long-term competitive advantage because if you think about it, what we've created is a highly distributed logistics infrastructure where you're shipping from millions of small warehouses, some are homes, some are actual wheel warehouses, and each of them is being shipped by a specific set of individuals using a shared virtual infrastructure, which also matters of physical infrastructure.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the bets we made very early on was that two to three day delivery is going to be a key advantage for us. So we actually created something called Posh Post in partnership with USPS Day one. Every single package that our seller stylish actually goes through a USPS priority box. There's no choice. That's a minimum expectation of every service that we ship. And on every seller stylist profile, you see their days to ship, which is same day within 24 hours within 48 hours. So you can pretty much compute roughly what your expected time of delivery of the package would be. And because the shipping is...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an experiment, it was a small experiment to touch it. I think again, the challenge of sort of working with different kinds of supply chain, demand chains, working through the fast inventory cycles, as well as sort of the new consumer behavior. I think will lead to sort of fundamental reinvention of many of these flows. I often talk about that the new And that's doing it with very few skews. If you start to broaden it out and you have 75 million skews, how do you make it happen? It requires rethinking some of the problems.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We work with Rebecca Minkoff and we did an early partnership with them. We in fact even drove a lot of traffic to their LH store and sort of did back and forth. Most recently, we actually put some of our, this was reverse, we actually put some of our seller stylist brands that they've created at Macy's and put it in the Macy's market. And that's been very interesting to see how that happened. There was a lot of traffic that went in the store. But one of the memes that I saw, which was quite surprising, was that many of the customers who came wanted to buy the item they were seeing in the store on Poshmark. They didn't want to go to the cash register, which I thought was quite shocking.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Awesome, awesome. Well, at some point, you know, it might go in Jason's closet. So, as people are sort of touching and liking these items, you'll see the sellers engaging with them and then like today, for example, is one of the days where we have our clear out so people will drop prices. You'll get a notification saying, or I may, if I like your jacket, saying, hey, this jacket is for sale and I may pick it up. So that whole sort of model of this very hyper personal engagement, you know, sort of little bit of pricing flexibility, this sales cycle of starting from liking to actually purchasing, it's a very disruptive set of behavior and phenomenas and that sort of something trying to figure out how do you figure it into a traditional fulfillment cycle and merge them together will take time.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really figuring out the right model. So, for example, on our platform, the shopping is a very sort of different experience. So people will come and I'll say, hey, let's see you're selling this jacket. I'll just say, I like this jacket. I may buy these shoes.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so easy to get, especially with physical distribution and retail distribution, kind of dying down. And then if you put your product on a large website, Who knows who's going to ever find that product?”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we actually did full priced inventory. We've done liquidation of inventory as well. A lot of it is a different kind of model. So it's almost like if you think of social media, traditional media and how they've partnered, not partnered, you know, et cetera. I feel like social commerce platform like ours can really be a great partnership with traditional brands. And I think over the next few years, you'll see us doing more and more sort of partnerships and experiments and seeing and engaging in a way that can be very, very productive. One of the ways if you can think about is our seller stylish really can take that brand and take it to newer audiences that traditionally the brand is not able to reach. They can also act as customer service. They can style it. They can also even fulfill it if the brand so chooses to do. And that gives a level of penetration into different demographics, different cities that is”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can also get into the journey and start to create brands. So many of the seller stylists on our platform are now launching new brands, whether it's for kids or for men's or for women or jewelry brands. And they are following sort of enhancing their distribution with other sellers on the platform.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's two aspects of it. One is that the brands that are being curated there are in many times created by our community itself. So for example, we have a woman who's a large boutique owner. She's a bomb of two kids, lives in LA. She had a big boutique on Poshmark, and now she's launched a brand which has one of the very high followings on the platform. Thousands of sellers are carrying that brand. And they will take that brand. And a lot of it is just dresses and other kinds of clothing. And they'll personalize it to their needs and their own style, which is almost, you know, if you go to a traditional show, like a magic fashion show, people will pick up inventory and the boutique owners will then go and dress it up in their physical boutiques. That's sort of how it flowed because you have to connect that product to the customer. And what you are tapping into is not just one or two people, but thousands, in fact, tens of thousands of people picking that up. On the flip side, any”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into is not just a simple life, but the fact that our preferences and tastes are sort of accelerating constantly that we should be rotating these items at a very fast pace. And then the third thing was really an accelerated demise of physical retail and major brands where sort of this emergence of smaller brands is happening. And that's what you were talking about earlier is we have hundreds of socially native brands that have been created by our community on the platform. That's not forced. That was naturally happening. What we did was we created a wholesale market. We added something called a boutique kind of concept. And that has sort of led to the acceleration of that aspect of our business. But resale is a fantastic business as well.