SPEAKER_00: and then on the people side by one principle that has been very core to me as an entrepreneur is embracing the weirdness of every single person you meet and also embracing your weirdness which means recognizing you're special and you're kind of unique but you're also kind of screwed up and effed up like everyone else and then aligning with the person you're meeting and knowing that they have strength and figuring out how to combine those strengths and admire that and that has allowed me to tap into various folks you know for example in my board we had people of certainly different ethnicities and colors you know i was privileged to have two black women on my board but that was sort of what you can look but then when you think of their strengths with each person brought there were people who had never finished college than the people who had two master's degrees on the board and similarly at the employment team so tapping into everyone's uniqueness is very powerful

SPEAKER_03: too this week in startups is brought to you by and brokers startup insurance program help startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at a broker.com twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist dot tech domains has a new program called startups dot tech where you can get your company featured on this week in startups go to startups dot tech slash jason to find out how and plunge go to plunge dot com and use code twist 150 for 150 off your cold plunge tub all right

SPEAKER_05: everybody welcome back to our all-star summer here on this week in startups it has been crazy darmesh from hubspot was on the pod rich barton from zillow glassdoor and expedia dave from mongo db ryan from qualtrics and he happened to buy the utah jazz we had a little

SPEAKER_07: discussion about nba teams will from whoop mike from zapier which makes you happier man and just the train is going to keep going with the grammarly ceo coming on i love that product or a ceo a bunch

SPEAKER_05: of you folks are lunatics about the aura ring linkedin ceo plaid ceo booking.com ceo man it's like all-star summer is going to go into all-star september because so many great founders and ceos want to

SPEAKER_07: come on the program and investors and today will be no different i have been uh fascinated with

SPEAKER_10: poshmark since i heard about it and if you have anyone in your life who is into fashion you've heard about it uh manish chandra is the ceo welcome to the program manish thank you jason thanks for

SPEAKER_14: having me all right so um there's something about the circular economy that captures everybody's attention um tell me what is the circular economy what is parshmark poshmark and why are this group

SPEAKER_05: of people so absolutely fanatical about it so for us the circular economy is really about conserving

SPEAKER_00: what you have and really reusing what you have so we've produced a lot over the last decades and now it's time to consume what we've produced and recycle it so that's that's in a nutshell circular economy for us the circular economy means really shopping each other's closets instead of buying retail you buy resale and if you think about something that almost everyone in the world has it's a closet you have some clothes that you wear every day no matter where you live no matter which part of the world you are and likely in any part of the world and and certainly for a lot of people they have some clothes that they are not wearing right now either they've gone out of style they've gone out of fashion or they just don't like it and uh what we've seen over the last decade is something that you don't want somebody else wants so the whole purpose and focus is how to make

SPEAKER_19: it delightful and simple for this closet economy to scale and make it easy to buy and sell your closets

SPEAKER_22: and so what drives consumers towards this because it does seem like there's a group of people

SPEAKER_14: who are into this not for saving money but it's the way they believe they should be consumers so maybe we could just open up and double double click on that piece of it this is and i don't know what percentage of your users this is but we've always had consignment stores we've always had the ability to save money if you wanted to buy used but this seems to be something more than that there's a bit of a movement here so if you were to look at a hundred poshmark users how many would be in that

SPEAKER_08: subset of like fanatically interested in saving the planet and having their shoes for 10 years and you know if they're not using them making sure somebody else is using them and they don't get

SPEAKER_16: fast fashion thrown into a landfill yeah no i i would say if you go back to the very beginning of

SPEAKER_00: poshmark over the last decade or so uh a small number of people maybe 10 15 have been very much about the fact that it's only for them it's reuse it's the only way to shop it's the only way to sort live your life through thrifting outside of just the money saving it's saving the planet because you're not consuming as much you're not producing as much you're not producing a lot of the second order side effects global warming which is you know really upon us in different ways uh you are impacting all of that the volume of those consumers and sort of a whole generation particularly you know the generation we call gen z and even the younger generations after that are in some ways very focused you could even use the word militant fighting for their right or maybe in a way undoing the sins of their fathers and mothers yeah as they consume uh so that's something we've seen a research or our surgeons in the last few years and you know it would be harder to quantify but i would say you know that number has doubled or tripled as a percentage of poshmark users where that is a core piece but if that was the only thing and you didn't have convenience you didn't have value pricing you didn't have styling that number would be much lower when you add all of that it becomes really a core movement that's what's happening probably in the last five years is it's it was growing and then it's taken another point of inflection interesting and so what are the popular