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could wait for a long time for that Uber to lift. The reason is, I think people don't want to spend time making all of those decisions. They want the platform to take care of it. So we provide a layer of inbuilt trust for both the seller and buyer. We provide shipping. We provide sort of all of the buyer protection, seller protection built into the platform. But going back to your original question, what triggered it, I think the first thing was mobile and sort of the rise. When we first started the company in 2011, we bet the entire company is building a mobile app, which was considered very antithetical. And if I built a previous company, I may not have even gotten the funding for this company to start the journey because everyone thought that for buying, you needed a website and we didn't create a website till two, three years into the journey. Second thing is I think social media, which is both an accelerator in the joy of selling, but also an accelerator in the joy of obsolescence. So when you think of Murray Kondo, sort of what she's capped.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Zero inventory. Everything is held by our seller stylish. You have to really engage and empower where anybody can be a sellant in order to make selling fun. You have to remove a lot of barriers on the platform. For example, we do not have any public reviews. If you think of a large marketplace with no public reviews, in fact, the first three years, we didn't have any reviews at all. And the marketplace functions. So those were the thesis. Now, why?”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my thesis and sort of our team as a founding team, there's four of us who started the company. Our thesis was that social really is the key to discovery. I had a previous company called Caboodle, where we really talked a little bit about social discovery, but there was no actual transactions happening on the platform. The second thing was, in order to sort of scale, particularly fashion retail, you need almost an insane amount of inventory. So, for example, at any given point in time in Poshmark, we have 75 million skews that are available. And third thing is, in order to provide the social security,”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe walk into a stationary store and there's a specific pen for you. That is beautiful. Yes, right there because he knows that Jason is writing that phenomenal book on the evolution of poshmark, right?”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're competing for time with social networks. We're competing for time with TV, but really, more importantly, we're delivering retail in a way that suits the social generation that we are on, which is constant consumption of content. We want instant access. But also we want sporadic conversations. If you go back to retail 30, 40, 50 years back, you could walk into a store. You'd ask, hey, Jenna, I'm going for my girls weekend. outfit me something right or jason could walk into a store 40 years back and somebody might say hey jason here's a hammer for you and the hammer would be because you're potentially working on your deck and the store owner know”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, if you go to a typical store day one, it's a little overwhelming. There's a lot of products. If you go to that same store day two, it's a little underwhelming. Nothing has changed. Whereas when we look at our time today, when we turn around, when we look at whatever we are doing, we expect things to be changing. We go on Netflix binges. We scour Instagram. We are sort of constantly consuming and refreshing content. How do you simulate that same experience in retail? In Pashmark.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've always thought of us as a social commerce platform focused on fashion and lifestyle category, where resale is really the fuel that drives it. So resale, in a way, democratizes retail. It really empowers anybody to be a seller. And certainly for you to have access to an unbelievable array of products that are available from people's closets. So that's sort of the first thesis. The second thing is by enabling people to not just sell, but also curate on the platform, you really bring this social community together, which is something that is really missing, you know, whether you think of physical retail, you think of online retail, everything gets very static very quickly.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so early days, and I think up until maybe the last couple of years, when I thought of Poshmark, I thought of secondhand clothing, sort of across the spectrum of brands. And then it seemed, so that's still how I think about it mainly, and I think that's likely how most people think about it. But when we've talked recently, you've sent across a different message around full-price clothing and brands actually launching on the marketplace. So was that a forced, an evolution that just happened, or is that something you all have tried to push on the marketplace? To me, it seems like there's still plenty of room to grow in secondhand. We'll talk about Marie Condo in a second. That impact”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a couple of things I think we have basically been in a very disciplined approach to growth. So if you think of sort of a lot of times, you'll see apps just spike up and then come down. For us, it's been a gradual climb up the ladder. And a lot of it is built on not just marketing and bringing in new users, but also the loyalty of our users. So when you think of our platform, really the fuel that drives it is the social commerce engine. And that's really all about people connecting, people following and building those deep connections. And the result is that you have sort of this tremendous loyalty both to the actual sellers on the platform and then for sellers on the platform to the platform.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those things change really quickly, and I think the money raising side of things is very easy right now. Like we've had people just straight out call us to offer us money for DTX and to invest in it. And, you know, DTC is a hot area. We're in it, so I can understand that. Really, I don't know if you're in the middle of a recession. I don't know if those type of things are going to happen. So with the founders, we've been talking to them about just make sure you set up your structure, your money raising for a rainy day because it hasn't been much rain in the last 10 years. But when it comes, rainy days are also the best time to be set up structurally for success because while everyone else pulls back, if you're set up well to get through that and you're happy with your structure, you're happy with the amount of money you raise, you're happy with your ownership, it's a great time to put the turbo down on kind of powering through those recessionary times. So we do talk to people about that.