SPEAKER_05: categories on the site i'm certain some things will lend themselves to being resold other things maybe less so so i'm wondering if it's things that are high-end uh you know chanel bags or you know notable pieces uh or if it's just everyday pieces at a great price yeah for us it's mostly everyday pieces we

SPEAKER_00: have a pretty significant business in luxury uh but unlike say the real real it's not our only form of business so we have a segment that's very high price because we physically authenticate the items and so that's there but the the amazing equation we created with the shopper when we started the product is that we are able to buy and sell apparel like day-to-day the shirt you're wearing the shirt i'm wearing you can buy and sell that's a predominant amount like more than half of the stuff we buy and sell is apparel now that's a category historically that was not very big for ebay that was not very big for any of the sort of online players and we literally single-handedly pioneered the growth of that category outside of handbags and shoes sort of stuff that is a little bit easier to transact than you know a dress or a shirt which has so much uh fitting requirements etc the second thing with apparel is that the average price per item is much lower so you have to make the shipping the transaction cost much cheaper for that to work and we've been able to effectively achieve all of that so it's kind of like you know if you think of uber racks or lyft kind of expanded the taxi market we've sort of expanded the resale fashion market with a singular focus and empowering everybody to be able to sell and fulfill themselves without having to go to a central point and then working on systems that can reduce cost of payment processing shipping trust you know returns all of the stuff that become friction and allowing that to create millions of closets across america with each other and so talk to me a little

SPEAKER_14: bit about how you made the decisions about fulfillment because there's a group of people who are like i want to send i want to get the stuff out of my closet um that's like part one i don't want to do the fulfillment i don't want to manage this just get it all out of here and i'll send it to a consignment store whatever um and then you know there's hey is this actually what you said it is is it in the condition you said it is in is it the right size and is it often authenticated so if i want to buy something that's nike i don't want to buy a three dollar fake nike shirt or shoes i want to buy the the ones that are legit so how did you determine you know which model to go with and did you think about different models or running them simultaneously it was a really good question i think i think our

SPEAKER_00: vision from day one was that you know imagine if you are a girl sitting in a dorm or sort of you know initially we for the first five years or so we only ran it in the women's fashion category and it wasn't until 2016 that we expanded to men's and kids and other categories out there so from 2011 to 2016 first five years it was 100 focused on women's fashion partly it's because you know if you think of traditionally women are a much bigger uh consumer percentage of the fashion span which means they naturally have bigger closets they transact more they're sort of more focused on it and then over the last four or five years we've seen men expand their footprint and for men you know it's not universal across categories certain categories are extremely biased in terms of their spend more notably sneakers is you know it's a huge sort of part of the men's wardrobe in general but for women it's really spread across the thing when you do that you have to really solve for lower price point because that's the higher problem i mean if you have a 30 item well to give it to someone or ship it to someone then they process it and ship it out there's just not enough dollars to go around so unless you take on the process of self-fulfillment it's much harder to make the economics work whereas if you take a three thousand dollar chanel bag well it can go through many hops and still you know there's profit to be had for each hop uh along the way so that was sort of one thing but the other thing was when you look at sort of uh one of our users we wanted to make sure that they can spend ten dollars here and five thousand dollars here so that took many years to kind of build the right product and the right service level across the spectrum so we can really be part of your whole closet and then when we added men's and kids we really expanded that footprint to all of the dimensions of your life so today we feel from an end-to-end perspective we provide the most comprehensive resale solution with different levels of things uh now consignment which is you know say you want to sell something you may not want to sell it directly but you still want to make sure your clothes are going to a good home environmental things and you know maybe the money you make you can donate it somewhere or whatever that part is a process that many of our sellers support we don't have a structured support for it but many of our sellers act as consigners out there and help other people and we certainly want to look in the future and maybe creating our own consignment network as an option uh at the right time again you know you've got to remain focused on your roadmap as an entrepreneur you can't just you know go everywhere but we've systematically added things to the to the

SPEAKER_39: product all right listen we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm it's called launch i'm talking pre-series a right we're talking seed stage friends and family and you know what at

SPEAKER_41: that stage maybe they don't have insurance yet in fact just recently we had an amazing startup they didn't have d and o insurance uh if you don't know what d and o means that basically protects your

SPEAKER_39: directors and officers directors board of directors officers the people who run the company your management team so what do we do we send them right over to in broker in broker is business insurance built specifically for startups in broker's single application helps startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes they connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service and that goes beyond your policy okay we use this uh at all of our companies it's easy peasy lemon squeezy and if you're not getting insurance you know at some point you're gonna have to get it so let's make that point today right now this weekend tonight just go to in broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 off their startup package how do you get the startup package in broker.com twist that's e-m-b-r-o-k-e-r.com twist make sure you use that code twist for 10 off that also more importantly than getting the 10 off that shows them that you're listening to this week in startups so

SPEAKER_43: we love in broker uh they've been amazing in terms of supporting our founders for years and of course

SPEAKER_14: this very podcast great job and broker maybe you talk a little bit about this movement of fast fashion and disposable clothes this is something that i think is a major driver here but maybe consumers are learning that if you buy like my favorite brand of shoes is crocketing jones it's a um a shoe store in london that has been making shoes i think for 200 years or something crazy and i was just on poshmark i found all the crocketing jones and i'm like wow the resale value of my thousand dollar crocketing jones is like 300 you know for my 10 year old shoes wow this is pretty incredible if it was a younger if i was a younger jason i might actually buy those nine and a half crockett jones and just get the souls redone and i would be in them for 30 or 40 percent um but then on the other side you have people going to is it sheen or shine whatever this yeah um you know horrible horrible trend is of buying clothes and you wear them once and throw them away maybe talk a little bit about that counter

SPEAKER_00: trend and yeah yes people are looking so a couple of things fast fashion has been around in various forms i mean sheen is the latest example of it and probably at the very low end in terms of the price point but you've had people who've been you know part of this trend and have been sort of under the uh microscope if you may i mean many years back forever 21 was criticized as a fast fashion brand right it's sort of changed since then and evolved uh h m was a very low price brand and they've added you know a lot of sustainability piece etc so rather than commenting on specific brands i would just say that the consumers desire to have products that give them latest trendy looks at an extremely low price they can use a few times and they don't care about the life cycle has always been there today's consumer if you look at a gen z consumer and you talk to them they're kind of a little bit bifurcated in the sense that they will be spending money on sheen and they'll be spending money on a poshmark at the same time and you know when you ask them the questions and answers they'll have different answers as to why they do it but there's a very good framework the thing that has happened is between social media which gives you instant access to so much data and information um the tick tock trends which are sort of moving literally by two days the ability for an average young person to keep up with all these things that are happening is very hard and when you look at a platform like sheen it gives they give them a tool at an economic price to be able to keep up with trends whether you should keep up with trends or not is not a decision i want to get into but the fact that these things do that so what a platform like poshmark is trying to do is to give them the same kind of trend data but in a paid forward way so you can buy that item it may cost you sometimes more than sheen sometimes you know equal to sheen but certainly something you can use forward like you were talking about your crockett and jones shoes that can kind of keep going forward and you know i mean obviously it's a little less convenient than just buying an item and throwing it away and you have to sort of use it and then wear it but certainly the impact of what you do is much higher and the clothes look better so i think from a pop culture perspective the movement towards reuse is growing and i believe that we will hit a point where suddenly if you are wearing an inauthentic or sort of you know like if you're wearing an inauthentic designer bag people will look down or criticize upon you but i think if you're wearing an inexpensive dress from one of these fast marketplaces it's not something we sort of consciously internalize so it's all about sort of that social dynamic that's happening the funny thing is if you search for sheen and poshmark there's thousands of items that are up for sale from that brand which is

SPEAKER_14: insane in some ways well right i mean if it's a 20 piece and you're selling it used how much are you possibly selling it for i mean i i would think people would just put them in a stack and be like

SPEAKER_55: i'm a size x here buy 20 items that that happens as well so for very low price item people will create

SPEAKER_00: these mystery boxes and and then and then sell them that way because it's cheaper to transport it cheaper logistically to do that but an auxiliary point here is that people actually want to buy resale and reuse at a core level so sometimes even fast fashion brands are coming through the resale channel into people's closets which is okay i mean if you're reusing another way i want to think about it is if i buy this shirt and i use it two times and move it forward and then it goes into the garbage boil supposing i sell it to someone they use it once and then throw it away that's not a good use if i use it 20 times somebody else uses it 20 times it's a great thing so if a low priced fast fashion item can be used 10 20 30 40 50 times whatever the number is it's actually a better usage even though it is throw away item and so use usage in my mind transcends sort of the the bucket in which you put an

SPEAKER_59: item and you guys did you guys go public and then get bought by neighbor is that the history of the

SPEAKER_60: company we went public in january of 21 and january of 23 we were acquired by neighbor yeah neighbor of

SPEAKER_05: course is kind of the google plus yahoo of korea um and incredible company there's three search engines basically uh neighbor dow down and um google in uh in korea how did those transactions occur is is this becoming uh the circular economy um something popular in asia and korea or is it that neighbor and and they've had aspirations to kind of have more um properties in the west is it something like they

SPEAKER_14: look at you as a way to kind of head west and build a base of revenue outside of the asian markets

SPEAKER_36: a little bit of both like it's really a a little bit of both so circular economy is becoming big in in

SPEAKER_00: in u.s in europe in the developed asian markets and even some of the emerging asian markets you are starting to see circular economy become big um you know you have players like where like philippines singapore uh everywhere in japan korea uh china uh china has massive platform believe it or not they have uh sneaker the resale platforms that are driving you know tens of billions of dollars of wow of gmv out there so it's it's big but for neighbor you know as they are looking into expansion they have a strong thesis that consumer to consumer shopping is a big dominant wave that's here and will grow over the next many decades which we share it's a shared building so that's the second thesis the third thing is out of all the players they looked at they really thought that poshmark had the unique sort of market and market dynamic and they really were interested in partnering with poshmark so our conversation started by them making a private investment in a public company and potential discussions around that because they want to learn and partner with poshmark around both c to c commerce and social commerce because we sit at the intersection of those two things and somewhere along that line which we've documented through our public filings uh it turned into an m a discussion that's fantastic sort of ended up leading to this partnership that

SPEAKER_05: we are in yeah a pipe public investment or private investment in a public equity yeah um so question i have is you see a lot of cultural um bridges being built and especially in fashion music

SPEAKER_08: k-pop in japan uh you know japanese fashion and in america all the stuff in anime it's really just in the last you know gen x our generation and millennials have really gotten into this gen z so i'm wondering is there a way for you to move large amounts of product that could be interesting to people in japan and products that are in japan to the united states in bulk so that you could overcome this you know cost to ship products i was i went down the rabbit hole of trying to understand how fashion is made because i was looking at some investments and i found on um very fascinating there's an underground on reddit of services that will let you shop in china put your stuff into a box put that box into a container and so you could go shopping and every week they send a container to the united states and then resend your package so if you're an american and you want to shop the chinese websites buy a bunch of products in china and then shipped into the united states you have this like underground way of doing it yes it's really weird um i think panda was the name of the the product but that shows that there is something here in terms of globalization so maybe have you thought about that has that come up i'm i'm just spitballing with here of

SPEAKER_00: uh yeah yeah no i so we've we've just been testing something we call a global bazaar for cross-border shipping etc but i think what you're tapping into sort of this optimization of logistics so it makes it you know cost accessible which you know you're talking about one of these things a little bit more structured um there's a company in japan i think it's called by you or something where expats and their spouses would be shopping on behalf of the core japanese folks and post photos and then they would buy this item in a boutique in europe or whatever and cost arbitrage because it was significant cost sometimes they'll bring it back but sometimes it was even economical for them to ship it back to japan and then you've you know you've seen k beauty as sort of a bulk purchase and certainly europe coming back here you've got sites that try to you know bypass some of the the systems and certainly i mean if you've got a person who loves fashion when they go to europe they'll they'll buy stuff at 30 40 percent cheaper in france and italy that you get um overall so there's there's all of this stuff we haven't looked at optimizing the bulk logistics but we have looked at optimizing individual point to point logistics and making the inventory available but of course all inventory is not easily purchasable so it boiled down to more something that are economically better to do but some things that are just unique you know because there's so much stuff you can get access particularly from different markets you know whether you're looking at korea or japan or france or or italy there's there's items available that you just don't get so that's sort of been our focus a little bit in in in testing um but the economics and logistics are a significant thing so panda-like service certainly could be something we could um uh look i'm just thinking like you don't have any

SPEAKER_14: physical do you have physical stores ever have you experimented with we don't have physical stores yeah see i think as a pop-up if you did one in new york one in l.a one in seoul one in tokyo and you just did it as a one-year experiment you shifted a bunch of like you're saying the most interesting items from the most interesting folks you could say hey everybody who orders has to use the app when they come to so they download the app and you could just say hey however many downloads

SPEAKER_00: yeah one of the one of the interesting things is that we recently about eight nine months back introduced live shows on the platform and they've really taken off what's a live show a live show is someone actually goes you know opens up a live camera we have something called cost shows full support for transaction in this show and i can just show hey i want to sell this cup i can bring it up and i can talk about it that i can start an auction and people auction and buy that that's been a very

SPEAKER_36: popular form of shopping so what you're talking about could actually be achieved through these global streaming networks without having to do a full shop but you could kind of effectively simulate a shop where i could put these products up and other people could buy yeah so uh i i think i think

SPEAKER_14: these are all to work in america have have the live shows because i know that was a big thing in china right i don't know if it got big in korean or japan but have those live shows could be a qvc here for a while but that was for schlocky stuff i think generally i don't want to dig we've seen

SPEAKER_00: tremendous success so we really um yeah so the format that has worked for us is kind of very different than china and and sort of other areas where china and other areas is very much focused on big influence of selling a lot of products for a lot of brands and you know it's a big economy there hundreds of billions of dollars sure we haven't even achieved that but the business has grown very rapidly for us we haven't shared gmv numbers or revenue numbers yet on the business but i would say it's the fastest growing business i've personally built oh in in in this time frame it's growing very fast and the difference is that our sellers are everyday sellers on poshmark who are selling it and our gmv is coming from tens of thousands of these sellers as opposed to just

SPEAKER_14: a few hundred sellers so those sellers are individually selling an item you're stitching together their videos to play on a live stream is that right or no no they're doing they're actually

SPEAKER_88: hosting a live oh they host it themselves got it yeah so so they will go through their 20 items

SPEAKER_89: yes got it and then what we enabled was something unique to us was sell together so i'm selling my

SPEAKER_36: items you can also join my show and i can help you sell your items and re who's sitting with me can

SPEAKER_14: help sell her items so much more dynamic to do a collab because you can riff on each other's stuff i bring my audience you bring your audience third person brings theirs now we got three times as

SPEAKER_93: many community oriented very community which is the essence of poshmark yes

SPEAKER_41: when you're building an early stage tech startup it can be really hard to stand out right well i've got great news for you instead of just selling domains dot tech domains is going to give our twist listeners a platform to show off their startups and that platform is this week in startups that's right during this dot tech domain said read i will watch and judge a 20 second elevator pitch from a dot tech founder that's right there's only one rule you must have a dot tech domain name to apply and dot tech domain names are blowing up right now aurora a self-driving ai startup they are building at aurora.tech another ai startup called 1x.tech backed by sam maltman and open ai is also building on a dot tech domain name it's sweeping the globe so if you're interested in pitching me and i'm going to give you candid feedback and you're building on a dot tech domain name all i want you to do is fill out a form at startups.tech slash jason that's right startups dot t-e-c-h slash jason fill out the form to apply and i look

SPEAKER_37: forward to giving you feedback on your startup

SPEAKER_14: you had work in the uh social shopping space so this was an area people don't it's a forgot forgotten area but i had invested and was on the board of a company called this now this next okay yes caboodle yes and then there was this weird site pinterest that was trying to make it work yes he had and you had a couple of other people who were doing it um why did that largely fail i mean i know you sold but that whole space didn't create exactly enough value to come become strong independent obviously pinterest came out of that and then uh you know what you're doing a poshmark so what are the lessons you learned from that was it just too early was the affiliate revenue that most of you relied on just not enough

SPEAKER_105: i i think i think the the three lessons one is i think as an entrepreneur um how you think about

SPEAKER_36: the product and problem um determines the outcome right and so i typically give this uh story jason

SPEAKER_00: where we talk a little bit about the fact that somebody looks at the coffee cup and sees a coffee cup somebody looks at it and thinks of a coffee cart somebody thinks of it and thinks of a coffee shop somebody can visualize a couple of coffee shops but there was somebody who looked at a coffee cup and visualize the whole starbucks and so how you think about the problem and how you redefine the problem matters i think pinterest founding team particularly when i give a lot of respect for them they look at the problem they kept iterating and expanding the scope of the problem till that problem became so big

SPEAKER_108: and they could solve you know really big big things what do you think their their definition of

SPEAKER_110: it was that worked so well versus say the other ones that didn't work out so well because they're

SPEAKER_13: they're saying the framing the the the magical thing in my mind there was two magical things

SPEAKER_00: if if if we could go back that far and you and i probably remember very clearly at that time just for your audience i'll paint a picture the the vogue at that time was products like delicious and caboodle where you would go to a website clip something store it and people could collaborate on it that was sort of the shopping thing caboodle had sort of taken this and organized this kind like pinterest in the form of a list so you could go there you could clip it and everything was on the list so it was it felt very utilitarian you know because it was in the form of a list it was visually uninteresting then came a company called polyvore if you remember sequoia funded you know uh ultimately i think yahoo bought it there they took the same sort of clippings but people would organize them in these beautiful visual collages spend times perfecting them their engagement in posh in caboodle the velocity of creation was very high the engagement velocity was low so it was kind of not a great media property was a good utility bollywood was a great media property number of creators was very small because they took a lot of time but once you created this thing this collage was very fun to consume i felt what ben and team did was they really combined the two things so they made it very easy to create so creating was just clipping but instead of displaying the whole thing as a collage they automatically created a collage of these images hence a pinboard the second dynamic we saw was enabling a creator to go to various website and clip from it was slow but when you reclip something we had something called add to kabul which was a kind of a re-pin it was much faster because you were right there you know you don't have to go to another site you just kind of re-pinned it ben and team focused on that re-pin mechanics called that sort of thing and basically between re-pinning and this easy visual

SPEAKER_36: collaboration they tapped into two things increase the velocity of creators by tapping into re-pin and increase the velocity of consumption by not having to spend time laying it out but just sort of auto laying it out so i think they they kind of took the best of both sides and so they they out executed

SPEAKER_14: everybody they really figured they figured out that you need it needed to look beautiful but it needed to be utilitarian and fast yes and this is a great lesson for all entrepreneurs making products there is just no slowing down you have to keep iterating and it has to be beautiful and it also has to be functional right and sometimes people make things that are beautiful yes you know as you were pointing

SPEAKER_05: out like um people were really bummed uh when that website um you mentioned polyvore closed their doors i

SPEAKER_14: remember that was a community that really really had codified itself and you look at these yeah super passionate they were very deep into it like here's days like a hipster magazine talking in 2018 about you know how heartbroken they were when this thing uh was gone so uh i guess that takes me to your doing a good job building community at poshmark so what have you learned about community across the two companies and let's face it you started as an engineer at intel in the eight late 80s early 90s yes so i don't know when you got into being a fashionista uh but that's probably a good question too but what have you learned specifically about community let's start there because it's hard to

SPEAKER_35: build a community what's it what's in your playbook i think building a community is about simplicity and

SPEAKER_00: authenticity right so simplicity in the sense that community doesn't need a hundred features they need like one or two things that they do that they really love to do on your platform and their focus will be around that the second thing is authenticity is very important and that's a hard lesson that people learn and in that if you're doing something you need to be transparent if conversations are happening that are difficult conversations they need to happen you cannot curtail them you know within the bounds of legality and other things but beyond that just because people are being rough about your company or about something else you cannot control that flow of conversations and uh both of those things were true in caboodle but you know it was something i had not fully internalized in poshmark those principles were codified from day one is there the third thing is if you build a very powerful community and then you try to shove monetization into it in an artificial way it causes problems you know we have had a recent example without naming the particularly popular social site that tried to over monetize something and is having a revolt and so one of the core first principles at poshmark we put in is lead with love and money follows lead with engagement and monetization follows and so being a marketplace you know the more you have engaged users you know sort of built that virtuous cycle so that allows us to continue to focus on authentic community tools and not sort of get veered away in building something that's antithetical community and and so for me those were all lessons i mean at one point in caboodle in the middle of the oh eight uh you know recession we were because it was a depressing time in the media business the present time everywhere but particularly finance and media businesses were held extraordinarily hard and um we were running like four five six ad units on a single page you're hard to find what the content was yeah because you know you were so

SPEAKER_14: desperate to get some money in the door yeah that you're just slapping ads everywhere and you're over monetize so i love your rules simplicity there's only one or two features you need two authenticity there's going to be some hard discussions sometimes people in communities get a little rough you got to kind of embrace that within reason obviously there's some hard lines and then monetization lead with engagement love money is going to follow but you don't have to overdo it and i guess instagram is the one that's been like shoving it down people's throats way too many you know trying to sell stuff they're playing catch up i you know i i think the ability to share money um or just help people make a living is so powerful like whether it's airbnb uber doordash craigslist you know all these uh places that give you the ability to to make a living or make some side hustle

SPEAKER_05: um and now twitter acts giving a share of revenue i guess how many of the people who are on the

SPEAKER_14: platform are like dedicated and making a full-time living a part-time living or just doing it because they think it's the right thing to do and do you address those segments have i segmented it properly

SPEAKER_36: like full-time no absolutely absolutely it's a continuum it's a continuum though i think there's a lot of people i mean percentage wise i don't have a ready-made number but i would say a good one tenth to one fourth of the people between 10 to 25 percent of people are using poshmark for some sort of income generation needs if not more right i mean again depend this is just based on dollar etc overall but then even people who are not doing it for that level are still generating income because there's no there's no free like if you sell something you make money and now you may redeploy the money so a big chunk of our users are what i call revolving closets whatever money they make on an aggregate they spend it right back on the platform love it and so that is truly circular

SPEAKER_97: do they leave the money in the account and then spend it and buy sometimes they do i mean quite often

SPEAKER_36: they do but many times what they do is they'll actually withdraw the money and then spend it back so for example they make 80 cents on the dollar and for this community of sellers if you look at it literally if they earn a hundred dollars they're spending eighty dollars back on the platform as a community right so to me that's the power of community is that they're shopping from each

SPEAKER_108: other they're buying from each other and they're spending everything right there

SPEAKER_139: all right when you're an entrepreneur an executive or investor you know your mind needs to be sharp

SPEAKER_41: and to keep your mind sharp you need to treat your body right don't i know it it comes from eating right which i'm doing exercise i'm doing that and let me tell you about my newest activity no it's not sleep you're gonna get sleep nope it's cold plunges yes i've taken the plunge and it has been incredible for me i am so thrilled to tell you about plunge.com that's where i got mine from plunge.com it's sleek it's beautifully designed when i put it on the side of my house everybody says oh what's that oh that's beautiful it's an insanely high quality product it's ready to go out of the box it takes three minutes to feel amazing you just jump in there you can set it on a dial listen i'm not a doctor this isn't medicine what this is is an amazing way to feel great and if you do any of the research on it you listen to any of the folks online talking about the value of cold plunging at a minimum it makes me alert and feel great just go to plunge.com plunge.com plunge.com they also have gorgeous saunas too maybe get one of those next start doing cold plunges like your boy jacal it makes you so alert i feel like a superhero i get out of that thing i feel like i can take on the world so once again go to plunge.com and get your incredible cold plunge tub today by the way if you use my code twist150 twist150 you're gonna get 150 bucks off use the code twist150 get 150 bucks off

SPEAKER_05: your purchase today and uh take the plunge what can i say i think one of the great things that i've learned over time is if you just look at how things are constructed today a lot of times people are

SPEAKER_14: going for margin it's a race to the bottom they're using terrible products and then i just had uh the founder of bowling branch if you know the um the sheets and he's gone the opposite direction where he wants his brand uh scott tanner who's great on the podcast he's buying egyptian cotton that's organic directly from the purveyors and then he's building high quality stuff he wants it to last forever and what tannin uh was saying is they put in their stores like all of the cotton sheets and they show you after 50 washes 100 washes 200 washes that it gets better but then if you're buying the cheap stuff it falls apart and it's not meant to last and i you know i was talking to one of our producers here and they like to buy you know a certain type of uh jackets that uh starter jackets you know like you were a starter on the football team and the quality has gone down in the last 20 years but if you buy them from the 90s or the too early 2000s they're very high quality so it's actually you could save money buy something of higher quality and it's got that vintage retro vibe to it so

SPEAKER_05: it's kind of more unique in the world and so there's just so many things going in the right direction for you um and uh really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing all of this if you look back on your entrepreneurial career what are the major lessons that you think you know for a founder will

SPEAKER_48: result in success success being you know building a large sustainable business i think for me the

SPEAKER_00: first thing it starts with is people surrounding yourself with the right team is is key i mean all

SPEAKER_36: of my co-founders are still here with me after you know 12 13 years ipo back to public they're still

SPEAKER_00: there you know if i look at my first 20 employees probably 16 17 are still here uh second is commitment to growth your own growth the growth of the people around you the growth of your investors i feel like if you're not growing as an individual you can't grow the business you're in so that real commitment to growth is is is key the third thing is when difficult circumstances come in front of you you got to figure out realistically what are your choices and then use that opportunity to accelerate your march to whatever the destination is and so for me you know we've gone through lots of ups and downs and in in poshmark there have been times you know where i've been rejected by 100 investors sitting

SPEAKER_36: there and using that moment to sort of figure out you know with the resources we have whether to become profitable change the profitability or you know when times are really dark you know i tune out of the current dark times you don't obviously take action there but then also dream of a good future so

SPEAKER_00: sort of keeping that dream intact or looking at you know realistically what are sort of the different things where the world is going and how do you sort of take it forward which when we found the right partner neighbor we decided it's the right thing not just for uh the entrepreneur or just for the employees but for the investors for the community for the customers for the partners you know making those holistic decisions so you know if you go back it's like you got to have a big dream and and believe in that dream that your dream can be big no matter what you're doing second is start with the right group of people and treat them well and make sure you're committed to their growth and fourth thing is take every circumstance and create a way to accelerate your growth as opposed to impede your growth that has sort of guided us and then on the people side by one principle that has been very core to me as an entrepreneur is embracing the weirdness of every single person you meet and also embracing your weirdness which means recognizing you're special and you're kind of unique but you're also kind of screwed up and effed up like everyone else and then aligning with the person you're meeting and knowing that they have strength and figuring out how to combine those strengths and admire that uh and and that has allowed me to tap into various folks you know for example in my board we had people of certainly different ethnicities and colors you know i was privileged to have uh two black women on my board but that was sort of what you can look but then when you think of their strengths with each person brought there were people who had never finished college than the people who had two masters degrees on the board and similarly at the employment team so tapping into everyone's uniqueness is very powerful too i like the way you state that because if

SPEAKER_59: you state it as like uh dei identity politics it's kind of a road to nowhere because oh i you know i

SPEAKER_14: check box i have one of this type of person one of this type of what you're really saying is you know we're all have unique experiences and a diversity of experiences um you know is going to contribute to the success of the company and embracing the weirdness is just such a fun way to do it because like i said we're all up we're all got different skills etc so when you come to it as the leader if you accept that everybody's unique and a little bit different you don't have to be mad at people for being unique you just kind of they got their own mutant superpower and you just embrace them for

SPEAKER_61: having it and don't and in that same vein of we are talking about it and you when you look at a

SPEAKER_00: person don't just think that because the person looks kind of quote unquote normal that they don't have massive weirdness just the fact that you know okay this is the mainstream person his x y and z characters he should be fine or they she should they should be fine yeah and this person but but everyone is going through tremendous amount of struggle and being able to embrace them and empower that journey allows us to just grow and learn from everyone yeah so you know what it's so

SPEAKER_14: well said um thanks so much for coming on the program you are a wild card of awesomeness you know we're like saw you we heard you on another niche podcast and my producers were like who is this guy he's got such interesting insights and you didn't disappoint continuous success everybody go check out

SPEAKER_157: posh mark if you haven't already uh just well done and thanks for coming on the pod thank you jason