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of answers back on that one. A lot of people want to print the big number on their valuations. The other thing that's happened is when people are printing these big numbers on valuations, they're doing structured deals. And that's the other thing people don't realize is you might see somebody print evaluation of $500 million or a billion dollars or $2 billion on a private fundraising. What they don't see is the ratcheting that's happening on the structure behind. So the entrepreneur could end up in a situation where they're going to lose control of the company or if there's a hiccup in the market, which again, you got to remember for anyone who's under the age of, let's call it 35, or maybe 32, they haven't lived through any kind of a disruption in the money raising market, the recessionary period, those things. So you kind of forget what it's like to be in that environment, but it's...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think one, I'm glad you brought this up because I do think this is a mistake. There was a period of time where everyone wanted a mega valuation and the founders got really deluded. The other thing I should have said this in our thread, the other thing we want is we want our companies we're investing in, we want the founders to have really big stakes in the company. And I think having a really big stake for them has a whole bunch of psychological things. If they can become profitable faster, I think will end up in a much better financial situation for themselves and for the company and those things. So we've been had this conversation with every single one of the founders and one of the questions I asked the founders or our team asked the founders is, you know, how much future money raising you're doing and what valuations are going to be doing at and what's your end goal in terms of ownership stake. And I think that you get...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're trying to invest in companies that we think can build standalone companies, and they're really interested in building big companies also.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The founders were investing in we go in with our theories that they are obsessed and passionate enough and learning based. Like a lot of stuff we look for, we meet with them is whether or not they're science-based versus opinion-based. And theoretically, if they're science-based, they'll keep learning and learning and learning. And if they can live on their own great, it strikes me as likely watching what's happening in the offline spaces that a lot of these DTC companies are going to be acquisition targets. And then I think that's why we say we're founder aligned, because at the end of the day, we've told the founders when we invested in them, you know, we're really going to work and counsel you and do whatever we can. You got to make up your own mind about where your output is going to be from this. So we're not at that stage yet. And I don't know where we'll end up.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That basically looks more like the other platforms he uses. And so I think we're doing hard physical goods, but there's other things that we're doing which are more kind of digital direct-to-consumer products and services, and that's one of them that's been really successful, I think, and really interesting model too.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10% or 20% into their unit economics, some of them more, some of them like a third love is probably more. And then what we're investing in, so we've done a number of investments in physical goods companies, and then we did an investment into what I would call a director college, really just the consumers around college in niche.com, which is down in Pittsburgh. It's a great company at Carnegie Mellon Engineers. And really what they're doing is bringing a two-way relationship to the college process. And for those of you, I have a son right now who's going through the college process or starting to look at schools. watching him look at the traditional ways to look at college information which is like an editorially driven hey this college does this this is how they do it versus what niche does which intakes a lot of the two way relationships with the college students themselves he's instantaneously attracted to the platform”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think just on the second part first, most of the companies were invested in, we know they probably haven't reached their maximum unit economics, but they have cultures and processes that will allow them to continue to get to whatever that end state is in general. So most of the companies we're dealing with are probably...”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Twitter. But friends, if you get 150,000 live people watching, you probably would have been like the fifth or sixth largest cable channel in the United States at that time period. So”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's an example of our DTC brand, and I saw you doing it. You're taking your time to do it, and something must be working.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're probably doing a solitary. You guys have been doing live broadcasting, or you especially I've noticed. What is the learnings and reaction to live broadcasting?”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Twitter I would consider definitely also on that list. I don't know. I'm actually not as knowledgeable on Twitter from an ad standpoint or marketing standpoint, but I would Twitter would be a total natural also.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the other thing is an explosion of physical products going into other people's channels. So I think that's another area of opportunity. So I think you're going to see a mixture of experiential offline and online. We're more spending our time on the experiential side. I know the digital side fairly well. And I think there's room to grow on digital and different platforms. And I think there's areas.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's, again, I'm not involved in these companies, so what I'm about to say is I'm not showing for anybody. But I think Pinterest is a really interesting property. I think they have really deep vertical information on things. I think Reddit is interesting just in terms of the community there overall. So there's platforms like that that I think people have probably tried and toyed with, but those would be worthwhile spending time on them because they're big communities. They're deep. And I don't necessarily hear those a lot when I talk to the DGC companies. But if I were running a DTC company, those are the types of things that I would be really spending time like a scientist trying to figure out.”
2019-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: dtx CEO Tim Armstrong and Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra (live at An Evening With Code Commerce) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT