Podcast appearances and mentions of Katrina Lake

Sali Christeson is the Founder and CEO of Argent. Sali had a vision to arm women with a wardrobe that delivers style, functionality, and self-expression as they take their seats at the table. Since its inception, Argent's mission has been centered around forwarding women's progress, both through its product collections and brand initiatives. We discussed all of this and more this week on the On Brand podcast. About Sali Christeson Sali Christeson is the Founder and CEO of Argent, a venture-backed women's clothing label on a mission to redefine workwear and drive forward women's progress. A business major with an MBA from the University of South Carolina, Sali spent a decade in the Bay Area's finance and technology space, where she struggled to find work clothes that were bold, practical, and professional. For too long, workwear for women had been stagnant, constricting, and lacking key functional elements as simple as pockets. After reading hard statistics that women in the workplace are judged on appearance, which results in a tangible impact on their income over time, Sali founded Argent with a vision to arm women with a wardrobe that delivers style, functionality, and self-expression as they take their seats at the table. Argent's community counts leaders and disruptors like Dr. Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Meghan Markle, Gloria Steinem, and Amy Poehler as members, and is backed by industry leaders, including Founders Fund, Fuel Capital, Katrina Lake, and Brooklyn Decker. To date, Argent has partnered with Supermajority and Michelle Obama's organization, When We All Vote, to advocate for women's voting power. In addition, Argent created the first jeans designed for the office with denim brand AGOLDE, launched its first wholesale relationship with Nordstrom, and opened three NYC storefronts since the pandemic. The stores are built specifically for working women to help support them with their professional wardrobe overhauls as they navigate shifting dress codes/hybrid schedules. From the Show What brand has made Sali smile recently? Like many, Sali is excited about all of the energy and excitement around Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. She also shared some smiles she had with her kids around the Super Smalls brand. Connect with Sali on LinkedIn and Instagram and listen to Argent's Work Friends podcast. And, of course, the Argent website. As We Wrap … Listen and subscribe at  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon/Audible, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeart, YouTube, and RSS. Rate and review the show—If you like what you're hearing, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and click the 5-star button to rate the show. And, if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review to help others find the show. Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you'd like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is a part of the Marketing Podcast Network. Until next week, I'll see you on the Internet! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Andrew talks with CNBC's Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin. In 2000, Julia landed a job as a reporter at Fortune Magazine to cover the business community — without a single economics or accounting class on her college transcript. Since then, she's had a powerful impact on the business media world. Julia has been an on-air reporter for CNBC since 2006 and has interviewed many of the world's most powerful executives & entrepreneurs. Julia is also the author of the book “When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, & What We Can Learn From Them”. Her book is a deep dive on what Julia calls “odds-defying leadership” female leaders utilize to power some of the world's most innovative & successful companies. In this conversation, Andrew & Julia explore her career & actionable lessons on high-impact leadership, the power of asking questions, turning your “outsider” perspective into an advantage, & so much more.  This conversation is a roadmap all of us can utilize to achieve more success in any personal or professional endeavor. Show Highlights:(0:00) - Intro(2:41) - Julia's childhood(3:05) - Growth through challenges(5:08) - “Everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions”(7:50) - Early career (11:44) - Research process & organizing ideas(15:15) - Power of apprenticeship opportunities(19:06) - Julia's book and research process(21:02) - Challenges for women raising venture capital(24:33) - Leadership lessons from top-performing execs(27:41) - How Katrina Lake became a “talent magnet”(31:36) - Vulnerability(33:47) - Gratitude & patience(36:17) - Growth mindset** Follow Andrew On Social Media **Twitter/X: @andrewhmosesInstagram: @AndrewMoses123Sign up for e-mails to keep up with Andrew's podcast at everybodypullsthetarp.com/newsletter

Jesse Clark (@jn2clark) is a co-founder of Marqo, the end-to-end, multimodal vector search engine. Vector search has exploded along with the rise of generative AI models, so Marqo's arrival has had excellent timing. The project has quickly grown to almost 3000 GitHub stars, despite being less than a year old. Jesse and his team weren't exactly expecting this level of immediate success, but they are well-positioned to continue developing Marqo as a fixture in the worlds of information retrieval and machine learning.  Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Jesse's journey from physics research, to Stitch Fix, Amazon, and finally starting Marqo Industry vs academia in the cutting edge of machine learning Why “almost any organization in the world would benefit from Marqo” Talking about machine learning language - tensors, vectors, embeddings How Jesse deals with the stress of knowing how fast the AI space is innovating Links: Marqo People mentioned: Katrina Lake (@kmlake) Eric Colson (@ericcolson)

Katrina Lake is with Jack Chew explaining that Scoliosis does matter!! Don't ignore it! Tickets for Therapy Live: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/523668816527 Recordings: library.physio-matters.com/register

Katrina Lake is the founder, interim CEO, and executive chairperson of Stitch Fix, an online personal shopping service where human stylists and algorithms curate clothing for you. Today, Lake joins GP to talk about how she pushed through moments of doubt to become the youngest woman to take a company public. They talk about rejection, mentors, navigating different leadership styles, and how to approach difficult conversations at work. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you miss Shoptalk 2023 this year? Or were you there and feel like you didn't catch enough of the content and top trends? We've got you covered with another podcast cross-over event with This Week in Innovation and special guest host Jeff Roster! Kicking off this multi-part series, Jeff and regular host Ricardo Belmar sit down with Shoptalk's content team of Krystina Gustafson and Ben Miller live and in-person on the final day of the event. Together they review the top 4 trends and what they mean for retailers, brands, and the retail tech community. The team goes deep to break down the hype vs reality of Generative AI and discuss how retailers are changing and evolving their relationships with consumers, employees, and suppliers. Plus, hear about the latest trends in shopper engagement!This episode's guests:Krystina Gustafson, SVP Content, Shoptalk and GroceryshopBen Miller, Director of original content, Shoptalk and GroceryshopWe're at number 19 on the Feedspot Top 60 Best Retail podcasts list - please consider giving us a 5-star review in Apple Podcasts! With your help, we'll move our way up the Top 20! Leave us a review & be mentioned in future episodes! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/Meet your regular hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023, 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, a Top 12 ecommerce influencer, advisory council member at George Mason University's Center for Retail Transformation, and director partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft.Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock, and RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech!Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring E-Motive, and Overclocked, from the album Beat Hype, written by Hestron Mimms, published by Imuno. The Retail Razor ShowFollow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/TwRRazorConnect with us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/LI-RRazorSubscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/RRShowYouTubeSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/RetailRazorShowRetail Razor Show Episode Page: https://bit.ly/RRShowPodHost → Ricardo Belmar,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twRBelmarConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LIRBelmarRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWRBelmarCo-host → Casey Golden,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twCaseyConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LICaseyRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWCaseyTRANSCRIPTS2E12a #ShoptalkLive – SPECIAL - Krystina Gustafson & Ben Miller[00:00:00] ​[00:00:00] Show Intro [00:00:20] Casey Golden: Hello Retail Razor Show listeners and viewers, and welcome to retail's favorite podcast for product junkies, commerce technologist, and everyone else in retail and retail tech alike. I'm your host, Casey Golden.[00:00:33] Ricardo Belmar: And I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar. And boy do we have a special treat for you this episode! Today we are talking about the changing relationships between retailers and brands, the evolution of shopper engagement. How omnichannel is morphing into seamless stores, and we see how it's possible to transform over 320,000 meeting requests into over 50,000 actual meetings in a span of three days.[00:00:57] But first, let's talk about our newest [00:01:00] crossover event, and this episode's special guests.[00:01:03] Casey Golden: That's right after our wildly successful crossover event with This Week In Innovation podcast for our N R F Live miniseries. Joined by one of our favorite guest hosts, Jeff Roster. We've done it again for our Shop Talk coverage.[00:01:20] Ricardo Belmar: Yes, indeed. By popular demand, and by popular demand, I mean, we really liked the idea, so we thought, let's do it again. Jeff Roster and I teamed up at Shop Talk for a few special interviews to bring you a Shop Talk live mini-series.[00:01:33] Casey Golden: Well, I'm sad I once again had to miss this one, but I know you guys have pulled together a killer miniseries not to be missed. Who are the episodes special guests?[00:01:45] Ricardo Belmar: I am glad you asked Casey. What better way to kick off this mini-series and with a deep dive discussion on all the hot topics at Shop Talk than sitting down with the Source, Shop talk's, amazing content team led by Krystina Gustafson, SVP of Content, [00:02:00] and Ben Miller, director of original content.[00:02:02] Casey Golden: Christina and Ben are incredible. Uh, you and Jeff really got to dig in to all the hot topics and wasn't this right after they had delivered their retail zeitgeist presentation on , the main stage, right?[00:02:17] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. We, we recorded this the very next morning after that session where Krystina and Joe Laszlo had run through what Shop Talk was seeing as the major retail trends for the year. Plus , Ben and Krystina gave us some insights into what they found most notable from all the sessions at the show.[00:02:33] And did I mention those 50,000 meetings they orchestrated? I mean, just, wow. Wait until you hear all the stats about what was surely the, the biggest shop talk ever.[00:02:42] Casey Golden: Well, let's get to it then and jump right into you and Jeff's conversation with Krystina Gustafson and Ben Miller from Shop Talk, recorded live and in person at the show. [00:02:54] ​[00:02:59] The Shoptalk Review [00:02:59] Ricardo Belmar: Hello everyone [00:03:00] and welcome to our special Retail Razor crossover event with This Week In Innovation. I'm Ricardo Belmar, live and in person here at Shop Talk 2023, and I am here with the myth, the legend, Mr. Jeff Roster from This Week In Innovation. How you doing, Jeff?[00:03:15] Jeff Roster: Really good. Ricardo. I, you know, I, I'm so proud of both of us. We're, we're here last day, literally working the show to the last minute, and that's how we roll. That's how we[00:03:24] Ricardo Belmar: what we do. That's right. And for this special edition episode of our live series here at Shop Talk, we have the incredible pleasure of having two folks from the Shop talk team to talk to us about the event.[00:03:36] We're here with Krystina Gustafson and Ben Miller. Krystina. Ben, how are you doing today?[00:03:40] Krystina Gustafson: Doing awesome.[00:03:41] Ben Miller: Yeah, very good. Thank you. Thanks for having us. [00:03:43] Ricardo Belmar: Fantastic. Fantastic. So let's jump in. And I think, you know, one of the, the probably most in, well maybe not most interesting, but something I'm sure everyone wants to know is just give us a little bit of data around just how big a shop talk was this, this year?[00:03:56] Krystina Gustafson: Yeah, happy to start. 10,000 plus attendees, our [00:04:00] largest crowd so far. I would say though, what I take away even more than the size is just the quality of the a attendee. So it really sort of felt like this was. The big year. I know last year was technically retail's big reunion, but with the loss of corporate travel bands people just really being back down to business, the caliber of attendee, the amount of retailers and brands we had attending the show at a very senior level was, was one of the big takeaways to me beyond just kind of the scale of the event.[00:04:25] I know we'll probably talk about meet up a little bit later, but we also were able to facilitate 50,000 meetings over the course of two days which was incredibly impressive. Other things to note about scale 275 speakers 70 hours. 50 hours of content, 80 sessions seven content theaters. So I would say those are kind of the high level numbers. But Ben, you might have some, some additional stats to toss out there.[00:04:48] Ben Miller: kind of, yeah, I think when we talk about the Meetup 50,000 sounds an incredible number[00:04:53] Ricardo Belmar: right?[00:04:53] Yeah, it does.[00:04:54] Ben Miller: We had 323,000 requests to[00:05:00] so the appetite the appetite for, everybody to want to get together, to have some meetings, to meet people, to build their business. And you could feel that energy when you walked around.[00:05:10] And that energy, you know, it's, day four with lagging a little bit, but that energy that that energy is palpable. And that's, and that's been, yeah, that's been a key part of the show this year. [00:05:21] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's un 323,000 requests . Wow. What I, I, you know, one of the things we were talking about before, you know, what we think is sort of unique about the Shop Talk experience you have you know, for example, like how, how, how many vendors were here, whether exhibiting or, or attendees.[00:05:39] I think that's always a key part of bringing all parts of the industry together. That Shop Talk is so, so special for [00:05:45] Ben Miller: key. No, we, we re really agree our. I think you've heard Sophie, our president talk before that we don't really think about a buy side and a sell side. We don't try and compartmentalize. We have a community and our vendors, the technology companies, whether they are [00:06:00] really small startups for whom a Series A feels a distant proposition still right through to Google Face meta.[00:06:07] You know, some of the biggest organizations and biggest corporations in the country and in the world are here. We have about 700. Technology companies and technology vendors, and many of them are on our show floor exhibiting showing their wear, hosting their their, their clients, and also being involved in the meetings and they're a really important part of our community.[00:06:26] Ricardo Belmar: And then tell us a little bit about you know, the, the startup community and the relationship with, with the shop talk there.[00:06:32] Krystina Gustafson: Yeah, it's I think, been a part of our community that's been really special from day one. You know, we were really the first show that was putting Katrina Lake on, on the main stage when she had founded Stitch Fix. You know, the guys at Dollar Shave Club. So I'd say it's always been a core part of who we are.[00:06:45] But we have recognized that it's Such a differentiator for us that we wanna pour more investment into it. And so we've actually been building out our team internally to make sure that we're really cultivating that community, bringing people on board who are specific to, you know, bringing the big VCs to, to the show because, hey, when you [00:07:00] get the big VCs here, you're also gonna be be building a, a big start of community.[00:07:03] And I had jotted down the number, which of course is escaping me now, but yes, 475 founders who were at Shop Talk this year. I like to think that number's actually probably a little lower. When you think about the fact that some founders have potentially sold their businesses, gone onto corporate ventures, it's probably over 500 in, in some capacity.[00:07:19] People who are current founders or have founded businesses before. But we just truly think that's what gives the show so much life. Just the energy that you have from those entrepreneurs who are coming here to learn share what they're finding. They tend to be also some of the more open folks , when they're talking about the challenges that they're facing, which is[00:07:34] Jeff Roster: Yeah. Not tend to be a hundred percent. What? That's, that's why it's so fun to, to, to talk to the startup community cuz they there is no filter.[00:07:41] And there was no AR person to, to say, don't say that. So, no, it's, I mean, the difference is an analyst working, you know, with, with the largest companies in my old days of Gartner to work covering the startup committee.[00:07:52] I mean, it's night and day. It's so refreshing.[00:07:55] Krystina Gustafson: were you I don't know if you were in the keynote with Imran Khan from Veri Shop, but he, he was unfiltered while he [00:08:00] was up there on stage, which, I mean, we've been getting such good feedback on that interview, so yeah, I hear you. [00:08:04] Ben Miller: getting, I think we are incredibly proud about the keynote lineup this. year. And we, we, we've, it's an incredible process to work with all of our keynotes to, to be prepared. But one of the things that we have spoken about is how they can be open. Cuz nobody wants to come to an event and just see someone reading the press release.[00:08:19] And some of, the, some the great conversations that we've had on the main stage this year and some of the openness of the speakers has been quite a revelation and yeah, I think it's probably the best keynote group that we put together.[00:08:30] Krystina Gustafson: I agree. And I have to say, just being in the, I spent a lot of my time in the, the depths of the green room at the show, and I have to tell you the authenticity of those leaders. And I know that sounds really cheesy, and I'm not typically the type of prince Ben knows. I'm not the soft emotive type.[00:08:44] But I mean, it was palpable. Every single one of them was incredibly kind, incredibly grateful to be here. Willing to be open, recognizing that our audience really wanted to learn. And so I didn't even feel to the same degree as impacious that we had to push. Obviously we're always pushing people to say interesting things, but they [00:09:00] were eager to do it which was really unique and special.[00:09:02] Ricardo Belmar: tell us a bit more about some of the feedback you've had, both, both in the keynotes and then even in some of the other track sessions that I know there have been some really interesting speakers there. I know I was in some where you could just feel, you know, and some of the speakers are, or just, I, I would almost have to describe as entertaining and some of the things they said in, in the way that, that the crowd really reacted to them.[00:09:20] Krystina Gustafson: Yeah.[00:09:20] I think some of the interesting formats that we rolled out have been a lot of fun. So one session that got a ton of great feedback was our rapid fire session. We did two of them. One was with investors, which again, kind of getting back to your point about people that can be unfiltered, a lot of laughter coming outta that one.[00:09:34] I think one of the, one of the questions at the end was you know, what's your most unpopular opinion today? And just really kinda, you know, use poking and prodding[00:09:42] them. So that one was a lot of fun. [00:09:44] Jeff Roster: I'm stealing that one. I'm gonna, that, that's gonna be my,[00:09:46] Ricardo Belmar: yeah, that's right. Right. Yeah.[00:09:47] Krystina Gustafson: Exactly.[00:09:48] We gamify it. There's a really loud, obnoxious buzzer when people run out of time.[00:09:51] They have their four minutes. So, so that was a hit. And then we also did one on tech investing, which was really fun. It had CB Insights, Ulta Beauty and Patagonia on [00:10:00] it. And I think what was really interesting about that one was you had sort of Ulta that has this huge budget. They're always trying new things.[00:10:05] They're always testing, and, learning. And then you have Patagonia, which is a little bit more conservative, maybe doesn't have that big budget to blow. So just kind of hearing Prama, who's the Chief digital officer at Ulta talking about, oh yes, we're trying this. Yes, we're doing AR. Oh, this is fantastic. And Patagonia just being kinda like, no hard pass on Metaverse hard pass on this.[00:10:19] You know, it really represents the dynamics that our audience has, you know? [00:10:23] Ricardo Belmar: different. Yeah. Yeah.[00:10:24] Ben Miller: And, and I think that authenticity has been something that's, that's thread throughout and we, we've programmed sessions that were, were about purpose and we wanted to talk about purpose and want to talk about sustainability.[00:10:34] But actually what we've found is great. We've got the specific sessions, but the general principle of authentic leadership has, has woven through so many of the conversations. Whether that's, you know, leaders openly facing in some of the challenges that they've had or talk about their views on social issues.[00:10:48] There's been some really dynamic conversations and that's been exciting to be part of. [00:10:54] Krystina Gustafson: I think to your question too about feedback though I haven't had anyone complain to me yet.[00:10:57] so that to me is, [00:10:59] Ricardo Belmar: That's something, [00:10:59] Krystina Gustafson: [00:11:00] that's a big barometer of, of people being happy. So I think just generally kind of going back to where we started the conversation, everyone's gritting, ear to ear having a fantastic time, and that's not really something that's measurable.[00:11:10] We'll get sort of the more measurable data after the show, but. , but it's, I mean, so far I think the buzz has been really great. I do really look forward to getting that feedback though. One of the things that I had mentioned for anyone who was in the opening remarks session, when we talked about how we were doing more on seamless stores this year, that was feedback that we got from both Shop Talk and the most recent grocery shop was that people wanted to see us lean more into physical stores.[00:11:30] And so, We did that we made sure that it was covered on our keynote stage with Footlocker, with Brilliant Earth. It was something that we dialed up in our track sessions as well. So it's great to hear kind of the initial buzz and excitement. But we also try to take that constructive feedback post show when we're getting more concrete data, survey results, and then action that for, the next show [00:11:48] Seamless Stores & the "Death of Omnichannel"[00:11:48] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. So tell, tell us a little bit more on that topic of Seamless stores, because I, I did, I, cause I noticed that difference as well, right? From back, from both, from last Shop Talk and, and progressing through grocery shop to hear that there was [00:12:00] more emphasis on what's happening in physical stores and how that ties back into the rest of of the retail organization.[00:12:06] So how, tell us more about that.[00:12:07] Ben Miller: I woke up this morning to a notification on my phone flicking through half jet lag still, and there's this great message that somebody had posted on my LinkedIn saying, thank you, shop Talk 2023 for finally killing omnichannel.[00:12:24] And[00:12:24] I think, [00:12:25] Ricardo Belmar: saw that post[00:12:26] Ben Miller: do you know what, we've now reached that point where we talk about seamless stores, we talk about unified commerce, the general principle of how do we help customers wherever they are, whenever they want to interact with the brand, to be able to, discover, to be able to explore,[00:12:44] to be able to excited it or to be able to buy and whether that's on a social media channel, whether that's on the retailer's own asset, whether that's having a fantastic experience when they walk through a store.[00:12:55] That's shopping. And I think the number of times I've heard that, you know, [00:13:00]there's been very few conversations about channel management, cuz I think we've finally realized that channels are just this artificial construct and actually[00:13:05] what it is he's getting, he's getting product to people and exciting. about product. And that's been one of the big things for me for, for the whole show. When we, we, we spent a lot of time talking about it in advance. We've been looking at how do you remove friction from the shopping experience, and places where a bit of friction's good, but also where you want to take out friction.[00:13:23] And that's been a really important thought. How do you link some of these things together about the online experience and the offline experience What are the building blocks? What, what's the tech stack to enable that? But as a, as a concept, just getting product to people when they want, it has been, I think it's been the biggest thing for me, [00:13:40] Krystina Gustafson: One of the, one of the cheesy jokes I didn't get into the zeitgeist was it reminds me of the Nintendo Switch, you know, where you're playing on your handheld and then you plug it into the TV and your game is picked up. You know exactly where you were in, in the game progress, you don't have to finish a level.[00:13:53] That's how I, that's how my brain thinks about what unified retail should be going forward. I didn't have room for it though. We were already five minutes over. But, but in all [00:14:00]seriousness you know, the example that I did share, which was probably more valuable to the audience, was Brilliant Earth, right?[00:14:04] You know, go online. You do an online consultation, you get to the store, Hey, here's five rings that we picked out for you based off of what you told us online. Like I think that's kind of how we're thinking about unified these days. It's less about shopping where you want, when you want, and making that a continuous experience.[00:14:18] Because we were talking, we didn't wanna undermine in in our zeitgeist presentation that frictionless isn't hard and it isn't important. But I think where we landed is more companies have solved for that already, right? The amount of companies that have curbside, that have redesigned their store formats.[00:14:31] I think that's kind of more progressed, if you will. And I think Unified is really still in its early stages seeing what companies like Brilliant Earth are doing. The other speaker who we confirmed was the chief digital Officer from Panera. And they recently signed that deal with Amazon One for the biometric scanning in their stores linking to loyalty programs.[00:14:47] So that's another great example. And it's a completely different category than fine jewelry, which is what Brilliant Earth is doing. But I feel like those are two early examples of where we see this trend heading. [00:14:57][00:14:57] "Follow the Money" ... but, Omnichannel?[00:14:57] Ben Miller: And I was in a different room when the Panera presentation was [00:15:00]on, so I missed it. But the social comments and the social feedback on that yeah, we did some work. One of the things that, it goes right back to when Shop Talk was founded by, led by Anil and, and the team was to sit down and look at where does the VC And if you follow the money, then you start to pick up the trends. And we spend a, we spend quite a bit of time looking at this whole idea of, okay, if Shop Talk wants to talk about physical stores, well what's relevant, what's new? What's the future in that? So, you with our friends, at CB Insights, we went into the data and there's a phenomenal amount of funding's continuing to go into removing friction.[00:15:38] Whether that's checkout free, for example, they say whole seamless of connecting that shopping journey. It's, there's funding there, but it's, it's still lower, but we really see that increasing and there some, some of the stats about the levels of is huge. So we believe that's only gonna get more and that's only gonna snowball.[00:15:55] So understanding that further, pulling out great examples. We talked on the main stage [00:16:00] about Zara and some of the work that they're doing in their flagship stores. Yeah. Zara is is certainly the biggest apparel retailer in Europe, if not, yeah, the parent company, Inditex, the biggest in the world[00:16:11] They're still only doing it in, in a couple of trial stores. So the potential is, is absolutely huge and, and we wanna celebrate trials like that.[00:16:19] Ricardo Belmar: Right. Yeah, no, that, that, that makes sense.[00:16:20] Jeff Roster: Yeah, that's music in my ears. I mean, I've been fighting omnichannel forever. [00:16:25] No, no offense, but when, when your competitor coins the term, no, Gardner, Allen should ever use that term. What's funny, the funniest thing I ever had is somebody, one time, you know, no offense to the, the vendors in the room, but a vendor one time ask me, Hey, do you have omnichannel IT spend?[00:16:39] And I said, well, I do, but you'll have to define what you mean. And the conversation went dead. He had no idea what he he was [00:16:44] Krystina Gustafson: I absolutely love that. My favorite, thing is when people apply to speak at Shop Talk and we're like, what do you wanna speak about? And they're like, oh, omnichannel, or, oh, I wanna talk about e-com. And I'm just like, gimme more, gimme more [00:16:53] Supporting Store Teams[00:16:53] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. Right. Could you be a little more vague?[00:16:56] Yeah. Yeah. So, so one thing I [00:17:00] noticed in particular this time, which I haven't seen at other shows as much attention. And I think maybe it's part, it sort of comes out I think, a little bit out of the seamless stores. But I think Krystina, you or Joe mentioned it in this, session that there's this renewed, focus on how we're enabling store teams, whether it's directly with technology or just with different, by changing the processes, but just how they're able to work and how even if you didn't have a session that was stated on the agenda, that's what it was about. I heard that come up from so many presenters and speakers that part of what they were doing was tying back into how they're supporting those store teams to make their job better. And I, I think I lost track, but maybe three or four times, I heard one of the speakers mention how they see that as something that is enabling a better career path for these retail workers. And I thought that was super interesting to me because I haven't seen that at other shows or in other events.[00:17:53] Ben Miller: I mean, let me give a big picture of you and I'll pass over to Krystina for a bit more detail.[00:17:58] I would say take one step back from [00:18:00] that. And, and the first step back from that is, is the investment environment that we find ourselves in right now.[00:18:05] And the decisions and the hard decisions that people have to make.[00:18:10] So if we are going through continued elevated levels of e-commerce sales, we're going through a store Renaissance, something as we referred to it, and we need to try and deliver to customers, you know, commerce everywhere where, that's great, but all of those parts require investment.[00:18:25] So how do you do it in an investment environment which is, which is tighter and it, this has felt a really optimistic few days, but we are really cognizant of the environment that we're in. The number of speakers that I've heard to say in an environment. The two things that they focus on right now are people and talent, and also the store infrastructure.[00:18:44] If you take that together and you think, okay, well where's the investment in people? In stores?[00:18:49] Then you start to realize that actually you've got a really cost effective way to be able to drive, drive digital transformation and to drive significant improvement. So we, we deliberately programmed some areas where we wanted to talk about some of the [00:19:00] detail about that, but actually is a theme.[00:19:02] Completely agree. Ricardo. It's cropped up in so many different [00:19:05] Krystina Gustafson: Yeah. I would build on that. I think it's not only the store associates, right? I think people overall ended up being a much bigger theme than we had intended it to be. You know, to Ben's point, we did have a couple of sessions that were very specific to store employees, whether it was from the retailer brand side, whether it was from the tech side.[00:19:21] We had a couple sessions, maybe one or two on culture and leadership. But that theme came up I feel, even more than usual. And I think it's this whole idea of empathy. Kind of going back to your point too, and, and how you leverage your workers. Leverage is probably a, a crass word, but. [00:19:35] Empower your[00:19:36] Jeff Roster: There you [00:19:37] Krystina Gustafson: use Empower. What Use Empower. It was really interesting because I, I feel like the dialogue around store associates for so long has been about productivity. And of course we were hearing quite a bit of that. The lens of safety seemed to be a new conversation, right? As much as we hear about automation and the, is that, oh, the robots aren't gonna take your jobs now, it was sort of, you know, listening into Amazon, okay, well we're actually using automation to make the warehouse [00:20:00] workers safer and to make sure that we have, you know, safety protocols in place. And that was kind of a new spin on that theme that I hadn't previously heard and, and wasn't necessarily expecting coming into the show.[00:20:08] Ben Miller: I'm trying to find a stat and I'm [00:20:12] we go. I got it. There's a great, there's a great session from Katie Reeves from, who's the managing director of Cos[00:20:20] of the h and m group manager of Cos in North America, and she's talked about the investment that they are making their smart store[00:20:27] portfolio. [00:20:28] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. I, I remember that session. [00:20:29] Yeah. But[00:20:30] Ben Miller: one of the key components of the smart store was enabling their teams in the store and they talked about the app that they. And, and they'd use the app for process improvement, bring all the information into the right place to help them operationally as well as help serve customers better.[00:20:46] And she shared that in the pilot stores where they have got the app running, their staff retention of install teams has increased by And if you think about the labor market we are in,[00:20:58] Ricardo Belmar: wow. [00:21:00][00:21:00] Ben Miller: Joe shared on the main stage, the the quit rate is over 40% higher for retail than it is for as a whole.[00:21:07] Yeah. It's harder to find people, people more expensive. If you're able to make that sort of change, enable that by technology. That's incredible.[00:21:13] Not only that, she shared that because the process improvements their store staff are having an extra two and a half hours a week to be able to serve their customers better.[00:21:25] And that's, that's transformational for a[00:21:27] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. That, that's a massive difference. That's a massive improvement.[00:21:30] Yeah.[00:21:30] Krystina Gustafson: You know, one thing that comes to mind as you're saying that, and it sort of circles back to what we were talking about before I was in the session with Chobani, and they were actually taking this from more of a perspective. And you know, she was saying, we get asked the question all the time, how do you measure. The impact on sales. How do you measure the impact on the business? And she was actually making the point actually, we see the most measurable statistics in our employee acquisition and retention because there are so many people that want to be a part of a company that is mission driven. So I think it's always such a [00:22:00] good point.[00:22:00] Technology is really enabling workers. It's, you know, boosting retention. It's helping that labor shortage, but also a really strong purpose and something that has nothing to do with technology could also be really powerful.[00:22:10] Ricardo Belmar: strong purpose. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.[00:22:12] Jeff Roster: I mean, how novel people wanna be part of something big. I'm shocking[00:22:15] Ricardo Belmar: Shocking, right.[00:22:16] Krystina Gustafson: We lose sight of it though, don't we?[00:22:18] Jeff Roster: Well, we do. And you know, and that was such a strong point. And, and, and I was sitting here thinking as you're talking you know, of course our, our good friend Ron Thurston is this, is this like his legacy because. Five years ago, four years ago, we weren't really talking about this stuff.[00:22:32] And then Ron pops on and does that amazing podcast and that amazing journey and now all of a sudden it's, it's like we all are, are able to say what, what's common sense? It's, it's a people business. You better put your people in front of your people business.[00:22:46] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. I, I, I even think, you know, the, the biggest change I've noticed to your point, if you go back five years, no one used the phrases enabling store teams. No one talked about empowering them with the right technology. What everyone said is, well, we have to get them the right training. [00:23:00] It was all about, training was always the key word, and it was investment in training as if, you know, the only thing you needed to do was to impart a set of skills to just work the store.[00:23:09] And now that's completely transformed that it is. I, I think, you know, you have the right words, Krystina, right, it's about enabling, empowering those teams with the right elements, whether it's process, technology or the. People skills itself, whatever it is. And I can't remember which session it was, but the one that's also stood out to me, someone was talking about how they recognize that when they look across all of the store associates, they have, people have different skills and the different talents, and some are better than others at certain roles in the store. And that it doesn't make sense to assume that every store employee should be able to do every single job in the store. And especially if you start layering in things now, like live streaming, for example.[00:23:47] And this was one that I keyed in on because and you may remember this, this trip because some time ago on, on the podcast we talked. This idea. And I had, and, and some other conversation I had with with Retail Wire. I think we talked about this idea that, the retailers [00:24:00] have this inherent talent in some of their employees.[00:24:02] Because let's face it, if you go by the, just by age demographics alone, odds are in most retailers, you have employees in stores who may have their own YouTube channel already. Independent of that job function. And they're good at this and they like doing it. So it makes sense for a retailer to kind of take advantage of that in, in a sense, right?[00:24:19] And encourage those skills. But at the same time, that that same person who might like to live stream, they might not be a good stylist. For example, if it's an apparel store and there might be another employee that loves to do styling with customers and is so much better at it than others. So give them that kind of growth path using those skills.[00:24:37] Ben Miller: using, and this speaks to something at the sort, the very heart of shop content, which is how is technology enabling a lot of this transformation? And if you talk about, you know, enabling and empowering frontline workers, you've got a hundred percent, there is this sort of talent.[00:24:51] How do you unlock this talent? And things like livestream shoppable video, creating new way for frontline workers to be able to unlock that talent that [00:25:00] they've had in that store. And they've probably been helping a small number of customers with, but now you can do it on a bigger scale. The second in training,[00:25:07] it's really hard, to take a whole day out or to take a frontline worker away from their store to help them with some of the at times softer to be able to do that.[00:25:18] We've got some amazing trials and Kroger on the front foot about doing some incredible work to help empower with app enable. Short, quick, accessible training to help be able to improve and to deliver a better experience for their guests. And then finally, there's that element you talked about, about playing to STRs. There is this group of workers in the in flexible environments economy and tech is enabling retailers to access that pool. But actually more broadly, is enable. Existing workers to have that flexibility to choose which all they want to work in, or tasks that they wanna pick up, working at times their families.[00:25:59] So tech is [00:26:00] enabling all these things to take that workforce, drive the attention, drive the engagement, and ultimately serve their customers better.[00:26:06] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.[00:26:07] Krystina Gustafson: I'm laughing because , it's a little bit of a tangent, but as you're talking about this and, and we're just kind of on this theme about empowering your workers and thinking about building technology for the people who are running the organization. I think about maybe another industry, maybe the airline industry[00:26:23] Ricardo Belmar: mm-hmm.[00:26:23] Krystina Gustafson: didn't focus on this and Yeah.[00:26:24] Somewhat imploded. And so i, I, I laugh because, We always tell people, if you tell me you're a data-driven, consumer-centric company, get off the stage.[00:26:33] Cuz everyone else, like every single company who's on our stages. If you're, if you're not, get outta here.[00:26:37] But I do think sometimes by saying that, and it's obviously the right approach we ignore what needs to happen for the employees to make this whole business run.[00:26:46] And we've very clearly what can happen when that gets ignored. So I think, even just kind of looking to lessons from other industries. Made us realize just kind of how important is overall as well.[00:26:57] All about the Data & Data Insights[00:26:57] Ben Miller: Ricardo, there's a question that I, I wanted to ask you. [00:27:00] What one of the conversations, cause we're starting to touch about data Mm-hmm. and you, you've got such incredible knowledge in this space. We, we've picked conversation almost.[00:27:09] The number of speakers that almost thrown their hands in the and said, you know what?[00:27:13] Data, trying to understand the customer across all touchpoints. You just can't do First party, hear a party.[00:27:19] I, I can't get an omnichannel, a true of my customer everywhere, and that's fine. I'm just gonna have to serve them where you can.[00:27:27] Ricardo Belmar: Uhhuh[00:27:28] Ben Miller: Is that a view you recognize?[00:27:30] Ricardo Belmar: I, I I think kind of maybe the, the, I would kind of break that down to say that I, every retailer I talk to Will, will say, you know, at the end of the day, we are overwhelmed with data.[00:27:39] There's no lack of data . It's, it's really a matter of a, what can I do with that? How can I actually analyze it in a way that tells me the story about my customer and who they are, what, what their preferences are, what, how they want to engage with us. That's what every retailer wants to know. And I think the challenge really is I forget what the statistic is, but the [00:28:00] amount of data that retail generates every day is just overwhelming. I think it's something on the order of it's more data than the internet generated five years ago or something. Un unbelievable like that. And so the question every retailer has to ask is, so what am I gonna do with this now?[00:28:14] Right? What are the tools I have to use? And even if you have the tools, it's not enough, right? Because it, even that needs to be looked at by people to interpret what do I do now that I have this knowledge? If I convert that data into something useful and knowledgeable, that gives me a, a possible actions to take.[00:28:29] Someone has to take those actions, someone has to make the decision, which is the best action, and then it becomes back to a, a people problem. And I know. . I think even today, but in past years, I've, I've seen retailers will say, you know, now we think we know how to select the right tools to help us with the analysis, but now my challenge is this is so new, we don't have anyone on staff that knows how to deal with this.[00:28:49] And if I try to go out and hire those people, everyone wants to hire those people. So it's incredibly competitive and I feel like I don't even know if we can afford those people on to be part of our, [00:29:00] our organization because it's so competitive.[00:29:02] Ben Miller: We're back to people in[00:29:03] Ricardo Belmar: Exactly right. Exactly. It always seems to come back to that.[00:29:06] You know, I guess what I'll maybe turn around because sort of the one thing we haven't talked about that has come up all over the, the place is, everyone's favorite new, hyped up technology , is generative ai, ? It's like last year's metaverse. And, and one of the promises, I guess I'll use that strong word about this, is that it is supposed to help with this problem and give you better tools and better decision making capability with all that data that you have.[00:29:29] What About Generative AI?[00:29:29] Ricardo Belmar: I, I'm, I'm wondering, I mean, what, what are your, for both of you, what are your thoughts? Cuz obviously everyone must be coming up to you and saying, oh, what, where, where is the session that we're gonna talk about generative ai [00:29:38] Krystina Gustafson: Every, yeah.[00:29:39] You know was actually surprised people were more measured than I expected them to be. I thought it was gonna be like Metaverse last year where it was like, the session is not about metaverse and it's still snuck in. I, I feel like generative AI was a little bit more measured.[00:29:50] Look, I think our big thesis on it is, again, still very early. What feels different to us though is that this feels immediately applicable and it feels like something [00:30:00] that you invest in and see real business results on. Right? So, so many opportunities I think.[00:30:06] Gosh, he wasn't. Sean Downey from Google was just kind of talking about the various use cases for it, whether it's advertising, whether it's, you know, looking at supply chain data, whether it's creatives, whether it's customer service.[00:30:14] We had a slide that was kind of making fun of in a, in a good way. The CB insights market map that they built with just all the, and it was just scrolling, right?[00:30:21] I mean, it's not even retail. Right. It's every single industry, the use cases. Endless, which I think is a really exciting opportunity.[00:30:28] I think we would both agree that a lot of work still needs to be done to make sure this is ethical, to make sure it's accurate. We're very early stages, but I think it just feels more real than the metaverse[00:30:38] Jeff Roster: well, the, the thing that's real about it is we all, we all are, are playing on it in our own search engine. I[00:30:44] Ricardo Belmar: right. Yeah.[00:30:45] Jeff Roster: I wanted to ask you know, the Microsoft guys we talked to yesterday, just what. How many more hits on Bing has gotten in the last[00:30:52] Ben Miller: own[00:30:52] Jeff Roster: I mean,[00:30:52] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, it[00:30:53] Jeff Roster: that's all I've used. Yeah.[00:30:54] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, it[00:30:55] Jeff Roster: And, and so we're so it's[00:30:56] Ricardo Belmar: extra users[00:30:57] Jeff Roster: Exactly. Exactly. It just, it has to be [00:31:00] so, so literally. There's no technology that, that every single person is using that it has this immediate impact in the business. I mean, we all didn't pick up point of sale devices or all, didn't pick up whatever, but this one thing hit, but we, I mean, we were tracking it from an, from a startup perspective.[00:31:17] I mean, the amount of, of spending AI even 2, 3, 4 years ago, it's, it's, it's orders of magnitude compared to everything else. Yeah. And then it just exploded.[00:31:25] And then it got a little controversial, so then people even used it more and everyone's trying to trick it and all this stuff,[00:31:30] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. It kinda [00:31:30] Krystina Gustafson: but I think you, you hit on something really important there, right? One of the biggest problems with the metaverse conversation, and we were very clear about this last year as well, the learning curve.[00:31:39] To even understand what it is to understand what blockchain is.[00:31:42] is virtual gaming actually, the metaverse, what ,is it goggles?[00:31:46] ChatGPT, my parents can go, go. on the website, tape it. It is So easily accessible and it's so Easily understandable. And I think that's why you've seen just meteor meteoric rise in interest compared to the metaverse.[00:31:57] Ben Miller: And the other thing is if you break it down, [00:32:00] There is three potential areas that generative AI can help with, which are fundamental retail challenges.[00:32:08] Number one, can I make repetitive tasks more efficient[00:32:11] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm. [00:32:11] Ben Miller: Mm-hmm. , and scale retail is the efficiency of process.[00:32:16] that's what it is. it's, about [00:32:17] Ricardo Belmar: scale, right? It's about [00:32:18] Ben Miller: Great. This is something that can help it. So of course retail's gonna lean in. The second is can it help drive commerce everywhere? You know, we started a conversation with seamless stores, The amount of copy and creative that it be required to be wherever your customers want to be is mind boggling. Generative AI might be able to help. And thirdly, that the holy grail of mass retail, physical, of personalization, we've talked about it every time. And the reason we talk about it every single conference is cause we haven't cracked it[00:32:45] Ricardo Belmar: confidence, right? That's right.[00:32:46] Ben Miller: generative AI has the potential to be able to help in in stalled areas. So there's three absolutely cool retail, pr drivers that we can see. cases for. So no wonder people are very excited on the plus side.[00:32:57] We were, we were in the staff room just before we came [00:33:00] down, and I, we brought up chat, G b T, and I asked you chat, G b T what were the key themes from Shop Talk 2023. And of course he told me that unfortunately it's historic and can't can't Do that. So Krystina pointed out that maybe our jobs were secure for another year yet. So [00:33:13] Ricardo Belmar: That's right. [00:33:14] Ben Miller: we'll take, we'll take, we'll take that. [00:33:16] Ricardo Belmar: that's right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I think you're, you're, you're spot on on that. I mean, I, I, I like to I sort of, I steal a, a quote from one of my colleagues at Microsoft who like tells everyone in every meeting, you know, if I haven't had five retailers I talked to today about generative, generative ai, it's only because the fourth retailer didn't get off the phone with me till the end of the day and I couldn't get to the fifth call[00:33:37] Krystina Gustafson: I like that.[00:33:38] That's a good one! [00:33:39] Ricardo Belmar: And, and it's, and it so true.[00:33:40] And, and I think, you're right about the, different categories. I mean, one of our. Favorite customers that we, we talk about is CarMax, where they've taken this technology and, you know, one of, they found that one of the pain points in their customer journey is people go to their website and they wanna research the cars they have in inventory.[00:33:57] And one of the tools, of course, is to look at reviews and [00:34:00] comments from people who've bought past cars. Well there are thousands of reviews! So you go on there and if you wanna look at a car, what's your, your choice is to read a thousand reviews before you decide what you want to go look at. Or maybe you just give up or you find some other tool to help you do that research.[00:34:14] So they've actually leveraged these tools now to do all of that summarization for you. So you can go to their website now and you give it the parameters that interest you about a car. Their new AI tool just comes back to you with immediately the summarization across all those thousands of reviews.[00:34:29] Here are the key points that you're interested in. Here's how it compares in these cars that you chose to look at.[00:34:33] Krystina Gustafson: I need this so bad. The joke, the joke. in Our household is whenever we travel, I don't read anything. I literally, I just see, I see a pretty picture and I'm like, book. And it kills my husband. He is like the one that's reading[00:34:44] Ricardo Belmar: He wants to research everything, right?[00:34:46] Krystina Gustafson: my god. Every single thing. Well, I think the bars in the wrong place in this hotel or the room is only this many. Yeah, he's, he's, on, he's on it. And I am not So this, this, will help me be a better [00:34:55] Ricardo Belmar: you go,[00:34:56] Krystina Gustafson: partner[00:34:57] Retail Media Networks[00:34:57] Ricardo Belmar: There you go. So I guess let me shift [00:35:00] then to the kind of the last one trending thing I wanted to ask you about because it's, it's one that, it's probably one of my favorites. So, over the past year, and Jeff likes to poke fun of me for this quite a bit.[00:35:10] You know, I, I've been really big on retail media networks and knew I was going this way. And part of the reason why I've been beating the retail media network's drum for so long cuz I, I started talking about it back in, what did I talk October, 2021,[00:35:23] Jeff Roster: it seemed like two decades[00:35:24] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. . Yeah. Yeah.[00:35:25] But it, it's evolved and and I think, again, I think you, you guys mentioned this in this session, that really, what has it evolved to? It's become more about retailers looking more like a technology company and offering technology solutions and services to other retailers. . And I think that to me is a, is just really interesting into how their own, their whole core business is evolving.[00:35:45] Krystina Gustafson: I think that Ben will jump out of his skin if he doesn't get to answer[00:35:48] Ricardo Belmar: I know. Well, and I, and Ben's laugh and Ben's laughing, so anyone not who's not can't see this. I mean, Ben's laughing because he and I have had this conversation exactly before . [00:35:56] Krystina Gustafson: I don't, think, I don't think an hour goes by without ben talking [00:36:00] about in a, in a Very positive way. [00:36:02] Ricardo Belmar: We're, we're of like, minds . [00:36:03] we're of like minds.[00:36:04] Ben Miller: I, I, I, You did a very good job leaving that to the last question, because otherwise we'd have lost a whole of the podcast. [00:36:10] Ricardo Belmar: else if we had started with that. Yes. , [00:36:12] Ben Miller: this is, it's what the, why is it so important and why do I get so interested about it? Because there's two levels. One, I think at the, our friend Andrew lipman Insider says it so well. this is the third wave of digital. [00:36:24] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. I absolutely, yeah, totally agree.[00:36:26] Ben Miller: You see the numbers, okay, the numbers, let's be honest, the numbers are hugely hugely skewed by investment in search returns on Amazon, so yes, we recognize the prize, but you've gotta recognize that's skew in it. But when you strip that back, there is a marketing a digital marketing channel where, which has the opportunity to directly attribute sales to investment and whether retail media is more efficient than other digital marketing channels or at, or it's just that you can actually prove it, then actually that point is really valuable.[00:36:59] [00:37:00] it's a, it's a phenomenal trend. It's a, it's a huge wave and what's been really exciting in this particular event, and yeah, we, we, we'll continue the conversation in a, a European Barcelona as well, I is to stand back and say, okay, we all know what retail media is now. We don't need to do that. a lot of us are doing it, really, how do we get efficient?[00:37:19] Okay, do we, and do I need 600, retail media networks in my portfolio?[00:37:23] Where, where do I spend the money? What's exciting about it is he's coming back to, and I think this is a point that we made Joe made during the zeitgeist, is it's about the basics of great advertising. So let's talk again about creative, let's talk about engagement, let's talk about generating fun, and this is another channel to enable us, us to do that.[00:37:41] So that that, that's really exciting. The second element of it, which is why it's so important, is that element about changing relationships.[00:37:49] This idea that a retailer is as, as well as a buyer, is now a seller to their vendors. And it's not, that's not just limited to retail media that, that think you have these, we call it [00:38:00]collaborative commerce networks, which is the sharing of logistics, for example. and when you're adding marketplaces and you see how the Their customers and we feel the retailers are changing and how do you do all of that and drive the margin that's there to be taken at the same time as keeping that laser focus? Cause we know that as soon as a retailer loses their laser focus on the customer, then that's a challenge for them. How do you balance those two together? And that's, that's still a working progress.[00:38:30] And that's one of the fun conversations that we've been having and seeing where, seeing what next and seeing how retailers map that you've got. Yeah. If you are a serious retailer or a significant scale, you've got to be in the retail media game.[00:38:40] You cannot leave that margin on the table. But how do you do it in a way that keeps focused on the customer and you're targeted now calling that out in their earnings reports to say to the center of their thinking. And that customer-centric approach to alternative revenue streams is gonna be a really interesting trend to [00:38:56] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. I agree.[00:38:57] Jeff Roster: yeah, I gotta tell you, Ricardo, so, so I was [00:39:00] kidding you about, you know, that. I spent probably three and a half hours yesterday about four different vendors. And I think I now begin, am only beginning to understand literally how much money we're talking about in re in, in retail media. And it is it's never been, I mean, it really was never a focus at the, at the other show in in the cold part of the country in January and it's ever present here. Yeah. And you can't, as an analyst, it covers the entire landscape. You can't get away with it. But the people that actually built some of this stuff I talked to. Right. And it's, and you know, it got the history and it's like, oh my gosh, we're not talking about something that's been around a hundred years.[00:39:38] We're talking about something, it's really exploding the last three years.[00:39:40] Ben Miller: yes, [00:39:41] Jeff Roster: And, and it's like, that's what he's been talking [00:39:45] Krystina Gustafson: Ricardo, I'd be curious your thoughts. One debate that we've kind of been having, and we haven't come up with an answer to it yet, is just kind of the dynamics of how this plays out in industries outside of grocery because. . That's of course been the industry that's adopted it the fastest, but yeah, the incestuousness of, [00:40:00] of that industry compared to department stores. Apparel. Yeah. Places where companies have the opportunity to be more D to C.[00:40:05] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.[00:40:06] Krystina Gustafson: Part of me wonders if it's as scalable there where the retailers don't have as much, let's go back to the word leverage as they do in the grocery industry. Like, have you thought about that at all? [00:40:16] Ricardo Belmar: I have because you're right. I mean, there is a very unique kind of trade relationship in grocery between grocers and the CPG companies that, that have all, you know, all those products. That's a different dynamic. . Then you look at a department store, which is maybe the easiest, I guess, example to kind of look at here, where there's so many third party apparel products, right?[00:40:34] Yes. There's private labels in, in your department store. Generally people are shopping there because of all the, the name brands that are available. So what's the say equivalent opportunity? I, I've actually been saying, department stores to me feels like probably the number one most untapped opportunity for this, because I think department stores, we all say the same things, right?[00:40:53] They've sort of lost their luster a little bit, right. Just are shopping less at department stores, but what could department [00:41:00] stores do to make this more interesting? You know, I would say one of those is they have to increase the, just the overall experience in the store. And if you think of visual impression as a consumer walking into a department store versus, any an apparel store where you just see apparel hung on rack.[00:41:15] In a department store. I think the merchandising opportunities are much bigger. And if you think about the in-store advertising they can do with digital screens, not the sort where, you know, oh look, there's a screen hanging on the wall showing a video clip about this designer and their products running.[00:41:30] Not that right, because anyone can do that. And, and that's probably my, my number one least favorite example that anyone can do. And, and I've, I've been working with digital signage. Since more than 10 years, and, and Jeff is laughing because one of the comments I keep making about retail media is from the early days back in the, you know, maybe early 2010s when I was marketing digital signage solutions, we talked to retailers about creating this kind of media network.[00:41:57] It for their brand in their stores. And [00:42:00] not one retailer ever executed it well. The only, they all never got as far as, let's hang a screen here, let's hang a screen there and then ask brands to give us content. And I suppose part of the, the conclusion we had is that you can't ask IT to run that operation.[00:42:13] It really needs to be run by marketing, but. If you think about what you can do with screen technology now that you couldn't do then, you're not limited by the form factor of a traditional TV monitor type screen. You can have the screen shaped any way you want and you can have any sort of visual layout for it.[00:42:29] And if you do that, then I think that opens up new advertising opportunities for those brands that the department store can work with, that feels more, you know, lifestyle oriented. It feels more aspirational for the apparel merchandise that's there, that they can build off of and entice customers that when you walk by it, you feel like, oh yeah, if I was wearing that jacket, I, I could be doing what this person's doing on, on that video.[00:42:51] I'd be out on the mountain, you know, doing, doing this. And I think it, it just creates a different feel that even if you went to that brand store, you know, they may or may not be [00:43:00]doing that, but uh, it's different and it's a different experience. So that's why I think that's an untapped opportunity for department stores, and I think that's where that needs to go.[00:43:09] And that's why I think, adding the in-store component to retail media is so important right now. I think that's why, that's where the, the real story is gonna start to surface in, in this whole concept. [00:43:18] Krystina Gustafson: It's almost like a And I, I, that was really helpful. Thank you for sharing that. But it, it, it sounds to me so different than the conversations that we hear about retail media today. Right. I. Know some friends who work for some large CPG companies, and it's more of a conversation of, you have to do this, but what you're describing is like a desire to differentiate your brand.[00:43:35] It, it, it feels like a, a shift in, in, in the why.[00:43:38] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.[00:43:38] Jeff Roster: Don't you also think though, that with grocery groceries had slotting fees for forever mm-hmm. , and it just sort of seems like that's a logical extension of the, those co-marketing allows going back and forth where, actually, I don't even know this, but I don't think department stores really have slotting fees because the, the product is constantly changing.[00:43:54] So you have other, you have other something, but I, I mean, but[00:43:57] Ricardo Belmar: way. I mean, you, you have you know, a designer [00:44:00] like a Ralph Lauren may have an arrangement. The departments are based on how much space they get on the floor. and is allocated for them as a brand. And then that dictates, you know, what merchandise do they make available to that department store versus a competitive department store that might give them more space and they make different merchandise available to them.[00:44:15] It's kind of negotiated that way. Not quite the same as the slotting fees that CPG is doing. Grocery.[00:44:20] Jeff Roster: and I think the other thing that's the big drivers, the fact, I mean, just who was on the, who was on the the exhibit floor TikTok, and what were they doing? There was at least three or four live streamers. So the idea that we're all creating, we're all creating content and want to create content. , I mean, and that now we're finally getting to the point where retailers are comfortable maybe not having everything be so hyper produced.[00:44:40] You know, I think the, the best example I have is I just love B n h photo. And if, if you don't know what that is, it's, it's a, it's the best photo shop in, in the world and super high-end skill photographers that, that are selling camera equipment. And my first experience with, I dunno if it's live streaming, it's one-to-one.[00:44:56] Working with them. I mean, for a camera shop, the, the video quality was [00:45:00] not very high. I mean, it was a little shocking, but it didn't matter because the expertise and the engagement for me sitting in Silicon Valley to, to Midtown Manhattan and that experience was amazing. And if retailers just embrace that and let their associates create or do whatever they want and, and, and produce all this content to fill up all the screens, you're gonna see it's gonna be great.[00:45:21] What I don't wanna see is it becomes so. So over, over marketed and just take the soul out of it because retail should be passion. I mean, I think, I think my dad back in the seventies, you know, in his, his butcher shop, I mean, it was all about passion. It was about this and that, and engaging up and down and da, da, da, da.[00:45:40] And, and I think in some ways as we expanded retail, we've lost that a little bit of passion. And maybe this is an opportunity, maybe it's a nice thing, you know, post covid.[00:45:50] We've now re-embraced and learned and knew what we missed. And man, let's just have this retail renaissance and let's get back to the business of having, having fun and having [00:46:00]people engage in this process that we call retail.[00:46:02] And then you, and then, you know, all those years you pitched me, you know, with those whole digital signages, now all of a sudden everything's coming together. The infrastructure, the screens, the cheap, you know, the the screens, the abil, the, the equipment we have to, to create all this content. And we have now, we've taught almost everyone, you know, if you have something to say, turn on your, your, your phone and, and

I had fun chatting with Aarthi and Sriram.We discuss what it takes to be successful in technology, what Sriram would say if Elon tapped him to be the next CEO of Twitter, why more married couples don't start businesses together, and how Aarthi hires and finds 10x engineers.Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan are the hosts of The Good Times Show. They have had leading roles in several technology companies from Meta to Twitter to Netflix and have been founders and investors. Sriram is currently a general partner at a16z crypto and Aarthi is an angel investor.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:19) - Married Couples Co-founding Businesses(00:09:53) - 10x Engineers(00:16:00) - 15 Minute Meetings(00:22:57) - a16z's Edge?(00:26:42) - Future of Twitter(00:30:58) - Is Big Tech Overstaffed?(00:38:37) - Next CEO of Twitter?(00:43:13) - Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?(00:47:32) - Role of Boards(00:52:03) - Failing Upwards(00:56:00) - Underrated CEOs(01:02:18) - Founder Education(01:06:27) - What TV Show Would Sriram Make?(01:10:14) - Undervalued Founder ArchetypesTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.[00:00:00] Aarthi: it's refreshing to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.[00:00:05] Dwarkesh: Let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, Sriram, would you be down to be the [00:00:08] Sriram: CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. We [00:00:12] Aarthi: used to do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just sleep under our desk,, until the janitor would just , poke us out of there , I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. There's such joy in , Finding those moments where you work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:00:25] Sriram: You'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, and now we are on the other side We want to invest in something , where we think the team and the company is going to win and if they do win, there's huge value to be unlocked. [00:00:40] Dwarkesh: Okay. Today I have the, uh, good pleasure to have Arty and Sriram on the podcast and I'm really excited about this.So you guys have your own show, the Arty Andre Good Time show. Um, you guys have had some of the top people in tech and entertainment on Elon Musk, mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Yang, and you guys are both former founders. Advisors, investors, uh, general partner at Anderson Horowitz, and you're an angel investor and an advisor now.Um, so yeah, there's so much to talk about. Um, obviously there's also the, uh, recent news about your, uh, your involvement on, uh, twitter.com. Yeah, yeah. Let's get started. [00:01:19] Married Couples Starting Businesses[00:01:19] Dwarkesh: My first question, you guys are married, of course. People talk about getting a co-founder as finding a spouse, and I'm curious why it's not the case that given this relationship why more married people don't form tech startups.Is, does that already happen, [00:01:35] Aarthi: or, um, I actually am now starting to see a fair bit of it. Uhhuh, . Um, I, I do agree that wasn't a norm before. Um, I think, uh, I, I think I remember asking, uh, pg p the same thing when I went through yc, and I think he kind of pointed to him and Jessica like, you know, YC was their startup , and so, you know, there were even pride.There are a lot of husband and wife, uh, companies. Over the last like decade or so. So I'm definitely seeing that more mainstream. But yeah, you're right, it hasn't been the norm before. Yeah, the, the good time show is our project. It's [00:02:09] Sriram: our startup. Very, I mean, there are some good historical examples. Cisco, for example, uh, came from, uh, uh, husband, wife as a few other examples.I think, you know, on, on the, in, on the pro side, uh, you know, being co-founders, uh, you need trust. You need to really know each other. Uh, you, you go through a lot of like heavy emotional burdens together. And there's probably, and if you, you're for the spouse, hopefully you probably have a lot of chemistry and understanding, and that should help.On the con side, I think one is you, you're prob you know, you, you're gonna show up at work, you know, and startups are really hard, really intense. And you come home and both of you are gonna the exact same wavelength, the exact same time, going through the exact same highs and lows as opposed to two people, two different jobs have maybe differing highs and lows.So that's really hard. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, in a lot of. Work situations, it may just be more challenging where people are like, well, like, you know, person X said this person Y said this, what do I do? Uh, and if you need to fire somebody or you know, something weird happens corporate in a corporate manner, that may also be really hard.Uh, but having said that, you know, uh, [00:03:13] Aarthi: you know, yeah, no, I think both of those are like kind of overblown , like, you know, I think the reason why, um, you know, you're generally, they say you need to have you, it's good to have co-founders is so that you can kind of like write the emotional wave in a complimentary fashion.Uh, and you know, if one person's like really depressed about something, the other person can like pull them out of it and have a more rational viewpoint. I feel like in marriages it works even better. So I feel like to your first point, They know each other really well. You're, you're, you are going to bring your work to home.There is no separation between work and home as far as a startup is concerned. So why not do it together? Oh, [00:03:51] Sriram: well, I think there's one problem, uh, which is, uh, we are kind of unique because we've been together for over 21 years now, and we start for, we've been before, uh, let's not. Wow. There's gonna be some fact checking 19 on this video.99. Close enough. Close enough, right? Like close enough. He wishes he was 21. Oh, right, right, right. Gosh, feels like 21. We have do some, um, [00:04:15] Aarthi: editing on this video. No, no, no. I think 20 years of virtually knowing, 19 years of in-person. [00:04:20] Sriram: There we go. Right. Uh, fact check accurate. Um, ex experts agree. But, um, you know, but when you first met, we, we originally, even before we dating, we were like, Hey, we wanna do a company together.And we bonded over technology, like our first conversation on Yahoo Messenger talking about all these founders and how we wanted to be like them. And we actually then worked together pretty briefly when you were in Microsoft. Uh, before we actually started dating. We were on these sort of talent teams and we kind of met each of the word context.I think a lot of. You know, one is they have never worked together. Um, and so being in work situations, everything from how you run a meeting to how you disagree, uh, you know, uh, is just going to be different. And I think that's gonna be a learning curve for a lot of couples who be like, Hey, it's one thing to have a strong, stable relationship at home.It'll be a different thing to, you know, be in a meeting and you're disagreeing art's meetings very differently from I do. She obsesses over metrics. I'm like, ah, it's close enough. It's fine. , uh, it's close enough. It's fine. as e uh, here already. But, uh, so I do think there's a learning curve, a couples who is like, oh, working together is different than, you know, raising your family and being together.I mean, obviously gives you a strong foundation, but it's not the same thing. Have you guys [00:05:25] Dwarkesh: considered starting a company or a venture together at some point? [00:05:28] Aarthi: Yeah. Um, we've, uh, we've always wanted to do a project together. I don't know if it's a, a startup or a company or a venture. You have done a project together,Yeah, exactly. I think, uh, almost to today. Two years ago we started the Good Time Show, um, and we started at, uh, live Audio on Clubhouse. And, you know, we recently moved it onto video on YouTube. And, um, it's, it's been really fun because now I get to see like, it, it's neither of our full-time jobs, uh, but we spend enough, um, just cycles thinking through what we wanna do with it and what, uh, how to have good conversations and how to make it useful for our audience.So that's our [00:06:06] Sriram: project together. Yep. And we treat it like a, with the intellectual heft of a startup, which is, uh, we look at the metrics, uh, and we are like, oh, this is a good week. The metrics are up into the right and, you know, how do we, you know, what is working for our audience? You know, what do we do to get great guests?What do we do to [00:06:21] Aarthi: get, yeah, we just did our first, uh, in-person meetup, uh, for listeners of the podcast in Chennai. It was great. We had like over a hundred people who showed up. And it was also like, you know, typical startup style, like meet your customers and we could like go talk to these people in person and figure out like what do they like about it?Which episodes do they really enjoy? And it's one thing to see YouTube comments, it's another to like actually in person engage with people. So I think, you know, we started it purely accidentally. We didn't really expect it to be like the show that we are, we are in right now, but we really happy. It's, it's kind of turned out the way it has.[00:06:59] Sriram: Absolutely. And, and it also kind of helps me scratch an edge, which is, uh, you know, building something, you know, keeps you close to the ground. So being able to actually do the thing yourself as opposed to maybe tell someone else, telling you how to do the, so for example, it, it being video editing or audio or how thumbnails, thumbnails or, uh, just the mechanics of, you know, uh, how to build anything.So, uh, I, I dot think it's important. Roll up your sleeves metaphorically and get your hands dirty and know things. And this really helped us understand the world of creators and content. Uh, and it's fun and [00:07:31] Aarthi: go talk to other creators. Uh, like I think when we started out this thing on YouTube, I think I remember Shram just reached out to like so many creators being like, I wanna understand how it works for you.Like, what do you do? And these are people who like, who are so accomplished, who are so successful, and they do this for a living. And we clearly don. And so, uh, just to go learn from these experts. It's, it's kind of nice, like to be a student again and to just learn, uh, a new industry all over again and figure out how to actually be a creator on this platform.Well, you know [00:08:01] Dwarkesh: what's really interesting is both of you have been, uh, executives and led product in social media companies. Yeah. And so you are, you designed the products, these creators, their music, and now on the other end, you guys are building [00:08:12] Sriram: the, oh, I have a great phrase for it, right? Like, somebody, every once in a while somebody would be like, Hey, you know what, uh, you folks are on the leadership team of some of these companies.Why don't you have hundreds of millions of followers? Right? And I would go, Hey, look, it's not like every economist is a billionaire, , uh, uh, you know, it doesn't work that way. Uh, but during that is a parallel, which, which is, uh, you'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, or I was in the meeting when this thing happened, and now we are on the other side, which is like, Hey, you might be the economist who told somebody to implement a fiscal policy. And now we are like, oh, okay, how do I actually go do this and create values and how? Anyway, how do we do exactly.Create an audience and go build something interesting. So there is definitely some irony to it, uh, where, uh, but I think hopefully it does give us some level of insight where, uh, we have seen, you know, enough of like what actually works on social media, which is how do you build a connection with your audience?Uh, how do you build, uh, content? How do you actually do it on a regular, uh, teams? I think [00:09:07] Aarthi: the biggest difference is we don't see the algorithm as a bra, as a black box. I think we kind of see it as like when the, with the metrics, we are able to, one, have empathy for the teams building this. And two, I think, uh, we kind of know there's no big magic bullet.Like I think a lot of this is about showing up, being really consistent, um, you know, being able to like put out some really interesting content that people actually want to, and you know, I think a lot of people forget about that part of it and kind of focus. If you did this one thing, your distribution goes up a lot and here's this like, other like secret hack and you know Sure.Like those are like really short term stuff, but really in the long term, the magic is to just like keep at it. Yeah. And, uh, put out really, really good content. [00:09:48] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's good to hear. . [00:09:53] 10x Engineers[00:09:53] Dwarkesh: Um, so you've both, um, led teams that have, you know, dozens or even hundreds of people.Um, how easy is it for you to tell who the 10 X engineers are? Is it something that you as managers and executives can tell easily or [00:10:06] Sriram: no? Uh, absolutely. I think you can tell this very easily or repeat of time and it doesn't, I think a couple of ways. One is, uh, Uh, before, let's say before you work with someone, um, 10 x people just don't suddenly start becoming 10 x.They usually have a history of becoming 10 x, uh, of, you know, being really good at what they do. And you can, you know, the cliche line is you can sort of connect the dots. Uh, you start seeing achievements pile up and achievements could be anything. It could be a bunch of projects. It could be a bunch of GitHub code commits.It could be some amazing writing on ck, but whatever it is, like somebody just doesn't show up and become a 10 x person, they probably have a track record of already doing it. The second part of it is, I've seen this is multiple people, uh, who are not named so that they don't get hired from the companies actually want them to be in, or I can then hire them in the future is, uh, you know, they will make incredibly rapid progress very quickly.So, uh, I have a couple of examples and almost independently, I know it's independently, so I have a couple of. Um, and I actually, and name both, right? Like, so one is, uh, this guy named, uh, Vijay Raji, uh, who, uh, was probably one of Facebook's best engineers. He's now the CEO of a company called Stats. And, um, he was probably my first exposure to the real TenX engineer.And I remembered this because, uh, you know, at the time I was. Kind of in my twenties, I had just joined Facebook. I was working on ads, and he basically built a large part of Facebook's ad system over the weekend. And what he would do is he would just go, and then he con he [00:11:24] Aarthi: continued to do that with Facebook marketplace.Yeah. Like he's done this like over and over and over [00:11:28] Sriram: again. . Yeah. And, and it's not that, you know, there's one burst of genius. It's just this consistent stream of every day that's a code checkin stuff is working. New demo somebody, he sent out a new bill or something working. And so before like a week or two, you just like a, you know, you running against Usain Bolt and he's kind of running laps around you.He's so far ahead of everyone else and you're like, oh, this guy is definitely ahead. Uh, the second story I have is, uh, of, uh, John Carmack, uh, you know, who's legend and I never worked with him in, uh, directly with, you know, hopefully someday I can fix. But, uh, somebody told me a story about him. Which is, uh, that the person told me story was like, I never thought a individual could replace the output of a hundred percent team until I saw John.And there's a great story where, um, you know, and so John was the most senior level at Facebook and from a hr, you know, employment insecurity perspective for an individual contributor, and it at, at that level, at Facebook, uh, for folks who kind of work in these big tech companies, it is the most, the highest tier of accomplishment in getting a year in a performance review is something called xcs Expectations, or, sorry, redefines, right?Which basically means like, you have redefined what it means for somebody to perform in this level, right? Like, it's like somebody, you know, like somebody on a four minute mile, I'll be running a two minute mile or whatever, right? You're like, oh, and, and it is incredibly hard sometimes. You doing, and this guy John gets it three years in a row, right?And so there's this leadership team of all the, you know, the really most important people on Facebook. And they're like, well, we should really promote John, right? Like, because he's done this three years in a row, he's changing the industry. Three years in a row and then they realized, oh wait, there is no level to promote him to Nick be CEOWell, maybe I don't think he wanted to. And so, uh, the story I heard, and I dunno, it's true, but I like to believe it's true, is they invented a level which still now only John Carmack has gotten. Right. And, um, and I think, you know, it's his level of productivity, uh, his, uh, intellect, uh, and the consistency over time and mu and you know, if you talk to anybody, Facebook work with him, he's like, oh, he replaced hundred people, teams all by themselves and maybe was better than a hundred percent team just because he had a consistency of vision, clarity, and activity.So those are [00:13:32] Aarthi: the two stories I've also noticed. I think, uh, actually sheam, I think our first kind of exposure to 10 x engineer was actually Barry born, uh, from Microsoft. So Barry, um, uh, basically wrote pretty much all the emulation engines and emulation systems that we all use, uh, and uh, just prolific, uh, and I think in addition to what Fred had said with like qualities and tenets, Um, the, I've generally seen these folks to also be like low ego and kind of almost have this like responsibility to, um, mentor coach other people.Uh, and Barry kind of like took us under his wing and he would do these like Tuesday lunches with us, where we would just ask like, you know, we were like fresh out of college and we just ask these like really dumb questions on, you know, um, scaling things and how do you build stuff. And I was working on, uh, run times and loaders and compilers and stuff.And so he would just take the time to just answer our questions and just be there and be really like, nice about it. I remember when you moved to Redmond, he would just like spend a weekend just like, oh yeah. Driving you about and just doing things like that, but very low ego and within their teams and their art, they're just considered to be legends.Yes. Like, you know, everybody would be like, oh, Barry Bond. Yeah, of course. [00:14:47] Sriram: Yeah. It, I can't emphasize enough the consistency part of it. Um, you know, with Barry. Or I gotta briefly work with Dave Cutler, who's kind of the father of modern operating systems, uh, is every day you're on this email li list at the time, which would show you check-ins as they happen.They would have something every single day, um, every day, and it'll be tangible and meaty and you know, and you just get a sense that this person is not the same as everybody else. Um, by the, this couple of people I can actually point to who haven't worked with, uh, but I follow on YouTube or streaming. Uh, one is, uh, Andrea Ling who builds Serenity Os we had a great episode with him.Oh, the other is George Hart's, uh, geo Hart. And I urge people, if you haven't, I haven't worked with either of them, uh, but if I urge which to kinda watch their streams, right? Because, uh, you go like, well, how does the anti killing build a web browser on an operating system? Which he builds by himself in such a sharp period of time and he watches stream and he's not doing some magical new, you know, bit flipping sorting algorithm anybody has, nobody has seen before.He's just doing everything you would do, but. Five bits of speed. I, yep, exactly. [00:15:48] Dwarkesh: I I'm a big fan of the George Hot Streams and Yeah, that's exactly what, you know, it's like yeah, you, he's also curling requests and he is also, you know, you know, spinning up an experiment in a Jupyter Notebook, but yeah, just doing it [00:15:58] Aarthi: away way faster, way efficiently.Yeah. [00:16:00] 15 Minute Meetings[00:16:00] Dwarkesh: Yeah. That's really interesting. Um, so ar Arthur, I'm, you've gone through Y Combinator and famously they have that 15 minute interview Yes. Where they try to grok what your business is and what your potential is. Yeah, yeah. But just generally, it seems like in Silicon Valley you guys have, make a lot of decisions in terms of investing or other kinds of things.You, in very short calls, you know. Yeah. . Yeah. And how much can you really, what is it that you're learning in these 15 minute calls when you're deciding, should I invest in this person? What is their potential? What is happening in that 15 minutes? [00:16:31] Aarthi: Um, I can speak about YC from the other side, from like, uh, being a founder pitching, right.I think, yes, there is a 15 minute interview, but before that, there is a whole YC application process. And, uh, I think even for the, for YC as, uh, this bunch of the set of investors, I'm sure they're looking for specific signals, but for me as a founder, the application process was so useful, um, because it really makes you think about what you're building.Why are you building this? Are you the right person to be building this? Who are the other people you should be hiring? And so, I mean, there are like few questions or like, one of my favorite questions is, um, how have you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage? Yeah. . And it kind of really makes you think about, huh, and you kind of noticed that many good founders have that pattern of like hacking other systems to their advantage.Um, and so to me, I think more than the interview itself, the process of like filling out the application form, doing that little video, all of that gives you better, um, it gives you the, the entire scope of your company in your head because it's really hard when you have this idea and you're kind of like noodling about with it and talking to a few people.You don't really know if this is a thing. To just like crystallize the whole vision in your head. I think, uh, that's on point. Yes. Um, the 15 minute interview for me, honestly, it was like kind of controversial because, uh, I went in that morning, I did the whole, you know, I, I had basically stayed at the previous night, uh, building out this website and, uh, that morning I showed up and I had my laptop open.I'm like really eager to like tell them what you're building and I keep getting cut off and I realize much later that that's kind of my design. Yeah. And you just like cut off all the time. Be like, why would anybody use this? And you start to answer and be like, oh, but I, I don't agree with that. And there's just like, and it, it's like part of it is like, makes you upset, but part of it is also like, it makes you think how to compress all that information in a really short amount of time and tell them.Um, and so that interview happens, I feel really bummed out because I kind of had this website I wanted to show them. So while walking out the door, I remember just showing Gary, Dan, um, the website and he like kind of like. Scrolls it a little bit, and he is like, this is really beautifully done. And I was like, thank you.I've been wanting to show you this for 15 minutes. Um, and I, I mentioned it to Gary recently and he laughed about it. And then, uh, I didn't get selected in that timeframe. They gave me a call and they said, come back again in the evening and we are going to do round two because we are not sure. Yeah. And so the second interview there was PG and Jessica and they both were sitting there and they were just grueling me.It was a slightly longer interview and PG was like, I don't think this is gonna work. And I'm like, how can you say that? I think this market's really big. And I'm just like getting really upset because I've been waiting this whole day to like get to this point. And he's just being like cynical and negative.And then at some point he starts smiling at Jessica and I'm like, oh, okay. They're just like baiting me to figure it out. And so that was my process. And I, by the evening, I remember Shera was working at. I remember driving down from Mountain View to Facebook and Sheam took me to the Sweet Stop. Oh yeah.Which is like their, you know, Facebook has this like, fancy, uh, sweet store, like the ice cream store. I [00:19:37] Sriram: think they had a lot more perks over the years, but that was very fancy back then. [00:19:40] Aarthi: So I had like two scoops of ice cream in each hand in, and, uh, the phone rang and I was like, oh, hold onto this. And I grabbed it and I, and you know, I think it was Michael Sibu or I don't know who, but somebody called me and said, you're through.So that was kind of my process. So even though there was only 15 minutes, mine was actually much longer after. But even before the, the application process was like much more detailed. So it sounds [00:20:01] Dwarkesh: like the 15 minutes it's really there. Like, can they rattle you? Can they, can they [00:20:06] Aarthi: you and how do you react?Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I also think they look for how sex you can be in explaining what the problem is. They do talk to hundreds of companies. It is a lot. And so I think, can you compress a lot of it and convince, if you can convince these folks here in three months or four months time, how are you going to do demo day and convince a whole room full of investors?[00:20:27] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. For, I think it's a bit different for us, uh, on the VC side, uh, because two things. One, number one is, uh, the day, you know, so much of it is having a prepared mind before you go into the meeting. And, for example, if you're meeting a. very early. Are we investing before having met every single other person who's working in this space, who has ideas in the space.So you generally know what's going on, you know, what the kind of technologies are or go to market approaches are. You've probably done a bunch of homework already. It's usually, uh, it does happen where you meet somebody totally cold and uh, you really want to invest, but most often you've probably done some homework at least in this space, if not the actual company.Um, and so when you're in the meeting, I think you're trying to judge a couple of things. And these are obviously kind of stolen from Christ Dixon and others. Um, one is their ability to kind of go walk you through their idea, ma. And so very simply, um, you know, the idea MAs is, uh, and I think say the biology of Christen came with this, the idea that, hey, um, uh, How you got to the idea for your company really matters because you went and explored all the data ends, all the possibilities.You're managing around for years and years, and you've kind of come to the actual solution. And the way you can tell whether somebody's gone through the idea Mac, is when you ask 'em questions and they tell you about like five different things they've tried, did not work. And it, it's really hard to fake it.I mean, we, you maybe fake it for like one or two questions, but if you talk about like how we tried X, Y, and Z and they have like an opinion what of the opinions, if they've thought about it, you're like, okay, this person really studied the idea, ma. And that's very powerful. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, you know, Alex sample.Uh, uh, one of my partner says this, Yes, some this thing called the Manifestation Framework, which sounds like a self-help book on Amazon, but it's not, uh, uh uh, you know, but what if is, is like, you know, so many, so much of early stage startup founders is about the ability to manifest things. Uh, manifest capital, manifest the first hire, uh, manifest, uh, the first BD partnership.And, um, usually, you know, if you can't, if you don't have a Cigna sign of doing that, it's really hard to then after raising money, go and close this amazing hotshot engineer or salesperson or close this big partnership. And so in the meeting, right? If you can't convince us, right? And these are people, our day job is to give you money, right?Like, if I spent a year without giving anybody money, I'll probably get fired. If you can't, uh, if you can't convince us to give you money, right? If you wanna find probably a hard time to close this amazing engineer and get that person to come over from Facebook or close this amazing partnership against a competitor.And so that's kind of a judge of that. So it is never about the actual 60 Minutes where you're like, we, we are making up of a large part of makeup of mind is. That one or two conversations, but there's so much which goes in before and after that. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of [00:22:57] What is a16z's edge?[00:22:57] Dwarkesh: venture capital, um, I, I'm curious, so interest and Horowitz, and I guess why Combinator too?Um, but I mean, any other person who's investing in startups, they were started at a time when there were much less capital in the space, and today of course, there's been so much more capital pour into space. So how do these firms, like how does A 16 C continue to have edge? What is this edge? How can I sustain it [00:23:20] Sriram: given the fact that so much more capital is entered into the space?We show up on podcasts like the Lunar Society, , and so if you are watching this and you have a startup idea, Uh, come to us, right? Uh, no. Come, come to the Lunar society. . Well, yes. I mean, maybe so Trust me, you go in pat, you're gonna have a find, uh, a Thk pat right there. Uh, actually I, you think I joked, but there's a bit of truth.But no, I've had [00:23:40] Dwarkesh: like lu this [00:23:40] Aarthi: suddenly became very different [00:23:43] Sriram: conversation. I have had people, this is a totally ludicrous [00:23:46] Dwarkesh: idea, but I've had people like, give me that idea. And it's like, it sounds crazy to me because like, I don't know what, it's, what a company's gonna be successful, right? So, but I hasn't [00:23:55] Aarthi: become an investor.[00:23:57] Sriram: I honestly don't know. But it is something like what you're talking about Lu Society Fund one coming up, right? You heard it here first? Uh, uh, well, I think first of all, you know, I think there's something about the firm, uh, um, in terms of how it's set up philosophically and how it's set up, uh, kind of organizationally, uh, and our approach philosoph.The firm is an optimist, uh, uh, more than anything else. At the core of it, we are optimist. We are optimist about the future. We are optimist about the impact of founders on their, on the liberty to kind of impact that future. Uh, we are optimist at heart, right? Like I, I tell people like, you can't work at a six and z if you're not an optimist.That's at the heart of everything that we do. Um, and very tied to that is the idea that, you know, um, software is eating the world. It is, it's true. 10 years ago when Mark wrote that, peace is as true now, and we just see more and more of it, right? Like every week, you know, look at the week we are recording this.You know, everyone's been talking about chat, G p T, and like all the industries that can get shaped by chat, G P T. So our, our feature, our, our idea is that software is gonna go more and more. So, one way to look at this is, yes, a lot more capitalists enter the world, but there should be a lot more, right?Like, because these companies are gonna go bigger. They're gonna have bigger impacts on, uh, human lives and, and the world at large. So that's, uh, you know, uh, one school of thought, the other school of thought, uh, which I think you were asking about, say valuations, uh, et cetera. Is, uh, you know, um, again, one of my other partners, Jeff Jordan, uh, uh, always likes to tell people like, we don't go discount shopping, right?Our, the way we think about it is we want to, when we're investing in a market, We want to really map out the market, right? Uh, so for example, I work on crypto, uh, and, uh, you know, we, you know, if, if you are building something interesting in crypto and we haven't seen you, we haven't talked to you, that's a fail, that's a mess, right?We ideally want to see every single interesting founder company idea. And a category can be very loose. Crypto is really big. We usually segmented something else. Or if you look at enterprise infrastructure, you can take them into like, you know, AI or different layers and so on. But once you map out a category, you want to know everything.You wanna know every interesting person, every interesting founder you wanna be abreast of every technology change, every go to market hack, every single thing. You wanna know everything, right? And then, uh, the idea is that, uh, we would love to invest in, you know, the what is hopefully becomes the market.Set category, uh, or you know, somebody who's maybe close to the, the market leader. And our belief is that these categories will grow and, you know, they will capture huge value. Um, and as a whole, software is still can used to be undervalued by, uh, a, you know, the world. So, um, we, so, which is why, again, going back to what Jeff would say, he's like, we are not in the business of oh, we are getting a great deal, right?We, we are like, we want to invest in something which, where we think the team and the company and their approach is going to win in this space, and we want to help them win. And we think if they do win, there's a huge value to be unlocked. Yeah, I see. I see. Um, [00:26:42] Future of Twitter[00:26:42] Dwarkesh: let's talk about Twitter. [00:26:44] Sriram: Uh, . I need a drink. I need a drink.[00:26:48] Dwarkesh: um, Tell me, what is the future of Twitter? What is the app gonna look like in five years? You've, um, I mean obviously you've been involved with the Musk Venture recently, but, um, you've, you've had a senior position there. You were an executive there before a few years ago, and you've also been an executive at, uh, you've both been at Meta.So what [00:27:06] Sriram: is the future of Twitter? It's gonna be entertaining. Uh, uh, what is it El say the most entertaining outcome is the most, [00:27:12] Aarthi: uh, uh, like, best outcome is the most, uh, most likely outcome is the most entertaining outcome. [00:27:16] Sriram: Exactly right. So I think it's gonna be the most entertaining outcome. Um, I, I mean, I, I, I think a few things, uh, first of all, uh, ideally care about Twitter.Yeah. Uh, and all of my involvement, uh, you know, over the years, uh, uh, professionally, you know, uh, has, it's kind of. A lagging indicator to the value I got from the service person. I have met hundreds of people, uh, through Twitter. Uh, hundreds of people have reached out to me. Thousands. Exactly. Uh, and you know, I met Mark Andresen through Twitter.Uh, I met like, you know, uh, people are not very good friends of mine. We met through Twitter. We met at Twitter, right. There we go. Right. Uh, just [00:27:50] Aarthi: like incredible outsized impact. Yeah. Um, and I think it's really hard to understate that because, uh, right now it's kind of easy to get lost in the whole, you know, Elon, the previous management bio, like all of that.Outside of all of that, I think the thing I like to care about is, uh, focus on is the product and the product experience. And I think even with the product experience that we have today, which hasn't like, dramatically changed from for years now, um, it's still offering such outsized value for. If you can actually innovate and build really good product on top, I think it can, it can just be really, really good for humanity overall.And I don't even mean this in like a cheesy way. I really think Twitter as a tool could be just really, really effective and enormously good for everyone. Oh yeah. [00:28:35] Sriram: Twitter is I think, sort of methodically upstream of everything that happens in culture in uh, so many different ways. Like, um, you know, there was this, okay, I kinda eli some of the details, uh, but like a few years ago I remember there was this, uh, sort of this somewhat salacious, controversial story which happened in entertainment and uh, and I wasn't paying attention to, except that something caught my eye, which was that, uh, every story had the same two tweets.And these are not tweets from any famous person. It was just some, like, some, um, you know, somebody had some followers, but not a lot of, a lot of followers. And I. Why is this being quoted in every single story? Because it's not from the, you know, the person who was actually in the story or themselves. And it turned out that, uh, what had happened was, uh, you know, somebody wrote in the street, it had gone viral, um, it started trending on Twitter, um, and a bunch of people saw it.They started writing news stories about it. And by that afternoon it was now, you know, gone from a meme to now reality. And like in a lot of people entertainment say, kind of go respond to that. And I've seen this again and again, again, right? Uh, sports, politics, culture, et cetera. So Twitter is memetically upstream of so much of life.Uh, you know, one of my friends had said like, Twitter is more important than the real world. Uh, which I don't, I don't know about that, but, uh, you know, I do think it's, um, it has huge sort of, uh, culture shaping value. Yeah. I thing I think about Twitter is so much of. The network is very Lindy. So one of the things I'm sure from now is like five years from now, you know, what does that mean?Well that, uh, is that something which has kind of stood the test of time to some extent? And, um, and, uh, well the Lindy effect generally means, I don't think it's using this context with ideas like things which, with withstood the test of time tend to also with some test of time in the future, right? Like, like if we talked to Naim is like, well, people have lifting heavy weights and doing red wine for 2000 years, so let's continue doing that.It's probably a good thing. Um, but, but, but that's Twitter today. What is the future of Twitter? Well, uh, well, I think so one is, I think that's gonna continue to be true, right? 10 years from now, five years from now, it's still gonna be the metic battleground. It's still gonna be the place where ideas are shared, et cetera.Um, you know, I'm very. Unabashedly a a big fan of what Elon, uh, as a person, as a founder and what he's doing at Twitter. And my hope is that, you know, he can kind of canoe that and, you know, he's, you know, and I can't actually predict what he's gonna go Bill, he's kind of talked about it. Maybe that means bringing in other product ideas.Uh, I think he's talked about payments. He's talked about like having like longer form video. Uh, who knows, right? But I do know, like five years from now, it is still gonna be the place of like active conversation where people fight, yell, discuss, and maybe sometimes altogether. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the Twitter, [00:30:58] Is Big Tech Overstaffed?[00:30:58] Dwarkesh: um, conversation has raised a lot of, a lot of questions about how over or understaffed, uh, these big tech companies are, and in particular, um, how many people you can get rid of and the thing basically functions or how fragile are these code bases?And having worked at many of these big tech companies, how, how big is the bus factor, would you guess? Like what, what percentage of people could I fire at the random big tech [00:31:22] Sriram: company? Why? I think, uh, [00:31:23] Aarthi: yeah, I think. That's one way to look at it. I think the way I see it is there are a few factors that go into this, right?Like pre covid, post covid, like through covid everybody became remote, remote teams. As you scaled, it was kind of also hard to figure out what was really going on in different parts of the organization. And I think a lot of inefficiencies were overcome by just hiring more people. It's like, oh, you know what, like that team, yeah, that project's like lagging, let's just like add 10 more people.And that's kind of like it became the norm. Yeah. And I think a lot of these teams just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think the other part of it was also, um, you lot of how performance ratings and culture of like, moving ahead in your career path. And a lot of these companies were dependent on how big your team was and uh, and so every six months or year long cycle or whatever is your performance review cycle, people would be like, this person instead of looking at what has this person shipped or what has like the impact that this person's got had, uh, the team's done.It became more of like, well this person's got a hundred percent arc or 200% arc and next year they're gonna have a 10% increase and that's gonna be like this much. And you know, that was the conversation. And so a lot of the success and promo cycles and all of those conversations were tied around like number of headcount that this person would get under them as such, which I think is like a terrible way to think about how you're moving up the ladder.Um, you should really, like, even at a big company, you should really be thinking about the impact that you've had and customers you've reached and all of that stuff. And I think at some point people kind of like lost that, uh, and pick the more simpler metric, which just headcount and it's easy. Yeah. And to just scale that kind of thing.So I think now with Elon doing this where he is like cutting costs, and I think Elon's doing this for different set of reasons. You know, Twitter's been losing money and I think it's like driving efficiency. Like this is like no different. Anybody else who like comes in, takes over a business and looks at it and says, wait, we are losing money every day.We have to do something about this. Like, it's not about like, you know, cutting fat for the sake of it or anything. It's like this, this business is not gonna be viable if we keep it going the way it is. Yeah. And just pure economics. And so when he came in and did that, I'm now seeing this, and I'm sure Sheam is too at like at eight 16 Z and like his companies, uh, but even outside, and I see this with like my angel investment portfolio of companies, um, and just founders I talk to where people are like, wait, Elon can do that with Twitter.I really need to do that with my company. And it's given them the permission to be more aggressive and to kind of get back into the basics of why are we building what we are building? These are our customers, this is our revenue. Why do we have these many employees? What do they all do? And not from a place of like being cynical, but from a place of.I want people to be efficient in doing what they do and how do we [00:34:06] Sriram: make that happen? Yeah. I, I stole this, I think somebody said this on Twitter and I officially, he said, Elon has shifted the overturn window of, uh, the playbook for running a company. Um, which is, I think if you look at Twitter, uh, you know, and by the way, I would say, you know, you know the sort of, the warning that shows up, which is don't try this at home before, which is like, so don't try some of these unless you're er and maybe try your own version of these.But, you know, number one is the idea that you, you can become better not through growth, but by cutting things. You can become better, by demanding more out of yourself and the people who work for you. Uh, you, you can become better by hiring a, you know, a higher bar, sitting a higher bar for the talent that you bring into the company and, uh, that you reach into the company.I think at the heart of it, by the way, uh, you know, it's one of the things I've kinda observed from Elon. His relentless focus on substance, which is every condition is gonna be like, you know, the, the meme about what have you gotten done this week is, it kinda makes sense to everything else, which is like, okay, what are we building?What is the thing? Who's the actual person doing the work? As opposed to the some manager two levels a about aggregating, you know, the reports and then telling you what's being done. There is a relentless focus on substance. And my theory is, by the way, I think maybe some of it comes from Iran's background in, uh, space and Tesla, where at the end of the day, you are bound by the physics of the real world, right?If you get something wrong, right, you can, the rockets won't take off or won't land. That'd be a kalo, right? Like what, what's a, the phrase that they use, uh, rapid unplanned disassembly is the word. Right? Which is like better than saying it went kaboom. Uh, but, you know, so the constraints are if, if, you know, if you get something wrong at a social media company, people can tell if you get something really wrong at space with the Tesla.People can tap, right? Like very dramatically so and so, and I think, so there was a relentless focus on substance, right? Uh, being correct, um, you know, what is actually being done. And I think that's external Twitter too. And I think a lot of other founders I've talked to, uh, uh, in, sometimes in private, I look at this and go, oh, there is no different playbook that they have always I instituted or they were used to when they were growing up.We saw this when we were growing up. They're definitely seen some other cultures around the world where we can now actually do this because we've seen somebody else do this. And they don't have to do the exact same thing, you know, Elon is doing. Uh, they don't have to, uh, but they can do their variations of demanding more of themselves, demanding more of the people that work for them.Um, focusing on substance, focusing on speed. Uh, I think our all core element. [00:36:24] Aarthi: I also think over the last few years, uh, this may be controversial, I don't know why it is, but it somehow is that you can no longer talk about hard work as like a recipe for success. And you know, like growing up for us. When people say that, or like our parents say that, we just like kind of roll our eyes and be like, yeah, sure.Like, we work hard, like we get it. Yeah. But I think over the last couple of years, it just became not cool to say that if you work hard, then you can, there is a shot at like finding success. And I think it's kind of refreshing almost, uh, to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.And it's, it's very simple. Like you have to put in the hours. There is no kind of shortcut to it. And I think it's, it's nice to bring it all tight, all back to the basics. And, uh, I like that, like, I like the fact that we are now talking about it again and it's, it's sad that now talking about working really hard or having beds in your office, we used to do that at MicrosoftYeah. Uh, is now like suddenly really controversial. And so, um, I'm, I'm all for this. Like, you know, it's not for everyone, but if you are that type of person who really enjoys working hard, really enjoys shipping things and building really good things, Then I think you might find a fit in this culture. And I think that's a good thing.Yeah. I, [00:37:39] Sriram: I think there's nothing remarkable that has been built without people just working really hard. It doesn't happen for years and years, but I think for strong, some short-term burst of some really passionate, motivated, smart people working some really, you know, and hard doesn't mean time. It can mean so many different dimensions, but I don't think anything great gets built without that.So, uh, yeah, it's interesting. We [00:37:59] Aarthi: used to like do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just like sleep under our desk, um, until the janitor would just like, poke us out of there like, I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. And so we would just like find another bed or something and just like, go crash on some couch.But it was, those were like some of our fun days, like, and we look back at it and you're like, we sh we built a lot. I think at some point sh I think when I walked over to his cubicle, he was like looking at Windows Source code and we're like, we are looking at Windows source code. This is the best thing ever.I think, I think there's such joy in like, Finding those moments where you like work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:38:36] Sriram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you [00:38:37] Next CEO of Twitter?[00:38:37] Dwarkesh: get working hard and bringing talent into the company, uh, let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, you know what, uh, Riam, I'm, uh, I've got these other three companies that I've gotta run and I need some help running this company.And he says, Sriram would you be down to be the next, [00:38:51] Sriram: uh, next CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. No, uh uh, no, uh uh, you know, you know when, uh, I don't think I was, the answer is absolutely not. And you know this exactly. Fun story. Um, uh, I don't think it says in public before. So when you, when I was in the process, you know, talking to and nor words and, you know, it's, it's not like a, uh, it's not like a very linear process.It's kind of a relationship that kind of develops over time. And I met Mark Andreen, uh, multiple times over the years. They've been having this discussion of like, Hey, do you want to come do venture or do you want to, if you wanna do venture, do you wanna come do with us? And um, and, and one of the things Mark would always tell me is, uh, something like, we would love to have you, but you have to scratch the edge of being an operator first.Um, because there are a lot of, there are a lot of ways VCs fail, uh, operator at VCs fail. Um, and I can get, get into some of them if you're interested, but one of the common ways that they fail is they're like, oh, I really want to go back to, um, building companies. And, uh, and now thing is like antis more than most interest, like really respects entrepreneurship, fraud's the hard of what we do.But he will, like, you have to get that out of a system. You have to be like, okay, I'm done with that word. I want to now do this. Uh, before you know, uh, you want to come over, right? And if you say so, let's have this conversation, but if not, we will wait for you. Right. And a woman telling me this all the time, and at some point of time I decided, uh, that, uh, you know, I just love this modoc.Um, you know, there are many things kind of different about being an operator versus a BC uh, and you kind of actually kind of really train myself in what is actually a new profession. But one of the things is like, you know, you kind of have to be more of a coach and more open to like, working with very different kinds of people without having direct agency.And it's always a very different mode of operation, right? And you have to be like, well, I'm not the person doing the thing. I'm not the person getting the glory. I'm here to fund, obviously, but really help support coach be, uh, a lending hand, be a supporting shoulder, whatever the, uh, the metaphor is, or for somebody else doing the thing.And so you kind of have to have the shift in your brain. And I think sometimes when VCs don't work out, the few operator on VCs don't work out. There are few reasons. Uh, number one reason I would say is when an operator, and I, I hate the word operator by the way, right? It just means you have a regular job.Uh, you know, uh, and, uh, but the number one reason is like when you have a regular job, you know, you're an engineer, you're, you're a product manager, you're a marketer, whatever. , you get feedback every single day about how you're doing. If you're an engineer, you're checking in code or you know your manager, you hire a great person, whatever it is.When you're at Visa, you're not getting direct feedback, right? You know, maybe today what I'm doing now, recording this with you is the best thing ever because some amazing fund is gonna meet it and they're gonna come talk to me, or maybe it's a total waste of time and I should be talking some else. You do have no way of knowing.So you really have to think very differently about how you think about patients, how we think about spending your time, and you don't get the dopamine of like, oh, I'm getting this great reinforcement loop. Um, the second part of it is because of that lack of feedback loop, you often don't know how well you're doing.Also, you don't have that fantastic product demo or you're like, you know, if an engineer like, oh, I got this thing working, the builder is working, it's 10 x faster, or this thing actually works, whatever the thing is, you don't get that feedback loop, uh, because that next great company that, you know, the next Larry and Sergey or Brian Armstrong might walk in through your door or Zoom meeting tomorrow or maybe two years from now.So you don't really have a way to know. Um, so you kind of have to be, you have a focus on different ways to do, uh, get. Kind of figured out how well you're doing. The third part of it is, uh, you know, the, uh, the feedback loops are so long where, uh, you know, you, you can't test it. When I was a product manager, you would ship things, something you, if you don't like it, you kill it, you ship something else.At, at our firm in, you invest in somebody, you're working with them for a decade, if not longer, really for life in some ways. So you are making much more intense, but much less frequent decisions as opposed to when you're in a regular job, you're making very frequent, very common decisions, uh, every single day.So, uh, I get a lot of differences and I think, you know, sometimes, uh, you know, folks who, who are like a former CEO or former like VP product, uh, uh, I talk a lot of them sometimes who went from, came to BC and then went back and they either couldn't adapt or didn't like it, or didn't like the emotions of it.And I had to really convince myself that okay. Hopefully wouldn't fate those problems. I probably, maybe some other problems. And, uh, uh, so yes, the long way of saying no, , [00:43:13] Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?[00:43:13] Dwarkesh: um, the desk partly answer another question I had, which was, you know, there is obviously this pipeline of people who are founders who become venture capitalists.And it's interesting to me. I would think that the other end or the converse of that would be just as common because if you're, if you're an angel investor or venture capitalist, you've seen all these companies, you've seen dozens of companies go through all these challenges and then you'd be like, oh, I, I understand.[00:43:36] Sriram: Wait, why do you think more VCs driven apart? You have some strong opinions of this . [00:43:40] Dwarkesh: Should more venture capitalists and investors become founders? I think [00:43:43] Aarthi: they should. I don't think they will. Ouch. I dunno, why not? Um, I think, uh, look, I think the world is better with more founders. More people should start companies, more people should be building things.I fundamentally think that's what needs to happen. Like our single biggest need is like, we just don't have enough founders. And we should just all be trying new things, building new projects, all of that. Um, I think for venture capital is, I think what happens, and this is just my take, I don't know if Farram agrees with it, but, um, I think they see so much from different companies.And if you're like really successful with what you do as a vc, you are probably seeing hundreds of companies operate. You're seeing how the sausage is being made in each one of them. Like an operating job. You kind of sort of like have this linear learning experience. You go from one job to the other.Here you kind of sort of see in parallel, like you're probably on like 50, 60 boards. Uh, and oftentimes when it comes to the investor as like an issue, it is usually a bad problem. Um, and you kind of see like you, you know, you kind of see how every company, what the challenges are, and every company probably has like, you know, the best companies we know, I've all had this like near death experience and they've come out of that.That's how the best founders are made. Um, you see all of that and I think at some point you kind of have this fear of like, I don't know. I just don't think I wanna like, bet everything into this one startup. One thing, I think it's very hard to have focus if you've honed your skillset to be much more breath first and go look at like a portfolio of companies being helpful to every one of them.And I see Sure. And do this every day where I, I have no idea how he does it, but key context, which is every 30 minutes. Yeah. And it's crazy. Like I would go completely and say, where if you told me board meeting this founder pitch, oh, sell this operating role for this portfolio company. Second board meeting, third, board meeting founder, pitch founder pitch founder pitch.And that's like, you know, all day, every day nonstop. Um, that's just like, you, you, I don't think you can like, kind of turn your mindset into being like, I'm gonna clear up my calendar and I'm just gonna like work on this one thing. Yeah. And it may be successful, it may not be, but I'm gonna give it my best shot.It's a very, very different psychology. I don't know. What do you [00:45:57] Sriram: think? Well, Well, one of my partners Triess to say like, I don't know what VCs do all day. The job is so easy, uh, uh, you know, they should start complaining. I mean, being a founder is really hard. Um, and I think, you know, there's a part of it where the VCs are like, oh, wait, I see how hard it is.And I'm like, I'm happy to support, but I don't know whether I can go through with it. So, because it's just really hard and which is kind of like why we have like, so much, uh, sort of respect and empathy, uh, for the whole thing, which is, I, [00:46:20] Aarthi: I do like a lot of VCs, the best VCs I know are people who've been operators in the past because they have a lot of empathy for what it takes to go operate.Um, and I've generally connected better with them because you're like, oh, okay, you're a builder. You've built these things, so, you know, kind of thing. Yeah. Um, but I do think a lot more VCs should become [00:46:38] Sriram: founders than, yeah. I, I think it's some of the couple of other things which happened, which is, uh, uh, like Arthur said, like sometimes, uh, you know, when we see you kind of, you see, you kind of start to pattern match, like on.And you sometimes you analyze and, and you kind of, your brain kind of becomes so focused on context switching. And I think when need a founder, you need to kind of just dedicate, you know, everything to just one idea. And it, it's not just bbc sometimes with academics also, where sometimes you are like a person who's supporting multiple different kinds of disciplines and context switching between like various speech students you support.Uh, but it's very different from being in the lab and working on one problem for like long, long years. Right. So, um, and I think it's kind of hard to then context switch back into just doing the exact, you know, just focus on one problem, one mission, day in and day out. So I think that's hard, uh, and uh, but you should be a founder.Yeah, I think, yeah, I think more people should try. [00:47:32] Role of Boards[00:47:32] Dwarkesh: . Speaking of being on boards, uh, what the FTX Saga has raised some questions about what is like the role of a board, even in a startup, uh, stage company, and you guys are on multiple boards, so I'm curious how you think about, there's a range of between micromanaging everything the CEO does to just rubber stamping everything the CEO does.Where, what is the responsibility of a board and a startup? [00:47:54] Aarthi: What, what, what are the, this is something I'm really curious about too. I'm [00:47:57] Sriram: just, well, I just wanna know on the FDX soccer, whether we are gonna beat the FTX episode in interviews in terms of view your podcast, right? Like, so if you folks are listening, right?Like let's get us to number one. So what you YouTube like can subscriber, they're already listening. [00:48:10] Aarthi: What do you mean? Get us [00:48:10] Sriram: to number one? Okay, then, then spread the word, right? Like, uh, don't [00:48:13] Aarthi: watch other episodes. It's kinda what you [00:48:15] Sriram: should, I mean, if there's [00:48:16] Dwarkesh: like some sort of scandal with a 16 Z, we could definitely be to fdx.[00:48:21] Sriram: Uh, uh, yeah, I think it's gonna, well, it's gonna be really hard to read that one. Uh, , uh, uh, for for sure. Uh, uh, oh my goodness. Um, uh, but no, [00:48:29] Aarthi: I'm, I'm genuinely curious about [00:48:31] Sriram: these two. Well, uh, it's a few things, you know, so the multiple schools of thought, I would say, you know, there's one school of thought, which is the, uh, uh, you know, which I don't think I totally subscribe to, but I think some of the other later stages, especially public market folks that I work with sometimes subscribe to, which is the only job of a, uh, board is to hire and fire the ceo.I don't think I really subscribe to that. I think because we deal with more, uh, early stage venture, um, and our job is like, uh, you know, like lot of the companies I work with are in a cdc c, b, you know, they have something working, but they have a lot long way to go. Um, and hopefully this journey, which goes on for many, many years, and I think the best way I thought about it is to, people would say like, you want to be.Wave form dampener, which is, uh, you know, for example, if the company's kind of like soaring, you want to kind of be like kind the check and balance of what? Like, hey, okay, what do we do to, uh, you know, um, uh, to make sure we are covering our bases or dotting the is dotting the, crossing The ts be very kind of like careful about it because the natural gravitational pool of the company is gonna take it like one direct.On the other hand, uh, if the company's not doing very well and everybody's beating us, beating up about it, you're, you know, your cust you're not able to close deals. The press is beating you up. You want to be the person who is supportive to the ceo, who's rallying, everybody helping, you know, convince management to stay, helping convince, close host, hire.So, um, there are a lot of things, other things that go into being a board member. Obviously there's a fiscal responsibility part of things, and, um, you know, um, because you kind of represent so many stakeholders. But I think at the heart of it, I kind of think about, uh, you know, how do I sort of help the founder, uh, the founder and kind of dampen the waveform.Um, the other Pinteresting part was actually the board meetings. Uh, Themselves do. Uh, and I do think like, you know, about once a year or, uh, so like that there's every kind of, there's, there's almost always a point every 18 months or so in a company's lifetime where you have like some very decisive, interesting moment, right?It could be good, it could be bad. And I think those moments can be, uh, really, really pivotal. So I think there's, there's huge value in showing up to board meetings, being really prepared, uh, uh, where you've done your homework, you, you know, you've kind of had all the conversations maybe beforehand. Um, and you're coming into add real value, like nothing kind of annoying me if somebody's just kind of showing up and, you know, they're kind of maybe cheering on the founder once or twice and they kind of go away.So I don't think you can make big difference, but, uh, you know, I think about, okay, how are we sort of like the waveform, the, you know, make sure the company, [00:50:58] Aarthi: but I guess the question then is like, should startups have better corporate governance compared to where we are today? Would that have avoided, like, say the FTX [00:51:08] Sriram: saga?No, I mean, it's, I mean, we, I guess there'll be a legal process and you'll find out right when the FTX case, nobody really knows, you know, like, I mean, like what level of, uh, who knew what, when, and what level of deceptions, you know, deception, uh, uh, you know, unfolded, right? So, uh, it, yeah. Maybe, but you know, it could have been, uh, it could have been very possible that, you know, uh, somebody, somebody just fakes or lies stuff, uh, lies to you in multiple ways.[00:51:36] Aarthi: To,

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG  @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Julia Boorstin is CNBC's Senior Media & Tech Correspondent. She covers media with a special focus on the intersection of media and technology. In 2013, Julia created and launched the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list she oversees, highlighting the private companies transforming the economy and challenging companies in established industries. She's the author of a new book called, “When Women Lead - What they achieve, why they succeed, how we can learn from them." Julia's parents inspired her to pursue hard things and instilled in her a love of asking questions. As parents, we should do the same. Asking questions is a sign of respect and that you care. We should ask more questions than we answer both at work and at home. Approach people with curiosity. It's how we show that we care. Julia found a unique way to add value to her employer: Creating the Disruptor 50 list. It's important for us to find unique ways to add value to our company and do work that inspires us at the same time. It's evident that Julia loves it and because of that, both CNBC and Julia win. She has taken an entrepreneurial approach to her career at CNBC and has come up with and championed many ideas that have been impactful and built her career. She shares how you can do that too… Julia shares her preparation process for interviewing a powerful leader like Sheryl Sandberg or Bob Iger. "I didn't have a background in business. I had to over-prepare." How to become a talent magnet and attract effective leaders to want to work for you... She shares the biggest takeaway that you learned from interviewing thousands of CEOs and executives including Katrina Lake, Gwyneth Paltrow, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Jennifer Hyman, and more. Advice Julia got from her dad: "The road is always better than the inn." Enjoy the process. "The best way out is always through." Don't look for shortcuts. "I can't go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Be persistent. How to build confidence? Get the reps... Do it a lot. Confidence is built through action. Commonalities of excellent leader: Humility Focus High adaptability quotient Communal leadership Empathy "Make your own characteristics a superpower." Life/Career advice: Be willing to fail It's a volume game Be prepared for brainstorming meetings. Have a portfolio of ideas. Julia's book writing process: She interviewed 120 leaders What can men do to be supportive? "Men need to understand the statistics. Diversity = more value." Be a talent magnet. Be honest about what you don't know.

Women's greatest strengths in the workplace are also their most underestimated.That's what CNBC senior media & tech reporter Julia Boorstin explains in her new book, "When Women Lead."Boorstin sat with sixty powerhouse female CEOs and leaders. In the book, she weaves their stories together with research on the most effective strategies women CEOs deploy at work. She provides invaluable lessons for anyone in the workplace.In this conversation, Boorstin explains how women like Katrina Lake, Lena Waithe and Gwyneth Paltrow not only rose to success but empower — and listen — to the people they lead. She breaks down the reasons empathy, gratitude and vulnerability can be superpowers for women leaders. And she shares key insight on confidence, pitching to investors and how women can unlock their leadership potential. In 2012, Boorstin founded the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list of 50 forward-thinking private companies that inspire change. For years she's followed the work of women leaders in her role at CNBC and a former reporter for Fortune Magazine. Pre-order When Women Lead here:https://bit.ly/3fFYFipJulia Boorstin➤instagram.com/juliaboorstin/➤twitter.com/JBoorstin➤facebook.com/JuliaCNBCYou can follow Jessica Yellin here:➤Instagram: instagram.com/jessicayellin​➤Twitter: twitter.com/jessicayellin➤Twitter: twitter.com/newsnotnoise➤Facebook: facebook.com/newsnotnoise➤YouTube: youtube.com/newsnotnoise➤Website: NewsNotNoise.com➤Newsletter: newsnotnoise.bulletin.comSupport this work:➤patreon.com/NewsNotNoiseJessica Yellin is the founder of News Not Noise, a channel dedicated to giving you news with real experts and providing facts, not panic attacks. Jessica is a veteran of network news, traveling the globe, covering conflict and crisis. A former Chief White House Correspondent for CNN, she reported from around the world and won awards. Now, Yellin uses her voice to break down the news, calmly and clearly for you -- free of punditry, provocation, and yelling.

Katrina Lake never had any dreams of starting a business. She thought she was never capable, but due to a discovery she made about other entrepreneurs, she decided to start Stitchfix. As a woman founder, she faced many hurdles, yet she overcame all this and made StitchFix successful and became a multimillionaire. Let us check out her story.

Felix Narhi, CIO and Portfolio Manager at PenderFund, discusses his investment in Stitch Fix (SFIX). Key topics include what Stitch Fix's Act 2 looks like, why negative anecdata from first time users doesn't worry Felix, and what separates Stitch Fix from other online retailers.Felix's Q2 letter: https://www.penderfund.com/commentaries/the-managers-commentary-q2-2021-2/My SFIX tweet thread: https://twitter.com/AndrewRangeley/status/1450509121661308928?s=20Felix's Twitter: https://twitter.com/PenderFelixChapters0:00 Intro1:10 Stitch Fix Overview2:40 Addressing the negative anecdata6:30 What does SFIX's transition to Act 2 look like?9:10 Why is SFIX's data and data scientist focus an advantage?16:50 What would an Act 3 look like?19:35 Is it concerning Katrina Lake (the founder) stepped down as CEO?23:45 Discussing the stylist hours worked controversy31:30 Stitch Fix's inventory changes35:30 Will brands pull from Stitch Fix at some point in the future?41:15 Will Stitch Fix ever charge for the data they give brands?44:30 Why isn't Stitch Fix growing faster?49:50 Quantifying Stitch Fix's valuation54:20 Stitch Fix's private market and strategic value57:30 Does Stitch Fix need physical locations?

To kick off Season 3, Anu chats with Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, an online personal-shopping service transforming the way people find clothes they love. Katrina walks Anu through her journey scaling Stitch Fix from seed to IPO and beyond, including how her leadership style has evolved alongside the platform, experiences navigating the transition to a public figure, advice for founders thinking of going public, dealing with early critics, and much more. She speaks passionately on the importance of authenticity, representation, transparency, and self-care with personal anecdotes that any founder will relate to.

In this very special episode of Teach Me Something New, one of America's most successful self-made entrepreneurs — Katrina Lake — joins Brit to share how she turned her idea for a fashion styling business into a billion dollar company that went public. Katrina walks us through the humble beginnings of Stitch Fix, the determined immigrant mentality she adopted from her Japanese-American heritage, and how she grew a company from a team of one to almost 10,000 employees. Tune in for her recruiting tips, to learn her number one regret as an entrepreneur, and her tips for navigating bouts of self-doubt that can hit at any stage in your career. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

After 10 years and taking her company public, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake is stepping down as CEO. Taking her place this August is Elizabeth Spaulding, who joined the company shortly before the pandemic hit, rocking the online retailer's business. Now, Stitch Fix is in rebound mode, and Spaulding is laying the foundation for the company's next 10 years. Already, Stitch Fix has begun adding new features to its try-before-you-buy model that put e-commerce more at the centre; the goal is to build a new way to shop online that gives customers a range of options focused on personalisation. Spaulding joined the final episode of this season of The Future of Fashion: The Innovators podcast to discuss why media companies aren't competition to commerce, the way people are shopping now and the overall health of the retail industry See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Katrina Lake is the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, a personalized styling service founded ten years ago. When Lake took her company public in 2017, she was the youngest female founder to ever do so. And, she's one of the few women founders to IPO a tech company. The IPO itself was notable for another reason too: many pictures from the event show Lake holding her young son. "It was a really meaningful moment that I didn't anticipate," she tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt. Lake reports that she's moved from "bristling" at regularly being called a female founder (instead of simply "founder") to embracing her position as a role model for other women in business. In this episode of Leadership Next, Lake describes the moment she knew she wanted to be in business, the dangerous lack of diversity amongst investors, leading through the pandemic, her plans to transition to executive chairperson, and more.

On this week's The Razor's Edge, we're talking Stitch Fix. The e-commerce apparel retailer has had quite a six months – a strong earnings report in December sent shares higher, propelled perhaps by high short interest in the name. That high short interest took on rocket fuel in January amidst the Gamestop frenzy. The air came out of the shares, and then the company reported a weaker earnings in March. And then co-founder and CEO Katrina Lake announced she would step down as CEO in August. So a lot going on. The stock has passionate bulls and bears, and we try to sort out the bull case and whether it's a keeper. Topics Covered 2:45 minute mark – Daniel's SFIX elevator pitch 6:00 – How to peg a valuation for a unique approach 12:00 – The value proposition and the edge 20:00 – Using (or misusing) the Netflix parallel 26:00 – Advantages from the back end side 34:00 – Is this changing the game in apparel 43:00 – The competitive threats that might come into play 49:30 – What to make of Lake stepping down and final notes

Despite picking up a record number of Academy Awards this year, Netflix is facing some big problems in terms of subscriber growth. Should investors be concerned about dwindling audiences in the face of competition from the likes of Disney, or will the "King of Streaming" keep its throne?   In this episode, the MyWallSt analyst team also discusses: What the UiPath looks like as a potential investment. How Biden's new tax regime will affect ordinary retail investors. Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake stepping down as CEO. And we make an Elevator Pitch for the one retail company that was actually opening stores last year.   Catch up with all the latest market-beating content in MyWallSt by starting your free trial here.  (https://bit.ly/3dtQPn8) MyWallSt operates a full disclosure policy. MyWallSt staff may hold long positions in some of the companies mentioned in this podcast.  

Microsoft buys Nuance Communications in a $16 billion deal. Coinbase makes an $86 billion Wall Street debut. FDA hits the pause button on Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Katrina Lake steps down as the CEO of Stitch Fix. Bed Bath & Beyond slips on earnings. White Claw introduces Surge. Pepsi serves up big growth in its snack division. And IBM unveils a surprising name for its cloud business. Motley Fool analysts Emily Flippen and Ron Gross discuss those stories and share two stocks on their radar: Bilibili and Ecolab. Plus, e.l.f. Beauty CFO Mandy Fields talks about the big business of cosmetics. Looking for more stocks for your radar? Get 50% off Stock Advisor by going to http://RadarStocks.fool.com.

That’s how Asit Sharma describes Coinbase going public at an expected valuation of $65 billion. He also analyzes Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake’s announcement that she’s stepping down as CEO, and the latest results from Bed Bath & Beyond.   Want 50% off to try our Stock Advisor service? Just go to http://StockIdeas.fool.com.

An excerpt from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast from the Stanford eCorner, featuring Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake. More details at https://ecorner.stanford.edu/

Thank you for tuning into "Starting Small", a podcast about brand development, entrepreneurship, and innovation in the modern world. In this episode, I am joined by Sophia Edelstein, Co-Founder of Pair Eyewear, affordable and customizable glasses, made for both children and adults. Studying human biology at Stanford University, Sophia met her now Co-Founder, Nathan. As a child, Nathan recalled his glasses feeling more like a medical glaring device, instead of an extension of his personality... enter Pair Eyewear. Pair Eyewear allows you to quickly change the top of your frame, allowing for a new look each day, with various colors and designs. Sophia and Nathan pitched Pair on Shark Tank, in which led to working out a deal with Lori Greiner and the CEO of Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake. Within much of Pair Eyewear's success, they have partnered with The EYEliance, donating one pair of glasses for every pair purchased.  Make sure to Check out Pair Eyewear at: https://paireyewear.com/pages/giving-back   Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle   Support for Starting Small comes from Humanscale, the leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance ergonomic products that help create a healthier work life. All of their products, from chairs to standing desks and more, are comfortable, easy to use, and sustainable. And great for either the office or the work from home environment. With an increase in shifting workplaces, comfort can be especially hard to find. As I run the podcast, I am in front of my desk for hours a day; from scheduling, researching, interviewing, and more. Humanscale allows me to remain productive, without the consequence of body stress to follow.  Make sure to check out Humanscale at humanscale.com, and use code: STARTINGSMALL at checkout to save 20% on your purchase.   Thank you to this episode's mid-break sponsor, Karastan. Karastan rugs and carpets are crafted to be timeless pieces that fit perfectly within your home. With inspired designs, flawless craftsmanship, and long lasting materials, Karastan is made for a life lived beautifully. Make sure to check out Karastan at https://www.karastan.com/  

While attending Harvard Business School, Katrina Lake saw an opportunity to combine data science with human stylists to reinvent the retail space. Lake founded Stitch Fix in 2011 to help women everywhere discover and explore their style through a truly client-focused shopping experience. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Lake discusses experiencing and fighting bias, achieving massive and unexpected financial success, and leading with authenticity.

While attending Harvard Business School, Katrina Lake saw an opportunity to combine data science with human stylists to reinvent the retail space. Lake founded Stitch Fix in 2011 to help women everywhere discover and explore their style through a truly client-focused shopping experience. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Lake discusses experiencing and fighting bias, achieving massive and unexpected financial success, and leading with authenticity.

A new season of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series starts on January 27! We’ll kick off with Hipcamp founder and CEO Alyssa Ravasio, then hear from innovators like MasterClass co-founder and CEO David Rogier, Zoox CEO Aicha Evans, and Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt. Subscribe to the ETL podcast to get new episodes delivered to you every Wednesday!

Katrina Lake is the Founder & CEO @ Stitch Fix, a multi-billion dollar public company, which has brought an entirely new model to retail apparel by combining data science, technology, and personal stylists, to create a unique shopping experience tailored to the individual consumer. Prior to their IPO in 2017, Katrina raised just $42M in venture funding from some of the best in venture including Bill Gurley @ Benchmark and Steve Anderson @ Baseline. In just 6 years Katrina took the company from founding moment to $2BN IPO and was even cash flow positive after just 3 years. If that was not enough, Katrina is also on the board of both Grubhub and Glossier. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Katrina made her way from being an associate at a venture firm to reshaping the world of fashion with Stitch Fix? 2.) On reflection, is Katrina happy that the business was forced to be so capital efficient so early? What did Katrina do to structure the business and its inventory management to preserve cash? How does Katrina think about the balance between growth vs profitability? 3.) What have been some of Katrina's biggest lessons from working with Bill Gurley? How does Katrina ensure not to overweight his opinion on the board? What have been Katrina's biggest lessons on effective board management? How has being on the Grubhub and Glossier board changed the way she operates the Stitch Fix board? 4.) How does Katrina think about imposter syndrome and self-doubt today? How does she remedy it? How does Katrina ensure she remains on the front lines with customers despite being a public company CEO? What benefits are there for founders to stay in the trenches even when a large company? 5.) How does Katrina think on the importance for founders to have a vision today? Where do they need to be flexible? What are some dangers or pitfalls associated with "the vision"? How far are Stitch Fix along in cementing their vision? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode Katrina’s Favourite Book: Between The World And Me As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Her radical data-driven approach to selling clothes has completely disrupted the retail model by combining data science with technology and personal stylists. Today, Katrina Lake’s online personal styling company, Stitch Fix, has taken a multi-billion-dollar slice of the $368-billion U.S. apparel industry, but she is just getting started. Stitch Fix is equally concerned with social impact and using their influence for positive change. After experiencing her own challenges first hand as a female entrepreneur struggling to fundraise in a male dominated VC landscape, Katrina has prioritized diversity for Stitch Fix from the start. They recently pledged to use resources, influence, and data to create real, systemic change as part of their long term work on social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability efforts. Most recently this year, they launched a new grant and mentorship program called Elevate which will help to grow, mentor, and support underrepresented entrepreneurs in a bid to help bring needed diversity into the apparel ecosystem. Stitch Fix also publicly shared their longstanding commitment to pay equity, which they analyze through the lens of race in addition to gender. Tune in to this special WorkParty conversation, live from Create & Cultivate's Social Good Summit and moderated by Elaine Welteroth, where we dive into these initiatives and so much more with the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake. Join the party on social @workparty and stay in-the-know at workparty.com. Guest Katrina Lake @katrinalake @stitchfix   Visit vegamour.com, and use code PARTY20 at checkout to receive 20% off Visit tradesy.com, and use code WORK at checkout to receive $50 off on any $200+ purchase   Produced by Dear Media

My guest today was the youngest woman to take her company public (IPO) and the only woman to do so in 2017. She’s using that distinction, her influence, and her voice to make sure many more will follow and break her records. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/yfm/message

Fashion has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak began because what we’re wearing has changed a lot. One company that knows exactly how much is Stitch Fix. It learns your style through a mix of online quizzes and algorithms, and hires stylists who choose clothes specifically for you. You get a box of personalized items — one at a time or as a subscription — and you keep what you want and send back the rest. Behind the scenes, the company’s tech predicts what you and people like you might like, so it’s always updating inventory and its in-house brands. But what happens to a clothing company, even a super techie one, in a pandemic? Molly Wood speaks with Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix.

Fashion has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak began because what we’re wearing has changed a lot. One company that knows exactly how much is Stitch Fix. It learns your style through a mix of online quizzes and algorithms, and hires stylists who choose clothes specifically for you. You get a box of personalized items — one at a time or as a subscription — and you keep what you want and send back the rest. Behind the scenes, the company’s tech predicts what you and people like you might like, so it’s always updating inventory and its in-house brands. But what happens to a clothing company, even a super techie one, in a pandemic? Molly Wood speaks with Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix.

Fashion has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak began because what we’re wearing has changed a lot. One company that knows exactly how much is Stitch Fix. It learns your style through a mix of online quizzes and algorithms, and hires stylists who choose clothes specifically for you. You get a box of personalized items — one at a time or as a subscription — and you keep what you want and send back the rest. Behind the scenes, the company’s tech predicts what you and people like you might like, so it’s always updating inventory and its in-house brands. But what happens to a clothing company, even a super techie one, in a pandemic? Molly Wood speaks with Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix.

Fashion has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak began because what we’re wearing has changed a lot. One company that knows exactly how much is Stitch Fix. It learns your style through a mix of online quizzes and algorithms, and hires stylists who choose clothes specifically for you. You get a box of personalized items — one at a time or as a subscription — and you keep what you want and send back the rest. Behind the scenes, the company’s tech predicts what you and people like you might like, so it’s always updating inventory and its in-house brands. But what happens to a clothing company, even a super techie one, in a pandemic? Molly Wood speaks with Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix.

My guest today is Katrina Lake, the co-founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix is a multi-billion-dollar public company which has brought an entirely new model to retail apparel by combining data science, technology, and personal stylists to create a unique shopping experience tailored to the individual consumer. I first met Katrina through past guest Bill Gurley and have been excited to host her since that first meeting. In our conversation, Katrina and I discuss all aspects of Stich Fix—its history, business model, innovations, and its future. Please enjoy this great and thought-provoking conversation with Katrina Lake.   This week’s episode is sponsored by Bottomless. Bottomless is a smart coffee subscription which automatically re-orders coffee for you based on your consumption habits.  Bottomless is offering one month and your second bag of coffee for free at bottomless.com/patrick.   For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes (2:19) – (First question) – Where E-Commerce stands and what the future might hold (4:37) – Why personalization makes Stitch Fix stand out from the others (9:34) – Why data science is foundational to their business (12:15) – What makes for a good augmented human and hiring stylists (14:34) – Stakeholder value and creating a great partnership with suppliers (18:10) – Their emphasis on stakeholder focus and social justice (19:28) – The capital efficiency of their business in the early days (24:46) – Her superpower of recruiting (29:46) – Her strengths in building Stitch Fix (31:56) – Transparency vs authenticity (32:59) – Big break for the business (37:15) – Exclusive brands to Stitch Fix (39:01) – The next act for Stitch Fix (41:43) – Lessons learned in pricing services (44:24) – Future trends in retail apparel (48:02) – Hardest thing to copy about Stitch Fix (49:59) – Lessons for putting data science at the center of your business (53:37) – Moments during her journey she’s felt most alive (55:23) – Kindest thing anyone has done for her Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Today's guest is Adam Whitehead. Owner and Founder of Sportsman's Box. Sportsman's Box is a subscription box for any outdoorsman or woman who wants to be better prepared for success in the field and stream.Adam brought the concept for his hunting and fishing box to life in March of 2015 with $750 and a good idea. An avid outdoorsman and athlete, Adam applies a tremendous amount of determination and perseverance to every aspect of his life. Receiving his undergraduate degree from East Carolina University in Health and Fitness, he took a turn shortly after college learning the basics of web design. Once the "new world", outside of small town/farm life was opened up, his hunger to learn began, putting him on a quest to learn the in's and out's of business. Today he spends his time working to improve the hunter and angler experience, while hoping to help improve the perception of who the hunter/angler is. Sportsman's box has been featured by some of the biggest names including:USA Today, Outdoor Channel, Carbon TV, NWTF, Delta Waterfowl and Wide Open spaces.They've also been able to partner with some of the biggest names in hunting and fishing including;Gator coolers, Vortex Optics, code blue, stealth cam and many more.On today's show, Adam and I discuss how to start a business with $750, and how to ultimately scale to the success he and Sportsman's Box are today.This episode is sponsored by Harbor Marketing Agency. Visit harbormarketingagency.com for get your FREE FUNNEL AUDIT, and for everything you'll need to get started on the path to growth! The most influential person that Adam know in the subscription box industry: Katrina Lake from Stitch Fix Adam's favorite subscription box: FabFitFunAdam's favorite social media platform: FacebookLinks:Adam and Sportsman's Box:Website: https://www.getsportsmansbox.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/sportsmansboxThe Subscription Box Show shareable Trailerhttps://www.buzzsprout.com/927664/3027694-the-subscription-box-show-trailer.mp3?blob_id=10986793&download=trueHost Links:The Subscription Box Show Website: https://www.thesubscriptionboxshow.comConnect with Eric Musick: https://www.thesubscriptionboxshow.com/contact2The Subscription Box Show Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/thesubscriptionboxshow.comEric Musick's email: eric@thesubscriptionboxshow.comEric Musick's Instagram: @thesubscriptionboxshow or https://www.instagram.com/thesubscriptionboxshowThe Subscription Box Show Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2960087864057955/Book a call with Eric at: https://www.calendly.com/thesubboxshow

Today we have Christina Stembel, the founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, joining us. After years of trying to raise capital, Christina realized that the only way she could retain the integrity of her business vision was to bootstrap the company – and it paid off in a big way. Being a female founder, she came up against the many implicit biases around women-owned businesses and failed to get the investments many other male-owned companies pulled off without showing any results. Today, Christina has the only female-owned large-scale e-commerce B2C flower company and made a remarkable $32 million in revenue last year. She talks about her business philosophy of high-quality, being entirely self-taught, how she saves on marketing, establishing a healthy company culture, leadership, and her secrets to building a superstar team.  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast![00:35] The origins of Farmgirl Flowers as a business, not a passion project.[01:33] Using the In-N-Out Burger business model and applying it to the flower industry.[02:12] The philosophy of doing something simple with excellence while reducing waste.[02:39] Almost running out of money a year and a half in and deciding to bootstrap.[02:50] Nine years later, 165 employees, and finishing 2019 with over $32 million in revenue. [03:15] The investment offers they have had being situated in Silicon Valley.[03:20] Actively trying to raise capital for three years and why she turned down three offers. [03:59] Not compromising but building the healthy, sustainable company she envisioned.  [04:31] The implicit biases she encountered as a female owner trying to raise capital. [05:03] Being the only female-owned large-scale e-commerce B2C flower company.[05:46] Not fitting the model for most VCs with a perishable product and small margins.[06:38] Higher quality at higher price points and other ways Farmgirl Flowers makes money.[08:05] The benefit of not having to spend what competitors do on marketing.[09:49] Christina’s self-taught knowledge about flowers, logistics, and distribution.[10:05] Working at Stanford University as the head of catering and how that prepared her. [11:09] Taking five and a half years to afford and get national shipping off the ground.[12:36] Their goal of opening two distribution centers and another one in 2021.[13:31] How Christina has learned to be a better leader and the mistakes she initially made.[14:24] Spending at least 20% of her time on her team and building the right culture.[15:08] The irony of being told that she is “unfundable” because she doesn’t have a team. [16:12] Building a superstar team by hiring people that no one else would believe in. [17:12] Learning about vulnerability as a leader from Brené Brown. [18:13] The importance of being thoughtful and strategic about business growth.  Resources From The Interview: Christina Stembel on LinkedIn Farmgirl Flowers In-N-Out Burger Kevin O’Leary on Women-Led Businesses Brené Brown  Katrina Lake on LinkedIn Stitch Fix Must-read book: Anything by Brené Brown!     Leave Some Feedback:   What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review here Subscribe to Leveling Up on iTunes Get the non-iTunes RSS Feed   Connect with Eric Siu:    Growth Everywhere Single Grain Eric Siu on Twitter  

Elizabeth Gilbert first became a sensation with her book; Eat, Pray, Love that was on NY Times Bestseller list for fifty-seven consecutive weeks! In 2015, Gilbert released Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Leslie and Leslyn both loved the book and sent it to their loved ones to read and ponder. In this episode, Leslie and Leslyn share what they loved about Big Magic and the great tips that they took away from the book. They start the discussion with speaking about Elizabeth Gilbert’s vision, or her interpretation of her own ideas. It’s a story that Leslie and Leslyn think will stick with you through Gilbert’s amazing mastery of words.The foundation of Big Magic is this: all ideas are seen to be out in the open, an idea will come to you or whomever will best bring it to its completion. Leslie explains, if you do not choose to nurture and love that idea, the idea will leave you and go to someone else who will. Leslyn likes to think of this as being like the Gulf Stream that goes around the planet. To Leslyn, these ideas work like an invisible Gulf Stream, that moves around the atmosphere and at random will drop down into your mind. People can relate to this vision in the way that we all experience having an idea that seems to come out of the blue. Leslie continues this by sharing J.K. Rowling’s experience of coming up with the idea for Harry Potter while she was riding a train. J.K. Rowling explains getting this idea as, “it fell into her head”. Leslie sees this idea that Elizabeth Gilbert laid out like the scene in Finding Nemo, when Nemo’s Dad is riding the turtle’s back in the Eastern Australian current.To understand Big Magic and the vision of the book, it’s important to have a good understanding of Elizabeth Gilbert’s fundamental belief about ideas. Gilbert believes that ideas float around and will be presented to you. If you do not nurture this idea, it will find a home somewhere else. Leslyn explains this in a scenario often seen in the entrepreneur’s world. Ten people will wake up with a similar idea, six of those people will do absolutely nothing about, three will sit back and at least think about the idea, but only one will actually do something with the idea. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert gives a real-life personal experience she had with this belief. She speaks about an idea that left her and went to one of her friends who is also an author. Gilbert had developed an idea for a book but had to put this idea away because as life happens, her focus was needed somewhere else. Well over a year goes by before Elizabeth Gilbert is able to focus on this idea again. Gilbert finds out that the idea is gone, no longer residing with her. Elizabeth Gilbert goes to a conference where she talks with another author, Ann Patchett, who describes the project that Gilbert was working on almost exactly. Even more wild about the story, the two authors work out that around the same time that Elizabeth Gilbert had put the project away for later, Ann Patchett had started working on the same idea!Leslyn explains that this could be like simultaneous invention, which is when two people, that are unrelated, get the same idea around the same time. Leslie points out that this simultaneous invention, happens often in academia and you can easily get “scooped” by another person as the idea’s creator becomes the person who finishes it first. Leslyn, after reading Big Magic, shares she had a whole different sensation about the ideas that would pop into her head. As ideas pop into people’s head all the time, many people will get an idea and think that they couldn’t possibly go through with it. Leslie, as an entrepreneur, at some point decided that one of her ideas was something she could execute and ran with it. Leslie likes to think that falling into that line of work happened to her, not that she chose it. The CEO of Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake, also thinks this way as she didn’t make the decision to have a clothing company, it came to her in a multitude of things and she just followed that current.Leslyn continues the discussion by sharing a quote from Big Magic, “My fear always made predictively boring decisions.” Leslyn goes on to say that every single person has a creative element in their spirit, but this fear often holds people back from engaging in it. Leslie shares she often talks herself out of her ideas because she experiences fear in not being perfect. Elizabeth Gilbert says that you should only go through with an idea for the love of doing it not because it’s going to be perfect. A good enough novel, that is violently written right now, will always be better than a perfect novel, that is meticulously written never. Leslyn believes that fear and creativity need to both be present in our lives, but fear need to be strapped in the backseat, it cannot be the driver. This idea of perfectionism cannot stop you from doing, as perfect can quickly become the enemy of finishing or even doing something at all.This fear should not stop you from doing, Leslyn says that you are going to fail some things but that is the first step of seeing growth in something. Leslie shares experiences with her children in feeling the need to be perfect and in the phrase, “I can’t.” Leslie says the kicker with this is: parents never expect their kids to know something out of the gate. Parents expect their kids to fail, make mistakes, and learn. Parents can be very forgiving of these things in their children, but often are not forgiving of their own actions. We do not have that open mentality of allowing ourselves to also fail, learn, and eventually figure it out. The role of failure can play a big role in how creative we are. Leslyn shares another quote from Big Magic, about how it is important for us to forgive ourselves for failure. You have to find it in yourself to say it’s alright to fail. Elizabeth Gilbert sees this as we’re nothing but beginners. Even if you have fifty years of experience in a craft, you are still a beginner and always will be a beginner, as perfectionism, the idea of being simply perfect, never ever can exist. This role of failure can prevent you from doing a lot of things in your life, if you let it. Finding the value in the nuances of success is vital. Leslyn shares that courage comes to play in the idea of success. You must have the courage to fail, but also the courage to succeed in whatever it is you are doing.Leslie quotes Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic by stating, “One of the oldest and most generous tricks that the universe plays on human beings, is to bury strange jewels within us all, and then standing back to see if we can ever find them.” Leslie finds this to be an interesting way to look at ideas, it’s a very freeing attitude to think that an idea and the capability is already within yourself, you just have to find it. Leslie shares that even in her own company, she feels the immense pressure to be different and to do something that hasn’t been done before. In reality, it seems that almost everything has already been done, so she changed her mentality. If you interpret an idea that you think might have been done, and you do it in your own unique way, it will turn into something different. Leslie and Leslyn further explain this by giving the example of a musician covering a song. A musician covering another musician’s song can give a completely different feel to the same lyrics. This is because completely different creative energies are being placed into the words. We as people, do not have the same experiences, talent, or abilities as someone else. Meaning if we complete an idea, put the energy into that concept, our own version of that thing will emerge. Leslyn emphasizes that this is something that truly should be embraced in life.This week’s Try This at Home, is to really think about where you experience creativity in your own life. If you are one to hesitate because of fear, think of what you are truly fearing in partaking in that particular action. If you think you are not creative, we hope this episode has shown that we all have the ability to be creative. Creativity is defined so broadly and plays a big contribution to a life well lived! Leslyn and Leslie end this episode encouraging you, the listener, to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic.Subscribe to this channel for new podcasts EVERY WEDNESDAY and Try This at Home!Next Week’s Episode: Social Media!One of our goals this year is to grow the podcast audience and you can help!We would truly appreciate a share or a shout out if you found the ideas here helpful.Don’t forget, you can always touch base with us personally on our Facebook, Instagram, and our website trythisathomepodcast.comLinks to Look At:Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magichttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24453082-big-magicBig Magic Audible Linkhttps://www.audible.com/ep/title/?asin=B00U0CAEB8&source_code=GO1GBSH09091690EK&device=d&ds_rl=1262685&ds_rl=1263561&cvosrc=ppc.google.big%20magic%20audiobook&cvo_campaign=250472169&cvo_crid=260135447937&Matchtype=e&gclid=CjwKCAjwgbLzBRBsEiwAXVIygL4HJJmxp73afPLTrNyUJW88KrnvKVfWqvWoVLJ7y7xF1QYun1UxAhoClJsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.dsFinding Nemo’s Turtle Scenehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNHtNEshk8Ann Patchett’s Bel Cantohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5826.Bel_CantoKonmari Methodhttps://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/14/how-to-declutter-your-life-marie-kondo-spark-joyStitch Fix Founder, Katrina Lake, Code 2018 Interviewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S-VTy2cWf8Kygo & Whitney Houston’s Higher Lovehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR49dyo-y0ESteve Winwood’s Higher Lovehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9olaIio3l8Can’t Get Enough? Follow us on our other platforms!Twitter: https://twitter.com/TryThisAtHomeP1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trythisathomepodcast/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TTAHPodcast/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXg2RODfYz2Rrc8tUO0ti5QListen to the Podcast at https://www.trythisathomepodcast.com/ or on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher![Show Notes by Abbie Brooks -- https://www.fiverr.com/abjbrook]

Katrina Lake is the youngest woman to ever take a company public at just 34-years-old. In less than 10 years, she

Founded by Katrina Lake in 2011, StitchFix has taken the fashion world by storm. By leveraging data science, StitchFix sends customers personalized “fixes” tailored toward their size and style, and the company has continued to innovate through new initiatives like its Style Shuffle game and new Direct Buy Program. We hope you’ll enjoy this conversation between StitchFix COO Mike Smith and the Motley Fool’s Tom Gardner, Andy Cross, and Tim Beyers.  Check out more of our content here: TMF's podcast portal YouTube Twitter Join Our Motley Fool Podcast Facebook Group LinkedIn StockUp, The Motley Fool's weekly email newsletter To get 50% off our Stock Advisor service, go to http://IF.Fool.com.

The Dow soared 373 points today after a volatile week, and Jim Cramer’s setting you up for next week with his Game Plan. Then, Cramer sits down with the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake, to get more insight on the company’s fourth quarter earnings report and plans for the future. And, with interest rates falling investors tend to turn to the REIT’s for yield- Cramer’s looking at real estate investment trusts as a possible play in this environment. Plus, Clorox has cleaned up today, erasing yesterday’s losses, but should you jump in? Cramer’s done his homework on whether or not you should buy after the company’s negative analyst meeting earlier this week.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2010, Katrina Lake recruited 20 friends for an experiment: she wanted to see if she could choose clothes for them that accurately matched their style and personality. That idea sparked Stitch Fix, an online personal shopping service that aims to take the guesswork out of shopping. Today, it has about three million customers and brings in more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Justin Li, who created wearable equipment to keep cool and hydrated called IcePlate.

In the season finale, ‘Like A Boss’, Alesha and panel will be discussing bossing it and burning-out as they share their views on pay gaps, imposter syndrome and the career tips you’d pass along to your younger self. The panel includes; CEO of Stitch Fix and youngest female in history to trade on the stock market, Katrina Lake; chef, author and Ayurveda advocate, Jasmine Hemsley and acclaimed author and journalist, Katherine Ormerod.

Welcome to the Voice of Retail for the week of July 22nd, 2019 I'm your host Michael LeBlanc and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada. In this episode we head to Western Canada for three different perspectives in and around the retail industry. First we put the farmer back in the “Farm to Fork” retail conversation with an exclusive interview featuring Cherilyn Jolly-Nagel, a farmer from Mossbank, Saskatchewan. We talk Ag-tech and how farmers can and should become a bigger part of the food conversation. Next recorded live in Victoria I check in with retailer Bob Ianson, founder and owner of Heritage Linens and RCC long-time Board of Directors member as he gets ready to pass the torch to his daughter after 25 interesting years. Then off to Winnipeg for the big picture perspective with RCC's Prairie Director John Graham . We do a quick scan of the key issues for retailers based or operating in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. You can reach John on 204.926.8624 or JGraham@retailcouncil.org Finally we'll cover off Retail This Week with the top retail stories from Canada, U.S. and around the world including L.L. Bean opening their first Canadian store, Couche-Tarde buys into Fire & Flower, and Stitch Fix's Katrina Lake predicts all retailers will be a tech company in ten years. But first, let's listen to my interview with Cherilyn: Thanks to Cherilyn, Bob and John for being my guests this week, now let's hit the highlights from Retail This Week eNewsletter, biggest retail weekly in Canada and you can subscribe on www.retailcouncil.org for free. That's a wrap on this edition of The Voice of Retail, if you liked this podcast you can subscribe on Apple iTunes or your favourite podcast platform, and be sure and recommend to a friend or colleague in the retail industry. You can also ask your favourite home devices, Amazon Echo, Google home to play the most recent edition. I'm Michael LeBlanc, Founder and President of M.E. LeBlanc and Company Inc. and you can learn more about me on www.meleblanc.co or of course on LinkedIn

Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the future of fashion, how the company has changed in the past nine years, and the rarity of female tech CEOs. In this episode: Lake’s background and taking Stitch Fix public; the difficulties of raising venture capital for a fashion startup; the "myth" of staying private forever; is Stitch Fix a “tech company?”; its expansion into new verticals, including men’s fashion; the broader online fashion landscape; how Stitch Fix has changed since its founding; figuring out people’s style preferences and riding fashion trends; sharing data with fashion brands; the future of retail; why Stitch Fix doesn’t have a physical store; how it reaches new customers; mistakes made and lessons learned; becoming a symbol for women in business; and what people underestimate about Lake. Vote for us Recode Decode has been nominated for best technology podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for Recode Decode at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Follow us Kara Swisher (@karaswisher), host Katrina Lake (@kmlake), guest Erica Anderson (@EricaAmerica), executive producer Eric Johnson (@HeyHeyESJ), producer More to explore If you haven't already, subscribe to Recode Decode Subscribe to Recode's other podcasts: Recode Media, Pivot, and Land of the Giants Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have another live episode from the How I Built This Summit, featuring Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix. Katrina sat down with Guy Raz in front of a live audience in San Francisco in October to discuss building culture at a billion-dollar company, and why it's important – even for the CEO – to "rehire" yourself every year. We have one more episode from the Summit coming up next Thursday; stay tuned for Guy's conversation with Lisa Price of Carol's Daughter.

Listen to any earnings call on demand with the Borsa Earnings Call mobile app now on the App Store. Download here: bit.ly/FreeQuarterlyEarningsCalls Welcome to Earnings Season. Our goal is to make listening to earnings calls easier. We upload relevant and newsworthy earnings calls for easy listening. To request a company's earnings call, email borsaHQ@gmail.com. This podcast episode is StitchFix's Q1 2019 earnings call. Listen to Katrina Lake discuss her company's performance. About Earnings Season: Earnings Season posts relevant earnings calls for an easy listening experience. Email borsahq@gmail.com to request a company.

Emily Chang sits down with Stitch Fix founder & CEO Katrina Lake on the set of Bloomberg Studio 1.0 to discuss the the online styling services’ successes and challenges in their first year as a publicly traded company.

Isn’t it about time we had a corporate mindset shift? Because come on! There's more to work than giving the company your heart and soul. Jon Fortt, co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Alley,” joins Laurie to talk about what's going right, what went wrong, and what's broken in the world of work. They talk about the reshaping of the traditional corporate mindset, #MeToo, wages, and the future of work. Jon Fortt is the host at Fortt Knox, a podcast dedicated to interviewing the highest achievers in the business, entertainment, philanthropy, and sports industries. His show gives us a sneak peek into these industry giants' lives and businesses while tackling the most interesting business and economic issues. How can we emulate the best leaders in the industry? Jon shares his take on how today's leaders are rethinking and reshaping the traditional corporate mindset. He shares how two outstanding leaders are breaking the mold of tradition with their business approach: Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, and Stitch Fix CEO, Katrina Lake. The #MeToo movement and stagnant wages are big issues in the global community. Jon shares his thoughts on corporate culture and respect. He also talks about why leaders should have plans to address and mitigate these issues. The tribe seems split when it comes to the flat wages issue. When labor demand is high but the employment rate is low, wages are at an all-time high. Although some companies are working to amend this for their employees' benefit, others see it as more of an expense. Jon believes it shouldn’t be about hard data. Things like empathy and creativity are deeply important in any industry or organization.   Laurie and Jon talk about the future of work and what he thinks about the next 10-20 years. People are worried that robots will be taking their jobs, but Jon believes that isn’t true. Instead, he believes there’s plenty of space for people because businesses need employees who are able to think about how their job impacts their role, the CEO, and the business. The DIY HR Handbook Wouldn’t you love to get your hands on Laurie’s no-holds-barred, honest DIY HR Handbook for employees and pros alike? Download it for free! Jon Fortt LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Productivity @Work Fortt Knox Squawk Alley Fortt Knox: Satya Nadella Interview Fortt Knox: Katrina Lake Interview Annette Fortt  

Listen to any earnings call on demand with the Borsa Earnings Call mobile app now on the App Store. Download here: bit.ly/FreeQuarterlyEarningsCalls Welcome to Earnings Season. Our goal is to make listening to earnings calls easier. We upload relevant and newsworthy earnings calls for easy listening. To request a company's earnings call, email borsaHQ@gmail.com. This podcast episode is Stitch Fix's Q4 2018 earnings call. Listen to Katrina Lake discuss her company's performance. About Earnings Season: Earnings Season posts relevant earnings calls for an easy listening experience. Email borsahq@gmail.com to request a company.

On this week’s 51%, we’ll listen to a conversation with the youngest female founder and CEO to take a company public. At age 35, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake became the youngest female founder and CEO to take a company public, and it happened in 2017. Online personal styling company Stitch Fix is now worth […]

We’ve got a fascination with founders in our culture – people who start stuff. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates.   I’ve had a new generation of founders here on Fortt Knox: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, and Guild Education founder Rachel Carlson to name a couple.  So this week we’re going to dig into what successful founders do right, and what we can learn from them. Because hey: The way I look at it, even if you’re not starting the next Apple, the chances are pretty good that a lot of us have started something, or will before too long. Maybe it’s a small business – a major project on your job.   My guests: CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank, who has chronicled the ways of successful entrepreneurs for many years now. And the irrepressible Scott Galloway, Professor at NYU’s Stern School of business, author of New York Times bestseller The Four, which examines the animating ideas behind Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. This week for the Fortt Knox one-on-one I’ve also got Maynard Webb. He’s former Board Chairman at Yahoo, former CEO of LiveOps, chief operating officer at eBay, and board member at Visa and Salesforce.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who is Shannon Grant?     Shannon Grant is an investor, community builder and startup advisor. She leads knowledge programs for the best and brightest minds in tech to facilitate high-level knowledge transfer and create powerful experiences for time-strapped leaders.     In 2014 she developed the Salon Series events at MKThink focusing on the future of education, and she helped build a membership organization of over 80 mission-driven CEOs with The Tugboat Group. She has coached founders to create original talks for CEO summits, hosted Jeffersonian dinners for awesome engineers and connected tech founders with the people or information they need to grow.     To support this vision, she started Deus Capital to invest in companies with billion-dollar market opportunities that have at least one female founder.     Her social impact work includes converting a liquor store into a children's writing center in the heart of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood with 826 Valencia and building a new model for charity with Mama Hope.      Show Highlights  Shannon shares her journey through venture capital into angel investing.   We talk about our shared interest in getting more women to invest and invest in female founders including the statistics around this.   We discuss the importance of getting girls to see what is possible by exposing them to investing, startups, entrepreneurship, and technology.    We talk about this being an economic opportunity and the importance of encouraging men to join us in investing in women and encouraging more exemplar men in this awakening.   If Shannon could wave a magic wand and change something in this world, she would encourage people to speak; your voice is needed.      Terri’s Key Takeaway  Investing in women will create trillions of dollars in economic opportunity.  It is not a zero sum game.     References in the Podcast  MKThink:  http://www.mkthink.com/  Tugboat:  http://www.thetugboatgroup.com/  Robyn Fisher:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/robynsuegoldman/  Smitten Ice Cream: https://www.smittenicecream.com/  StitchFix: https://www.stitchfix.com/  Katrina Lake:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmlake/  Learn Capital:  http://learncapital.com/  Accenture Ventures: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/innovation-architecture-accenture-ventures  First Round Capital Study: http://10years.firstround.com/  Darya Shaked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darya-henig-shaked-361539a9/  Wonder Ventures: https://www.wonderventures.com/  Dear Madam President:  https://www.dearmadampresidentbook.com/  Brazen Global: https: https://brazenglobal.com/  Jennifer Ehlen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferehlen/      Contact  Shannon can be reached via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannon-grant-6164139/.    You can follow Terri on Twitter at @terrihansonmead or go to her website at www.terrihansonmead.com or on Medium:  https://medium.com/@terrihansonmead.   Feel free to email Terri at PilotingYourLife@gmail.com.  To continue the conversation, go to Twitter at @PilotingLife and use hashtag #PilotingYourLife. 

At age 35, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake became the youngest female founder and CEO to take a company public in 2017. Stitch Fix is now worth over two billion dollars. She has not only changed the way many of us shop for clothes, but she’s also changing how we think about leaders. Find out how she learned to embrace her history-making role as the youngest woman to take a startup to IPO, in this conversation at INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Subscribe to “Inflection Point” to get more stories of how women rise up right in your feed! Want to support more women’s stories? Support the program at inflectionpointradio.org/contribute.

Stitch Fix Founder and CEO Katrina Lake is the youngest woman to take a company public. She launched her tech retail startup in 2011 and it has since grown into a multibillion dollar company. She opens up about the struggles she faced raising money, why she never expected to be a CEO, her commitment to ending sexism in Silicon Valley, and how being a mother changed her leadership style. Produced by Haley Draznin, CNN.

Katrina Lake spent the first part of her career watching other entrepreneurs pitch their companies to her VC firm. But then she decided she wanted to try it out herself. So she went to Harvard Business School and started her own company. Today, you know it as the multibillion-dollar online styling service Stitch Fix. And when she took Stitch Fix public in 2017, Katrina became the youngest woman to lead a company to IPO. Ever. NBD. On the couch, she talks to us about deciding to go to business school, hiring and managing a team, and not taking her dad’s advice.

Three of the most followed founders and entrepreneurs in fashion and beauty — Stitch Fix’s Katrina Lake, Everlane’s Michael Preysman and Beautycon’s Moj Mahdara — discuss their California-based businesses. To sign up to the Daily Digest newsletter click the link here: http://bit.ly/BoFnews  For a limited time only we are offering our podcast listeners an exclusive 25% discount on an annual BoF Professional Member. To get 25% off your first year of an annual membership click the link here: http://bit.ly/2KoRRBH, select the annual package and then enter the invitation code PODCASTPRO at checkout.  To contact The Business of Fashion with comments, questions, or speaker ideas please e-mail podcast@businessoffashion.com. For all sponsorship enquiries, please e-mail advertising@businessoffashion.com. 

Katrina Lake, the CEO of apparel delivery company Stitch Fix, talks with Recode’s Jason Del Rey at the 2018 Code Conference. Lake explains why Stitch Fix went public in 2017 even though it was healthy and profitable and what she has learned from the experience, as well as how much the company differentiates itself from commerce behemoth Amazon. Plus: Why Stitch Fix is introducing an annual “styling pass” rather than charging a $20 fee with every box of clothes it sends to its customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Grow or Die Mid-Week Checkpoint Edition, we examine two short clips from the How I Built This Podcast, where host, Guy Raz, speaks with Katrina Lake and Daymond John on Sexism, Racism and Privilege.

Episode 134 is a recap of Mary Meekers "Internet Trends 2018" report, and the weeks news. Industry News Walmart Shareholder Meeting Walmart Launches JetBlack Ulta, Sears, Macys, Target report quarterly earnings Apple WWDC Mary Meeker, State of the Internet 2018 Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 134 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, June 4th 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason:  [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 134 being recorded on Monday June 4th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot:  [0:39] Hey Jason um welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason's been kind of a busy kickoff to Summer here and we talk tonight this week we would cover some e-commerce news. [0:56] Last time we talked about news there was the hot take on Adobe in Magento before we dig into that though and even more important question give me your spoiler-free review of Star Wars a solo story. Jason:  [1:11] Yeah well you know I took my wife to to the movie for our 5th wedding anniversary cuz I'm a very romantic guy. And we really liked it I I feel like I owe the new Star Wars movies I've really enjoyed this or the new stories so and Rotel more than a rogue one more than. [1:34] I I may be in the main trilogy. Scot:  [1:37] Awesome what is 5th year anniversary I always say it's paper to my wife to so I can avoid it. Jason:  [1:43] But yeah I I pretend everything is paper or dessert or cubic zirconia which apparently is not one of the anniversaries either. Scot:  [1:50] 10 tens another good one. They're on their give her some aluminum foil. Jason:  [1:55] When I pretend I'm taking her to Disney World for the the Star Wars Hotel. Scot:  [2:00] Nice. Jason:  [2:01] I'm just kidding we have to go probably sooner than 10. Scot:  [2:03] 10 m e t i n. Jason:  [2:05] Tell Tim I got it yes I like sorry I thought we were already planning my tent and a. Scot:  [2:10] Paper paper in Tempe. Jason:  [2:11] The odds of her being able to put up with me for 5 more years aren't you no not that impressive. Scot:  [2:16] I don't know the how about and then. Jason:  [2:20] Her or you for that matter. Scot:  [2:22] Yeah it's been a long 3 years her the trip reports and you covered a really cool conference around grocery tote us about. [2:36] What all is going on with the exciting grocery folks. Jason:  [2:38] So Royal Bank of Canada has as this event every year focused on all that investors that are falling that that category so I got to go do a keynote on how did you disrupting. Digital is disrupting grocery so that was a fun talk and they they pretended to laugh at my jokes which I always appreciate. And there are a ton of CEOs there so I got to sit in a briefing with the CEO of Kellogg and he had some pretty. [3:12] Pithy of comments that I think at some Traction in my Twitter feed he was kind of joking about how how these um. [3:22] Startups are awesome and they all go to a hundred million dollars and then pray to God to be acquired by someone like dog craft. [3:32] And the MPD did we cover their conference last year did pretty cool recap on the evolution of the grocery so there's a. [3:42] You know obviously groceries a big piece of consumer spending and getting jujuy disrupted by digital right now so lot of people are trying to figure out what the what the sort of ramifications of all that will be in place marpat. Scot:  [3:56] Pulling in your talk to you the whole curbside versus delivery and and all that. Jason:  [4:02] So you know what I actually was a little higher level I was talking about some of the. The main ways in which consumers purchase decision patterns are changing over all and it changed and other categories and how those apply to grocery so. I didn't get the Deep dive into the tactics of grocery pickup versus home delivery for these guys that'll maybe next year stock but the. Did talk a lot about her. People need more information to make purchase decisions and social proof in absolute value and transparency are becoming a much bigger deal and you know what retailers are doing that well and what retailer still has some work to do there. [4:45] And you know this sort of big big trend of Brands and retailers colliding and all the all the the. Retail are starting to look more like brands of the you know snap up all these products and acquire meal kits and watch all these organic, and I mean organic is in in home in in house new products that they did they're launching and that you know how all the brands are trying to figure out how to go direct to consumer. Scot:  [5:10] Brickell so let's jump into the news first of all just travel outline tonight without would cover, sometimes we put kind of what we call other news is kind of tidbits at the end and it always gets bumped so we thought we'd kind of reverse that so you get the delicious Tibbets first and then we're going to talk about Apple's conference and then what are the big events that Jason I both being beta Geeks get excited about is Mary Meeker had her 2018 deck out so we're going to wrap up the show and go over the Meeker deck, so that, being said what would jump into Walmart they had a shareholder meeting that was just one of those things that they they hold and it's not quite as big as Warren Buffett, pretty somewhere where thousands and thousands people go in and hear Walmart's annual report did you see any interesting news out of that. Jason:  [6:01] Yeah the other number to thinks it is that annual event that Walmart ahold usually a week or two after their their earnings. I report and also usually right after a board meeting and I'm heading may not have as many shareholders come to the meeting as one that's for Berkshire Hathaway but the other thing that Walmart does is they bring, thousands of Associates from all of all their various businesses all over the world and so the the sports arena where they hold the event is. [6:34] Way more friendly they usually get some dick music acts and an interesting and see. And you know they often have launched projects or talked about you know there their focuses and initiatives. [6:53] For the year so it's a good if you're Walmart follower it's a good thing to attend it's kind of a pain in the neck because it. Basically puts the small town of Bentonville in in Arkansas at capacity so I give you don't plan well in advance. You're likely staying at a hotel like pretty far away like maybe down in the college or something and. Hard. You don't get in a restaurant and all those sorts of things so I would I was actually pleased to follow this year's shareholder meeting from afar rather than attend in person as well as I have done none number times in the past. Scot:  [7:31] Call seems like the big thing that blew up is this jet black tell us more about that. Jason:  [7:37] So the rumors of this is are coming out a couple weeks before the shareholders meeting but they officially announced this new service. At the shareholders meeting called jet black and one of our glory is Lieutenant Jennifer Fleiss came out to. [7:54] To introduce that folks might recognize Jennifer. She runs the the I keep going store 9 and its taurate. The incubation lab for Walmart but she also is one of the original founders of Rent the Runway so has a lot of. Interesting bespoke apparel expertise. And jet black is a new concierge service that Walmart is piloting at the moment just in Manhattan and just for people that live in particular types of dwelling. So you have to live in a condo or an apartment building with a doorman. So the date they can use the Fulfillment methods that they have in mind and essentially what they're doing is there they're providing a. Personal shopper for everyone that's in this program you pay a monthly fee. I think they're experimenting with a couple different price points on the monthly fee it might be like 50 or $100 a month at the moment. [9:00] And essentially you can call or even send a SMS message and say hey I need a new outfit to wear for this party or I need a birthday present for a 4 year old girl. Or I need a very specific thing, and your your personal shopper will track all your preferences and past purchases and you don't either get the specific thing you asked for or. Or make a smart recommendation based on what what information you give in a mini cases Bill do same-day delivery so they'll, like you you can simply send a text message and have something show up at your door man when you come home from work for your building in New York so it's a very. High-touch data-driven model they're saying that they have some AI chatbots as part of the system but there's also a lot of human interaction and intervention. And it's a it's a huge. [10:01] Push for Walmart to try to learn how to capture these more affluent customers. They're really the only part of the US market you know that Walmart hasn't captured yet so, in Walmart owns a big swath of of the u.s. send you know the one the one demographic the date that they don't do particularly well in is. These affluent Shoppers in in Walmart doesn't have a store in New York City for example and so, watching this this service is interesting and it's semi branded jet which is also interesting right like it's not clear whether the jet in jet black is for the Walmart check brand or they just. Chose to pick a descriptive version of black to name the the product so that's going to be a little interesting and it's, you know it's going to be interesting to see if socialites in New York will will you know subscribe to this this high-touch Services provided by Walmart who they you know, with what historically look down their nose at. Scot:  [11:04] Yeah yeah there's several startups in this area that have raced pretty considerable Capital one's called I think Alfred it's two women that have done it and it's cut. It's got kind of maybe half product half concierge services kind of a thing so you can have, yeah. Only can you say hey I've got it I need a gift for this party I'm going to but please deliver it to this address which may be some services along with the items that they could be interesting to see how that goes. Jason:  [11:35] Yeah for sure and. You know a lot of the folks in my industry are super eager to try it out and so we've all applied you know for the closed Beta And so you know we all had to go and claim that we're housewives in New York. Scot:  [11:51] Funny when they show up in Chicago. Jason:  [11:56] Exactly. Scot:  [11:58] Other interesting retail news so a lot of retailers they have a combat off calendar q1 so they're just announcing their queue on but it's not January February March it's more February March April, that they were hearing about now some of the Ulta in Sears were interesting I found because it's kind of Tale of Two Cities this kind of. Bifurcation that that we hear a lot about. [12:20] Sears was kind of one side of that story and they're cops were down 12% year-over-year same-store sales were down 12%. Going to close another 70 store so they're kind of doing this kind of a shaving knock stores as they going to spiral around conversely, Ulta who we talked about on the show it is Crush their earnings and there's their comps were up pretty concerned and they're opening 34 stores, search this really interesting kind of changing the guard going on in retail, Mall based vs. Melt Mall based categories like Beauty doing well little lemon did well at least your and we continue these Trends we talked about on the show a lot, I continue to go on and a lot of them at the bifurcation another area that's doing really well is a wholesale clubs and dollar stores so that kind of value-oriented side of the equation is doing well also. Jason:  [13:14] Yeah yeah it for sure and then. I think Macy's also had their earnings and also was favorable so they think they there. They're the revenues up 3.6% and cops were at 3.9% and check me on this, but I think this was the second consecutive quarter of favorable comps for them after a very long streak of negative comps. Scot:  [13:42] Yeah yeah on our good friend how is over there and so I think he can take credit for about this cuz it happened on his watch always always good you know to to land somewhere and then have things turn around right when you do it so we'll give how all the current flow. Jason:  [13:56] For sure and they they. Do you have a bunch of initiatives that have gone live that that in some ways feel like they they at least partially have house fingerprints on them you know since. [14:09] Shoptalk they've been really touting this this pilot of mobile scan a self scan check out that they've been rapidly expanding to a bunch of stores I find that super interesting because on one hand I feel like it. [14:24] Saw the very real problem that that Choppers have with Macy's in fact I think they it's the number one report a complaint at Macy's is that you can't find. [14:33] A cart to check you out after you made your purchases. And so this is a sort of self-service thing where you pick your clothes you scanned them with your mobile app if they have security tags on them you you show. The digital receipt at the door and someone takes those tags off and you you get out of the store much faster. Minute parently Macy's Shoppers are really responding well to that service and it makes a lot of sense the one thing that's interesting as we've seen a few other retailers. Pilot it and then sort of step back a little bit so you know Walmart had a pretty significant test of. Mobile scan self checkout and they did it in both Sam's Club and Walmart and then they they rolled it out at Sam's Club and it seems like they turned it off at Walmart so I you know I think there was. [15:18] A different learning there and maybe it's at a different shopping dynamic. [15:22] I bet you know also are like turning up the heat on some of their their e-commerce fulfillment things today they did launch a new drop-ship program so they're expanding their. [15:34] Their catalog by listing more vendor product that they don't even carry themselves and having the vendor ship that stuff Direct. A lot of times for a retailer that's a baby step towards a true market place so if if this program successful for then maybe we'll see. See Macy's launch of marketplace down down the road they also, launch there buying on ship to store and in for lizards that don't track this carefully, that's a slightly different flavor than buy online pickup in-store so buy online pickup in-store means. The goods are already on the Shelf in the store customer orders online and then they go get in there you know someone pulls the one off the shelf and save it for him and they get that one, in buy online ship to store the goods are still coming out of the e-commerce fulfillment center but instead of sending the goods to the consumers home which is expensive they should the goods to the consumers near store in the consumer I can come and pick it up for free, it's a big win for the retailer cuz the delivery cost for my to lower and that customers going to walk in the store and potentially discover other things and so this, the boss or buy online ship to store program is a new thing at Macy's if that also has been one of the major initiatives at Walmart, over the last couple years and Macy says that they're going to rapidly scale all this program so so interesting digital stuff happening at Macy's. Scot:  [16:57] This is why not I thought you'd find interesting so Target had mixed results so on the positive side their foot traffic was up, over 3.7% year-over-year which is really good in the world of offline retail you know where you're going to look in it at 2 and 3% comps then they said e-commerce grew 28%, which is interesting and then we just had it wasn't Walmart in kind of 30% which footnote when all these things come out and always reminds me of this discussion we had on the show where. Everyone's growing 30% than who is not growing 30% why is e-commerce only growing 15-day 18%. What to save that discussion again for another day and get some Gaston to help us understand that. [17:42] Anyway but that was the positive side but then while she was expecting a buck, 39 on you. And it came in at a buck 32 so it's a pretty big mess on the bottom line in the management team essentially said look e-commerce grew faster than we were expecting and it's expensive and crowded are margins so they really blamed, the bottom line Miss on the the nice kind of hit on the e-commerce growing at 28% number so it kind of. Whenever that happens I kind of think of Amazon has a lot of retailers in this really tough. Lose lose situation where you know you lose if you don't grow your eCommerce then if you do Gregory Commerce City but I was going to Crater and Amazon has kind of figured out how to do that way more efficiently than these folks that I've invested all there. Best looking into the store infrastructure but catching up on these things but Amazon's got a nice kind of you have 15-year lead so interesting kind of a reminder of that trap that I think Amazon has retailers in. Jason:  [18:45] Yeah and you know potentially this is just the new normal and Retail is obviously we're going to continue to see if shift in the sales mix to online sales and you know inherently from a retailer those those sales are less profitable so there's more pressure on margins than ever before, and you know, if you're if you're just expecting you know that they're eventually going to get back to that same margin level that they were at pre-digital that that might be unrealistic expectation. Scot:  [19:15] Yeah absolutely pivoting to the other recent event you know usually in the world of keep them this is, pretty exciting but it's kind of mediocre out here today so today Apple kicked off their what do I worldwide developers conference creatively called WWDC and, Prime most interesting thing it and there's there's new versions of all the operating systems coming out it really kind of it there's a theme for this when I think it was less positive fix bunch of stuff so so apples been inviting a lot. And it's crowded just got a lot of dangling threads and things that aren't kind of a hundred percent so looks like. This kind of generation for the next 6 months is going to be kind of you know some consistency so for example I always have trouble going between my phone and my iPad cuz the you is totally different cuz I have a 10 and it's different than the operating system on the iPad. [20:08] They're going to raid a lot more of the stuff on the Mac Etc by the most interesting part of the day I thought was Wall Street reacted very positively to Apple. [20:18] And you know we talked about on the show little bit there's kind of interesting race to see which of the the. The Horseman of the internet are going to be the first $20 company in a big boom it was made today is Apple went up 5 to 6% so where it stands as of today which is recording this is June 4th after the market closed. Apple is got a pretty considerable lead at 942 billion so really kind of 58 billion away which seem 58 million billion away from a trillion. Seems like a lot but when you kind of think about percentage is another kind of 6% move on Apple and you'll be there so that's going to be interesting to watch. Amazon if you've been keeping track Amazon used to be dead last now there in 800 and 8 billion in Amazon is also doing very well but not quite keeping Pace with apple and then Google has done quite well and they're sitting at about 8. Switching with Amazon back and forth depending on how the stocks do then Microsoft at 781 the real laggard who was in the race is really kind of falling off is Facebook at 560 billion. [21:25] So yeah it's pretty interesting I think. [21:28] Think will happen is it's hard to tell who's going at their first right now you would kind of call Apple getting their first but I think we're going to see a scenario where we have like. You know 3 or 4 trillion dollar companies so it's it's not going to be kind of the trillion-dollar company I think I think some of these companies that have built these massive platforms that are just soaking up. Dollars across all these categories are are going to be each of them will be joined our company's so it could be we'll keep people posted on that. [21:55] The three some things interesting obviously they're coming on there a lot of scrutiny and Regulatory concern and things for him going on there. Apple really sue a lot of shade at them in the WWE. DC so some of the features coming out although they don't specifically talk about Facebook there things for you know. [22:16] Making you look even more Anonymous than ever and specifically getting away around some of the ways Facebook tries to fingerprint you as a user that was interesting perhaps the most interesting is there any missing some features that allow you to, manage the amount of time you're using your devices and the time of day and things of that nature and then also a fair amount new features around that same topic around children so you can kind of say hey I'm going to let my kids have 30 minutes on their device, after school so they can call me and be in touch but then that's it I'm not going to let them. I'm going to lock them out of the device between you know that the school hours and then in the evenings as well so. [22:59] It's interesting to see if that any of that will will cause kind of the reduction in online time, your people are kind of addicted to these social media use cases primary Facebook's family up of apps so those were some of the interesting kind of high-level things I saw out of the conference, what did you say it was interesting. Jason:  [23:18] Yeah so I think you hit it right like it. I don't think they were huge Commerce Centric announcements at the show I think they Lowered Expectations for the show coming in by saying hey. Probably not going to launch a lot of major new stuff we're going to you know we have a significant focus on fixing a lot of the stuff we've already made. But they did announce an upgrade to their augmented reality stack so what they call a Arquette they they announce 2.0 which has Richard features. We talked several times about how. They are probably has a lot more application in VR does for for shopping in the in the near-term and. [24:01] Historically it's required a lot of horsepower in a lot of special software. To do decent AR on phones and now you know Apple and Google are both making it much more ubiquitous in much easier to code. SAR Kit 2.0 can be interesting one of the date Apple literally has a new app coming out with a arcade 2.0 called measure which is sort of a using your your camera as a. Surprisingly accurate ruler to be able to measure dimensions of rooms and things like that. And we talked a number X about out you know how these cameras get better at measuring things. That can apply to a whole bunch of Commerce use cases of fitment for clothes and visualisations and fitment for furniture and housewares and all these sorts of things. Become much more more possible as as these capabilities expand there were no Hardware announcements at the show but there's a lot of rumors that the next iPhone. Will have a triple camera on it and that third camera being a depth sensor and so. You know there already is a really sophisticated depth sensor on the front of the camera for measuring your face. Did they put a sophisticated temp sensor on the back of that next phone that could really open the doors to some interesting. Apparel fit man and Maid to Order apparel over the phone and all sorts of think so. So what Cantina watch that closely they did announce a potential very scary new feature for Safari so this is going back to the the Privacy stuff that you talked about that they're adding. [25:37] The ability to block third-party cookies in Safari and so you like. It is probably a good thing for users but it breaks an awful lot of the internet like almost all the news sites you can rely heavily on all these third-party cookies from all these contents indicator is an ad. I platforms and things and and if if all of these Publishers have to adapt to a world in which third-party cookies don't work. That's going to be a pretty big paradigm shift. Inform me then like the like this is a double DIN for apple apple gets to say we care about users privacy and we're eliminating you know evil advertisers ability to track US. [26:19] But when the the content sites that are. Time are we making money by selling ads around free content they give you when they lose the ability to monetize their content through these add platforms. It actually forces them onto Apple news and Google news as their only source of monetization for their their content so you know Apple announced the new version of their. Their news platform at the same time they're making it harder for these these news Publishers 2. To monetize their own content so so you know you can look at that as a coincidence or nefarious plan. [26:58] This is already in Safari but I just want to highlight for folks that you know recent updates of to Safari added the ability for Apple to finally support Progressive web apps. They been in the Google browser for a while and this. People not talking about this is enough this is a huge Paradigm change for how to do mobile you can do way better mobile e-commerce sites using the pwa. What are called Progressive web apps then you then you can using traditional mobile websites and certainly. Better play for most retailers than doing mobile apps and now that you can do one code base and have it work on most of the Google and Apple devices. Every retailer really should be redoing their mobile right now and interesting Lee not very many are and you know, my my hypothesis is that part of the problem is that all these retailers have mobile fatigue that they, you know in the last year they just want the responsive site and they felt like that meant they were done at mobile, and now no one wants to talk about redoing their mobile again to support all these new mobile standards like Progressive web apps and accelerated mobile pages and leveraging this these new payment Technologies like the payment request API, these are all best practices that make a huge difference in in Mobile, so it's going to be interesting. To see how that that all plays out did you see any other cool stuff at the at the Apple conference that's worth noting. Scot:  [28:31] The other at the keynote there was kind of two that had a little bit of a Commerce flavor and they were are within the augmented reality World which which we we talked a lot about on the show, side note we do have a deep dive into a rvr that, you should check out if any of this sounds interesting to you so one of things they did is they had a group of folks from Lego there and they had a table with, I just one of these little village kind of sets you know where they do kind of get you to buy one and then you can buy a multiple Village so they had this kind of apartment building set, I didn't they could look through their iPads and they could do some really cool stuff that could go inside of that apartment building set virtually and See Kai animated Lego. People living and doing things in there and then they kind of pull out other sets and look at how they would look next that set then there was a lot of animated. Play around there so the building could catch on fire and then someone could have the little Lego fire people come out in a Lego helicopter and does really interesting cuz you could, many people can have a shared 3D experience and then you know so you could imagine. [29:41] Husband wife in a designer having a shared 3D experience in a house. Planning where Furniture would go or the redesign of a kitchen and those kinds of things and then the other one that had e-commerce implications was Fender the Guitar Company, at least actually showed this is kind of interesting example where they went to the website and designed a guitar. And then they press the button and there's this new way of communicating these models that button than kind of. [30:11] Creator 3D model put it into the AR kit and you can kind of like then see a 3D version of the guitar that was designed then they Presta and that was kind of in just kind of a white space you can kind of spin it and see it, which is a terribly new for the world e-commerce and you could actually see it kind of like. Sitting I don't know why you want to do some guitar kind of sitting on its stand and and you can even kind of like you know Vision it in your environment so. These 3D models are starting to get kind of more transportable between experiences which is interesting and they announce the new new model. Sweet file format for this that seems like a relatively big deal and you know it may have e-commerce implications cuz I do hear from eCommerce folks you know. Everyone's out there creating these 3D models and there's a lot of duplication of effort so at some point. If you're a brand you made that may just be part of the digital package you give to somebody is an AR model that everyone can kind of consumed versus. Oh I have to. [31:12] At maybe house needs one in the Ikea needs another and I don't know the Wayfair app needs another or they're all creating on a duplicating work so soon. Scot a nursing implications out there for a our shopping for for what that's worth is probably many years out still. Jason:  [31:30] For sure but I think it exactly mirrors like the early days of e-commerce if you want any conversate you you hired your own photographer and took pictures of all the products you are selling because, the manufacturer wasn't used to giving you digital, versions of all their photos in overtime like we do all these pretty robust system is where you know manufacturers now syndicated a lot of digital content to e-commerce sites to help them merchandise products and I think you're exactly right you know that, the early a are examples that the retailer all recreated 3D models of the manufacturer's products which you know is expensive for the retailers in, oh by the way may or may not have been an accurate representation of the manufacturer's product until I think over time you'll see, that syndicating that 3D data just you know being another another attribute that a manufacturer has to provide to a retailer when they sell a product. Scot:  [32:25] Yeah and then last will note the the one thing that as I was reading a summary of all the changes coming. get me the most excited is I probably like you I am double authenticated on everything I do so probably 4 or 5 times a day I have to send myself a code and take that code and type it into a variety of, different devices they're coming out with a new feature in across the operating system family called security code autofill so if you generator code to your phone and you need to go type that in over on your desktop if you're in the Apple ecosystem and you have the messages and all wired up it'll say, when you going to tap in that code it'll say should I just use that code that came from this message you got about 5 seconds ago so that made me very excited I think that's going to. Save Me by 40 hours a year and typing coats and remembering all the seven digits over and over and over again. Jason:  [33:19] Yeah for sure I'm definitely looking forward to that to multi-factor authentication is super important and everyone should be using it and it's kind of a pain in the neck at the moment so, so reducing some of that friction is I'm all for it so we wanted to use the last bit of time on Today Show to talk about, part of the recode conference or code Commerce conference is it's called us it is a Big Show at in California every year put on by our friends at recode and Kara Swisher, and they get really Marquis keynote speakers every year and some of them have been very commercentre so I think 2 years ago Jeff Bezos was there and made some significant news, this year there were not a lot of. Connor speakers that are super excited about I think the big Keynotes were like the CEO of uber and CEO Spotify and Airbnb, I know Katrina Lake had a little presentation who's the founder of Stitch fix but to me the big presentation, did they have every year that always has some relevance to digital Commerce is one of the partners at the Kleiner Perkins on Mary Meeker does this annual, presentation called the state of the internet which is a super data-driven deep dive into the the major Global Trends in digital and so this year. [34:51] She did that presentation again and and what was the count was it like three hundred two hundred and something. Scot:  [34:57] 300 yeah right at 300. Jason:  [34:59] Yeah yeah almost 300 slides so for me that that's about how many sides I prepare for a 15 minute presentation. Scot:  [35:06] Yes Jason I have gone to those slides in want to kind of boil it down to 15 minutes that matters to you guys, it may be handy will put a link to the PDF in the show notes so that you kind of like the zip to the slide numbers that that we reference as we go through this is kind of the takeaways we got from the e-commerce section so it's a macro trends. Pretty much what I call, Steady As She Goes the some of the things from the macro Trends section the growth of the internet is slowing people are spending only 5.9 hours a day online that growth is kind of really slow down, a lot of the growth kind of interior there is in messaging and video she referenced which is this platform which is streaming gaming that it's really up into the right. Jason:  [35:55] Natasha Lyonne by Emma. [35:59] Don't I just spoke over you but exactly is owned by Amazon. Scot:  [36:03] Yes yes exactly. [36:04] And then kind of the new thing this year is because of the you know the amount of internet time and and the companies that we talked about just a Min ago there is increased government scrutiny of course which creates this kind of. Interesting Paradox that increasingly the the you know the displacement of the internet need more and more data from you to have these great personalized experiences. But you know, regulatory perspective are you really clear the date of your giving up how it's being used to his thing shared with so you know she kind of. Pretty easily predicted that's going to be an ongoing challenge for everybody Facebook's kind of squirrely kind of caught up in that right now but I don't see how anyone is really immune from it. When they're singing areas I thought was. [36:51] Investing in Tech in this kind of thing is at the highest ever over the 20 years they've been tracking it here in 2018 and that's both. That's that's kind of venture capital if you will set private company investing at the same time when you look at public companies they're spending more on R&D than ever has been spent a slide 40 is interesting and it does show. Amazon at the top there some people that really track this will know to that Amazon does put some of the acquisition of regional content in their R&D budget so. I may not be quite as big and scary but I think it's only like two billion of that is original content so it still keeps them at number one in the R&D spending public company R&D spending is up 18% year-over-year so when you had those two things together. If you thought the piece of Animation was going to slow down you're probably incorrect cuz if dollars are the the leading harbinger of innovation which I do think is true both public companies and private companies have, getting larger and larger investment than ever. Before I'm even at our scale percentage-wise it's a very large number so new slow down on Innovation even though the internet growth is slowing. [38:04] And then from there. Jason the e-commerce section really kind of kicks off on page 44 I thought you know last year there's a lot around ads in the ad ecosystem and I thought this year we got it. Well it's not worth shattering who got more kind of of the Meeker deck was on e-commerce so is that would cover each of our car highlights here Jason what were some of the takeaways for you in that section. Jason:  [38:28] Yeah yeah and I'd start out by saying like I really look forward to this presentation every year in in in every year in the past, there been in major insightful takeaways that were like major nutrients I hadn't really thought of that were super valuable to think of and so, looking for that again this year and I have to say this year felt a lot more interested to me was a lot more Hades trans we talked about in the past or accelerating these Trends we've been talking about for a long time or decelerating, I didn't have as many like aha moments as I have in the past and maybe that's just sort of the price you pay for this being the fifth or sixth time she's done this. But that being said I agree I think she did a deeper dive in Commerce she kind of talked about a lot of Commerce trends that would be old hats at to folks that listen to the show in terms of. You know 14% of 14% eCommerce growth in US 16% world. The cheese is some really low numbers but like I think she has about 8% of all. Retail sales being e-commerce now internet that's again the broadest definition of retail that includes I'd gas and things like that. But then the big things are interesting to me, she really focused on this this trend of personalization and everyone talks about personalization but she really excited as evidence for the fact that people are willing to trade. [40:01] Privacy for personalization even in this it is crazy privacy climate. She's highlighting services like Waze and Uber and snap. And even next door which is kind of interesting service where people are willing to give a lot of Geo located data in exchange for this personalized experience and so she showed the rapid growth of all these sort of. [40:27] Services that she defined is highly personalized services. I thought that was interesting in the e-commerce delivery section she she talked a lot about the limited growth of a UPS FedEx in the US Post Office and Anna as we talked about a bunch of times on this show. There's a huge gap in the the growth and knows those carriers ability to deliver packages and the 30% e-commerce growth that everyone is claiming they're having. So that you know that certainly is going to be a recurring theme we're going to hear about. And in the past she talked. She talks a lot about ads digital ads in general this time she talk kind of specifically about Commerce ads, and she's talking about how these ads that have a conference call to action or emerging is one of the most effective formats of digital ads so she talks about. Google Play is having three times the engagement is there another advertising platforms. She talked about you know the Facebook's continued traction and then cheat you know how I did that Amazon is emerged as a. A true huge advertising platform in that you interview they have a 4 billion dollar run rate they're growing 42% year-over-year. The you know I thought that was pretty interesting she talked a lot about the adoption of subscriptions Commerce and how the subscription services are growing so she with you. [41:59] Amazon Prime as a as a key Tampa subscription obviously but also. Netflix and Spotify and Dropbox and Stitch fix and Peloton and how these things are all going up into the right. 88 Ranch she talked about a number of times that she hit again this year is her version of the mobile gap which is sort of. And advertising look at the mobile Gap that essentially advertisers disproportionately spend on every other. Platform compared to his percentage of audience consumption. [42:32] Advertisers are still dramatically under spending on mobile advertising compared to audience consumption of mobile and so she thinks there's about a 7 billion dollar opportunity there and adds shifting to mobile being the. The platform. And then when she got out of the Commerce section the other the last thing also to highlight that there was really interesting to me we've talked about the bifurcation. Spending power a lot on the show and certainly Casey well and buys been on a couple times who's done a lot of thought leadership in that. [43:05] That's based she had some pretty detailed data that. You know despite the fact that there's a lot of economic indicators that are really growing household debt is it highest level ever, and she shows this really scary chart it says so I had 103 wear in 1968 the. Ratio of debt to income and the amount of personal savings that people had were both similar things right and. Debt to income ratio is a bad thing in personal savings is a good thing if you're talking about a family's Financial Health. And from 1968 till today those two Transit been going in opposite directions were saving less every year than we did the year before and our debt-to-income ratio is getting higher every year than the year before and so we're opening up this huge gap in. You know families being over leveraged and not having a lot of savings. And she highlights that part of the reason for that is healthcare insurance costs and housing costs are going way up and people are having to spend more of their budget on those things. Which subsequently means people are spending Less on food entertainment and apparel. And we talked a lot about people spending Less on apparel but it's kind of interesting she's highlighting data that you know people are spending Less on entertainment experiences and food. And you know compared to some of the hard Goods we said hey. Experiences in in food are doing better but she's highlighting that like in reality I like all of those the spending categories are challenged as people are having to spend more of their. [44:45] Their wallet to pay back their college loans in their health care and I guess the last part of the bifurcation was interesting to me as a she talked about, this decision Walmart made back in 1990 to get in the grocery and how they pretty quickly became the largest Grocer in the US, and that one of the big impacts of that is that grocery prices have gone down every year from 1990 to today and so today, food costs are are you permanently and substantially down from 1990 and that's that's a row did every Grocers ability to make margins and and you know we talked earlier on the show and we think digital, has the potential to do that to a lot a lot of other categories as well. Scot:  [45:31] Free cool so quickly some of the things I wanted to just point out to listeners from the deck that just kind of be aware of onside 50 she has kind of a look at some of the different, Tools around e-commerce and where the the current state of the art isn't it kind of has a framework for looking at the online store platform the payment platform fraud prevention prevention. [45:51] Purchase financing customer support Discovery process and then the delivery process so, weird order there I usually put kind of like Discovery at the top and Delivery at the bottom what not but but. The guy interesting to highlight those things have a fun chart on 63 where she shows kind of the evolution of finding products, where are you kind of have the old school to search box and then here we are today with voice search kind of Married With fulfillment, using Amazon is example and then using Google as an example, showing again that same kind of growth from simple organic search kind of. Google connect me to. Is that like 1997 car time frame all the way to the current shopping options actions where everything is really kind of integrated and you can buy right from the platform. [46:42] You know what. [46:45] The Firm she works where has really big China group and they always chime in on here and I always find there's this really good insights China's ahead of us as far as penetration and growth of e-commerce is well as mobile so. They're stuffing some insights there I think sometimes we ever read those here in the US so I think a lot of the rush to kind of copy the you know the messaging and the Commerce within messaging is. Is probably not going to take off cuz it's kind of pretty unique to that that environment that ecosystem in China. That being said there are some really interesting things there's a couple I wanted to point out, I'm number one is Alibaba is on a really big they talked about this there see you I was at the conference as well they've invested a lot in these stores called him a human they call it dope lusso which is online plus offline, which is kind of their version the kind of version of omni-channel if you will but it's much more of like. Shops in those kinds of things so it's kind of like a Next Generation retail so you can see their. What airlines I found interesting is some of the top apps in the US are these entertainment apps like HQ trivia most commonly abbreviated HQ, in China this really cool apps that have kind of married entertainment shopping and of course Ali Baba does this round singles day but there's more of that are kind of doing it, when I found really interesting to talk about your ended a lot of research on it this was a concept it's kind of invite. [48:12] The 2000 time frame a lot of companies try this e-commerce it didn't work in those called group buying where they would say hey I've got this widget and if you can get a hundred people to buy it I'll lower the price. The problem that is in those time frames we didn't have the platforms for telling a hundred of our friends very quickly but now has social media we do. [48:31] Chili's discount Next Generation platforms are tied into messaging and social media and whatnot and the Really geared towards and sending the consumer to share to get a discount. [48:40] The one on site 86 that she talked about is called pin duo duo and now I'd encourage listeners don't have time to go into it but I think that's really interesting concept and, could be used for a way to do liquidation and Sky really. To be like the next flash-sale kind of a model so I thought that was interesting, and yep. That kind of were some of the highlights I wanted to point out for folks and you know if that stuff is interesting to you let us know on her Facebook page and we can kind of dig into some of the area's deeper on one of the feature shows. Jason:  [49:14] Yeah yeah we do have to do a deep diver that makes sense on any of this specific areas it's, super dense deck and said there's you know a lot of potential things to take away, but that's probably a great place to leave it for this week because it's happen again we've used all of our a lot of time again there there is further conversation we love to hear from you on Facebook again if this was valuable episode for you we sure appreciate it if you jump over to iTunes and give us that 5-star review to that that feedback is what keeps us going. Scot:  [49:47] Thanks everyone for joining us and have a great week. Jason:  [49:50] Until next time happy commercing.

In this episode of the Grow or Die Mid-Week Checkpoint Edition, we examine a short clip from the How I Built This Podcast, where host, Guy Raz, interviews Stitch Fix founder, Katrina Lake, as she shares her story of becoming a successful business owner and the youngest woman to ever take a company public. Visit Stitch Fix: https://www.stitchfix.com

notes at http://thewaiterspad.com/2018/04/10/katrina-lake

  I am always very impressed with entrepreneurs who have made a difference. They took their ideas and ran with them. They also didn’t let their failures overshadow their successes. A little about Katrina Lake who invented the subscription box Stitch Fix and Norman Bushnell who invented Atari and Chuck …

In 2010, Katrina Lake recruited 20 friends for an experiment: she wanted to see if she could choose clothes for them that accurately matched their style and personality. That idea sparked Stitch Fix, an online personal shopping service that aims to take the guesswork out of shopping. Today, it has over two million customers and brings in nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue. Plus, for our postscript "How You Built That", how Brian Sonia-Wallace built "Rent Poet" — a poem-on-demand service for weddings, corporate gatherings, and other events.

When Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake took her company public in 2017, her pitch was a little bit rusty. Stitch Fix's IPO, which valued it at nearly $2 billion, was the biggest exit for an e-commerce company last year. Now, the company has to prove it can continue to recruit new customers -- on top of the more than 2 million who use Stitch Fix already, according to its S-1 -- if it wants to keep growing. For the first few years of business, Stitch Fix did little paid marketing, relying on word of mouth and organic growth to bring in new users. That's changing, as the company figures out the best ways to reach potential customers, and it's top of mind for Lake as she navigates her first year at the head of a public company. Lake joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss Stitch Fix's category expansions and marketing push, plus the changing customer behavior it's both leading the way for and adjusting to.

I came across a magazine article recently that urged readers to identify their signature fashion style. I posed that question to a male friend, who knowingly described his wardrobe as “comfortable meets lumberjack.” I’ve been wrestling with the idea for days and have yet to identify my own signature style. So, I turned to the experts. One style guru suggested I pick five items from my wardrobe I’d wear every day if no one were keeping track, then ask myself a few questions about each piece, about everything from the color to the silhouette to the fabric. Supposedly, the answers will help me identify my personal style, whether it’s boho chic, vintage French elegant or, more likely, Mama-needs-coffee casual. The post Katrina Lake: She’s Curating Your Signature Style appeared first on On The Dot Woman.

Katrina Lake is the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. And as of today, at 34 years old, she is probably the youngest woman to take her company public – ever.   Stitch Fix is a San Francisco company that combines data-crunching computers with human stylists on a mission to send you the perfect outfit. On Friday the company went public on the Nasdaq stock market at a market value of more than $1 billion, and I was there for CNBC, covering the remarkable story.  Katrina Lake sat down with me at the Nasdaq in Times Square minutes after shares of Stitch Fix started trading for the first time – you can hear the buzz of Stitch Fix employees and customers in the background as we talk. The first part of our conversation was live on CNBC's Squawk Alley, which I co-anchor weekdays on the network. She took some time after that portion to talk more about how she developed the idea for the company, why she still works as a stylist on the platform, and why the story of how she overcame sexual harassment from an investor is especially resonant today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stitch Fix is  going public, confirming Bloomberg’s scoop from  back in March. The online delivery company collects information on customers’ style, size and price preferences and sends users five pieces of clothing for a $20 fee. And guess what? It’s profitable and has had steady revenue growth, with annual sales of $977 million in the year ending July 29. That’s what makes Stitch Fix so unusual, according to Bloomberg Gadfly columnist Shira Ovide and Bloomberg IPO reporter Alex Barinka. In an era of cash-burning, unprofitable startups that push to IPO, Stitch Fix stands out as a professionally run business, founded by CEO Katrina Lake, with a clean balance sheet.  

EP0105 - Stitch Fix IPO Hot Take This episode is a hot take of the Stitch Fix IPO Filing: How IPO's Work / Jobs Act $1B Exits in E-Commerce Zappos - $850m 2009 Quidsi/diapers - $545m -2010 Kiva - $775b 2012 Trunk Club - $350m 2014 Jet.com - $4b  8/16 Dollar Shave club - $1b 7/16 Chewy.com - $3b 4/17 Zulily - went public with $2.7b Stitch Fix Background Offering History Financing History Stitch Fix financial performance Stitch Fix Customer Value / Churn Personalization and Machine Learning Company size and roles Conclusion Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 105 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, October 22nd 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason:  [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 105 being recorded on Sunday October 22nd 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot:  [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show Sanders, we started working on a little new show this week and as we got into it real realize that the big news that is dominating the retail and e-commerce world is one event. stitch fixes S14 their IPO so as we got into it. And started working on this week we realized that the stitch fix IPO is really a platform that we can use to talk about some of our favorite topics here on Jason Scott show, it's a little bit of everything Jason it's got, Ikea's venture capital and exit e-commerce subscription Commerce which we talked about one of your favorite topics personalization machine learning and AI. There's an Amazon undertone where you know this is one of the few companies that's made it out hopefully knock on wood and then Amazon dominated world how are they doing that, and for all our e-commerce retail us there's this really interesting KP eyes are key performance indicators here like the cost to acquire customers at lifetime value turn, and one of our other favorite topics is private label and digital native vertical Branch so stitch fix IPO covers everything. Jason:  [1:52] It's like our last hundred and four episodes all rolled into one it's amazing. Scot:  [1:56] Yes clearly Katrina over there with says must be a big lesson her because she's kind of wrapped it all into one company which we appreciate. [2:06] To a lot of the distance, interesting stories so we were at code Commerce now we reported this on the podcast for those either that follow this so in March there was shot talk and Jason Delray the Commerce and had the founder of stitch fix Katrina up there and, she kind of baited her and said that his sources are saying that there are over 500 million in Revenue side I think a lot of people in the street didn't really believe there are that large, and then she said I can't talk about it but we aren't a billion dollars yet so that was really interesting cuz she. Not only was a denial about 500 it actually kind of put a bracket on it that simply said. I'm not going to deny 500 I'm going to say we're less than a billion so then it gave us kind of the sliding scale of somewhere between 500 million and 2 billion is kind of where they were so speculation was running rampant with that and then they hired a. CFO of the Hennessey low change and y La here we go boom the you know they're actually. 977 Million Dollar business this year which is. Pretty darn impressive there you're just as runs August to August I believe which is why they can talk about 2017 it's not over yet. So you know I think it's really interesting that here is this. Pretty big company like I'm in the billion-dollar Revenue Club here and then another thing that's interesting as it's pretty Capital efficient so it's profitable which is good and then also they raise between 40 and $59 in venture capital in a lot of these other billion dollar companies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars of capital so. [3:41] Really interesting case study they also talked about at the code conference that, you know they're there watching and other categories so they've launched men in that business in six months is where it took three and a half years for women and they watch plus and it's already doing it more in its first month, students first year so we had a lot of nice kind of little data points from that conference and then, you know the the s-1 launching has been pretty exciting to read through that but Jason I've read through it with a fine-tooth comb and are. Job in this hot take / deep dive is to pick up that you see parts for you guys and walk you through it. Jason:  [4:22] For sure and we're super lucky as a regular listeners will know Scott is the financial markets Guru amongst the two of us, partly because I'm completely inapt and partly because of you you actually took your own company successfully public and presumably learned a few things along the way so I'm hoping you can get things started by giving us all a primer in the IPO process, and I'm going to start you off with a question and I may have misread this but I had had to pick up a couple places that they may have filed. Earlier in the year confidentially and then there's all this talk this month about this them doing the s-1 filing was that a red herring is this in a new filing or are we just seeing what they filed back in. In July or August. Scot:  [5:13] Yeah the. [5:16] So what happened is the way IPOs worked before 2012 was you filed your S1 and everyone could see it and the super annoying because. That's ones go through usually like 10 or 20 drafts so you submit it and then the SEC is the government body that regulates these things will come back to you and I'll say, Jason what did you mean by that sending you don't answer and then I'll be like okay it while you need to tell potential investors that so there's this like back and forth also. You may not you may not know it's really the kind of a. Nonlinear risk point where you decide to file this one because you've really hung yourself out there and maybe have a bad court maybe you're talking to the SEC for 6 months it usually takes and yeah the back corner in there or, markets turn South so to help companies go public in 2012 they passed the jobs act which. Which does Stanford jobs but it actually stands for Jumpstart our business startups and what that allows you to do is date they separate the the filing so. As a startup and they're certain definitions around this you can choose to have a confidential filing so. We did ours we were totally confidential but I think stitch fix action now it's just that they had filed confidentially was just a signal. The car says it was their choice you can you can do that or not there's probably some reason they decided to do it. [6:44] So in July they announced that they had filed confidentially so would that allowed them to do is to work with their Bankers work with SEC get a quarter kind of under their belts and, then you expand I also let you see how other IPOs so in that time frame they were able to see how Blue Apron did for example or United Snapchat had gone public by then but they, I could see kind of how it worked so that that kind of. It's really nice because it gives you the ability if you want to you can actually kind of yank the filing and not go public financing of the kind of put themselves out there but it does help with this whole process so that's what that was all about. [7:27] So So yes it so we went public at Channel visor in 2013 did this whole process we did the confidential filing work with SEC and, actually use the same Bankers in the same banking team that song stitches could just, sent them a note and they said yep we're working on stitch excite I know exactly the kind of hell what's going to happen there it's going public is a very very exciting kind of a thing that sucks with lots of stress kind of power concert. Pretty interesting times and excited for for this company to get out we we haven't had a lot of IPOs in the market and in quite a while. [8:03] So [8:05] You know this is just one of the most-watched IPOs in a long time because we really haven't had a lot of e-commerce IPOs and then I posed that we've had kind of a dud larger digital world, how can I put two out there Snapchat they went public at a $30 price point in its now 15 and a blue apron when, public at 10 and is now five those are not really successful IPOs so so it should have come. Bad Dana Point out there then we have this company that I'm surprised everyone with the scale that it's at and there's this kind of. Waiting group of e-commerce and digital companies that are not be watching this and really closely and if this IPO can go off not only price well but staying well for for a year or two I think it means good things for this does not cohort of companies that are. Are probably ready to go so in there are the ones that that I kind of think about our you have wish which is the marketplace with largely Chinese Goods box Pinterest house Flipkart stripe. Fanatics instacart Warby Parker in Casper and Kendra Scott Kendra Scott's like more old school but I thought I'd throw it in there because it's kind of interesting. Most of these are unicorns which means they have received a billion-dollar private company valuation and you know any kind of thinks through the scale that they have to be at to do that. [9:27] Your bus is companies can have Revenue that are are very much north of a hundred million if not kind of closing in on 500 million in a billion dollars so they're definitely in that kind of class of companies that have the scale the growth brand to be able to go public. Also it's it's interesting cuz we don't have a lot of data on public e-commerce, that's because a lot of the ones that get ready to go public get snapped up by Amazon that's actually you know not out of the question that maybe Citrix doesn't actually make it public there's there still this is kind of the. [9:58] The about halfway point of that six-month process imagine before the end of the year though price and go out. [10:04] But a lot of times he's S1 stimulate buyers to come out kind of say this is my one time I have to buy this before it becomes public. [10:13] Can I take a new bladder so so why keep an eye on that. The the public companies that are out there there's only three so you have CafePress and Overstock and those are kind of. Micro Capstar kind of sub billion dollars the most successful public e-commerce company so around is Wayfair it has a six billion dollar market cap that's about two times its revenues I think. If you were going to hold my feet to the fire on stitch fix at a billion dollar Revenue. Growing 30% I think it probably is what's a 325 x multiple so I think we're going to see a a market cap. You know it does three to five billion range so much better multiple because it is much more subscription kind of recurring Revenue than you Seattle airfare which kind of has to sell. Everything each time so she Furniture you know I don't think you know in your life when you need furniture and then then you can out of the furniture business for a while. [11:13] Yeah yeah they're definitely you know just a different model but yet a lot lot better gross margins and net margins. And another thing I look at when I see these s ones from IPS perspective is what is the banking Syndicate the the blues to Blue Chip Banks are Goldman Sachs and Morgan, and what you do is when you look at the page and it actually put a digital copy of it even in the PDF or on the s-1 over with sec. There's different positions they mean different things the lead Banker gets this position is a larger font. There's all this kind of History around this that we can't going to but it's pretty interesting and. The. You guys look at the left first and the largest upper left is called lead left is Goldman Sachs and this example so Goldman Sachs is the The Bluest of Blue Chips. Yeah you know Jim Cramer calls them golden sacks slacks and another good company is they rarely do things with with Morgan Stanley those two kind of go head-to-head it's kind of like. [12:13] Oh I don't know Canton gun LG your two sports teams that are bitter rival State they look they usually don't do well together. [12:23] There you go there you and then. So you don't have Morgan Stanley on this week if you have JP Morgan which is very good bank and then you have Barclays RBC Stiefel Piper Jeffrey and William Blair and what will you do here is your thinking short and long-term sign, simultaneously, to the bank's you pick you want a great firm that's going to help you sell your IPO so they have relationships with the buyers of IPOs which are institutional buyers which tend to be hedge funds and mutual funds and. All these banks have that and they will do a great job selling this company. But then the secondary consideration is longer-term what you're trying to do is get a great internet analyst that are are great analyst this is called a cell site analyst dick in. Advanced buy-side analyst that your company is awesome and in public about it and you're in the show we talked a lot about you know these analyst we've had several on the show talking about the things that they report on and. Goldman Sachs you have all these guys have really good analyst and, many of them may be familiar with socks on the show so it will be interesting to see so he's Terry is the big guy e-commerce guy over Goldman Sachs I imagine that's who will cover it and, all down the line there there's some really good unless she wants to go public there's this waiting. And you have the analyst cover it and and it's good as a company to have. People that really understand your business out there banging the drum so that that's kind of what you do when you do the banking process last couple little points on the public market. Thinks there's ticker symbol is going to be S fix and they're going to raise $100 this is really just a placeholder what you do is you put out this initial draft and then you start to get reaction from. [14:04] From buyers are early reaction and then, as you see how the markets going you raise more and then you come up with your pricing and that kind of thing they're using their guitars to public market so you go on the New York Stock Exchange that's what we did at Chow visor they have chosen to go with the NASDAQ it's kind of a, six to one half dozen the other I do like the another aspect of an IPO it's a raising money kind of a thing and then it's a pyramid. And I do like the pr aspect of the New York Stock Exchange you get on CNBC get to ring the bell you're right there New York NASDAQ you just go and press a button at the NASDAQ Market Center in Times Square if so that's exciting in in grandiose, New York Stock Exchange. 22 is what we're going to run to hear is called the prospectus and that's the s-1 which is to the technical number given to these documents by the SEC. And it's only one. People read these aren't familiar with them they get really bogged down at the top the first 50 pages of an s-1 are really cya it's a bunch of lawyer stuff to keep people from suing so. Pass that stuff and don't get wrinkled up and it feels like this kind of effort lawyers called a parade of Horrors it's like literally a list of all the things, the wrong it is a really weird way to collect unit tell people about your company but it's just kind of the way it's done so. You know it's like everything that could possibly go wrong with your company and then you're like an end here's here's why we're so excited, it's really strange strange way to do it but it's done to reduce risk of litigation so skip to that and go right to the management discussion and usually there's a letter from the CEO so. [15:39] Yeah we'll put a link to this over on the SEC in the show notes or or like to download the PDF and use your fine function and go right to management discussion. Jason:  [15:50] Awesome tip let the record show channel advisor got to wake or ticker symbol then then the stitch fix it. Scot:  [15:59] Xperia S fix SF 49959, another thing that is good about this is we haven't had a lot of Billy dollar exits and e-commerce so if if my math right you again this could be hopefully north of Two And in that 325 range depending on how it prices. [16:25] There hasn't been a lot of VC investment in the e-commerce industry because we haven't had a lot of exits ovc dollars chase the exits, and exits are commonly referred to as liquidity events at the two most popular are acquisition or m&a and an IPO so just, quick history here. If some of the bigger one so we had in 2009 we had Zappos at i850 million Quincy diapers.com it 545 million that's Mark Laurie 1.0, and then we had Keva at 775 I don't know if I can count that as e-commerce but but I know this guy saw us let's talk about it 2012 Trunk Club which is very relevant to this one was acquired by Nordstrom for 350 million in 2014, that's not in the billion-dollar kind of close to Club but I thought I'd include it because of the proximity to stitch fix, and then. Mark Lori 2.0 soljet to Walmart for 4 billion on August 16th that guy had like a five five billion and just suck the last 4 years. It's pretty good. Shave club was acquired by Unilever for a billion and then Chewy was recently acquired by PetSmart for 3 billion, Zulily was an interesting one that kind of got the the double whammy so they went public I had about a three billion dollar valuation and then work wired that IPO didn't do well over time that's fatigue with our customer base, hot and then it was acquired by QVC for 2 and 1/2 2.4 billion in August of 2015. Seems like a lot when I say it like that but but since 2009 we've really had like 9 kind of exits 6 or so that are over that billion dollars. [18:03] And three of them were in the last 18 months this is an industry we really need a lot more of these kind of exits to keep venture capitalist investing so this is really important for industry I think we all are all need to be great for this to do really well and in kind of. Bring people back to the e-commerce fold-in Amazon his cast of pretty dark shadow when you talk to people that I know that are trying to raise money, you know they say it's Amazon question that really stops am at you every BC wants to know how is your five or ten million dollar company to go to survive in an Amazon world than now if this does well people and say well so I'm sure we can. That's some of the implications at a macro level. Jason why don't you would kind of gone a pretty long way without actually saying what's just fixed us why don't you bring people to speed on that. Jason:  [18:53] Yeah for sure so stitch fix is. You can think of is an apparel retailer they were founded in 2011 and they had what. I believe it was a novel concept back in 2011. They would sure ate a box of items for a customer and initially this was targeted just at women and so you would do a subscription and you can in that subscription you would get a box. Of 5 items of apparel and accessories and you could. [19:25] Cheap all some or none of the items in that box so essentially you paid $20 up front. Which was that sort of a styling fee the first time you use the service you fill out a survey so that the The Stylist can get your preferences they stitch fix picks five items they think you'll like and want to keep, they send them to you if you like him you pay for him if you keep all five you get a 25% discount if you just want to keep some of them you pay for him and send back what you don't want, if you like none of them you can send the whole box back and you're just out the $20 styling fee and I should mention the styling fee is waived if you keep any of the items. [20:04] I'm so back in 2011 this is the founder of Katrina Lake like literally. Getting customers to pay her for a box she would go shopping at Nordstroms by things know what the return policy was at Nordstrom's. Send them to the customer and the customer and keep them she would return them to the the retailers that she bought them from so she's. She's managing all these sort of return she's almost like a personal concierge, for the Shoppers and she turn this into a very significant Automated Business so over time that that business model is sort of evolved. Initially it was subscription-only and you could kind of pic. The frequency of the subscription you can get a box every month every other month every six months you know I'm a different set of periods. They they. [20:54] Shifted to a model where you can still can have that subscription but you can also just order a fix on demand so you since you don't have the pressure of a box showing up when you don't need one and whenever you feel like you just need to refresh your wardrobe. I want something new to you you can go online hit the fix button then and I'll send you a new box. Originally they were all selling other people's products, and they they started to develop their own Brands what they they call it exclusive Brands and so now portion of the, the products in the Box are coming from stitch fix which will talk more about it later they also added men's much more recently in Ascot mentioned the men's products scaled-up much more rapidly they've also offered plus size boxes, and I think the newest offering is maternity boxes and so all of this from a CEO Katrina Lake who's now. 34 years old which is pretty impressive. You know we're talking about the rare of 1 billion dollar e-commerce exits in the the relatively small number of of e-commerce companies that successfully doing lipo when you talk about those companies that are led by a woman CEO. It's it's like even extremely more rare which is I think exciting and and pretty awesome so you. If you were to read her letter in the s-1 she kind of highlights. [22:26] The Three core principles of the business right the first one is that they're always customer-centric that they're always focusing first on the needs of their customer. Number two, personalization is the future we'll be talking a lot about that and number three they think they have this unique combinations of humans and data and they have made some very substantial investments in AI which will be talking about and they think that unique combination of humans and data are better together than either. Human stylist or artificial intelligence is by itself so that. In a nutshell is the business order effects get these byproducts keep what you want. Send back what you don't and I would argue that it spawned a large industry of similar competitors. In the same category as in an other categories like Children's Apparel for example before we go too much further, do you want to dive into how they they were funded by once they got beontra Tina's original Nordstrom's credit card. Scot:  [23:32] Yeah yeah and she used to work at Poly where I don't know if you ever met her back when she was there at the podium for founder is an ex eBay guy that I've met several times and so she was she was kind of early on in this this whole industry to start with c. Pretty pretty neat that sheep spun out of that and it's. Effectively lap them I think at this point so I share your enthusiasm for female Founders and see is I think it's great the only other guy was kind of what he said that the only one I could think of. Was Meg Whitman at eBay I can't think of another you know kind of a the CEO female CEO kind of in our industry. [24:10] Yeah the IPO level so they are capital efficient and you. The sky saying they only raise 45 million you know it is interesting because 45 million is no no that's not chump change but you know it takes a lot of capital to build a business like this and I think. How many billion dollar businesses have soaked up your I said it before but 100 200 300 million to build a good almost take. 500 million pop service is very impressive and so the funding history. In 2011 Lightspeed Ventures did a seed round. [24:52] 2013 two headed around from Baseline and then very quickly on top of that and and, so I was in February 13th and then in October 13th at a 12-9 Darby with Benchmark and then Benchmark is the company is one of the Blue Chip VC's in the Bay Area, girly a bill girly is on their board from their heat that that's one of the firms that did eBay and Yahoo in the early days, I also an outspoken Uber investor and then they did a series C. In the sea 24 in 14th 6, teen ceduna 14 and then dated a top off kind of in 2017 of 12 million and, I just called a mezzanine round so ABC and mezzanine for those who that haven't raised Venture Capital with the way it works is in an IPO the same way you. You issue new shares so each time that kind of value the company at a pretty money you added this Capital you get a post money and then you get diluted I mention this because I saw a lot of conversations on Twitter when you look at the ownership. You end up with Baseline at 28% Benchmark 25% light speed at 11% and then Katrina Lake the founder at 16%, there's obviously a case there that says that's not fair Katrina should own 80% of this as a founder of you, we are doing is kind of making this bet on your is Venture Capital you get you get more than just Capital but just kind of keep it to that conversation you're making this. [26:27] To you when I take this 45 million and give up you know 85% of the company there should be a bigger outcome then if I didn't do that and. You're clearly these kind of cases you take her 16% you multiply it by that that 3 billion you get like 450 million kind of evaluation of her ownership, I probably the right choice but you don't you never know the other side of the outcome you know maybe if she'd bootstrapped this and waited 5 more years it would actually she could own 80% of it and have just a bigot as an outcome in fast-moving markets where you have, companies like Amazon swimming around its speed that is definitely something that that takes is probably a good choice to raise capital for. And then sink that covers. Big pieces so we don't want to get too bogged down in the financial stuff but Jason do you want to hit some of their revenue highlights. Jason:  [27:23] Yeah so they've had an ice hockey stick which is I think one of the things that that has caught a lot of folks attention 2014, they they reported 73 million dollars in Revenue, 2015 the ramped up to three hundred forty-two million dollars in Revenue 2016 they they doubled at 2 730 million dollars in revenue and in their fiscal year 2017 which is over as you mentioned they were just under a billion dollars at 7977 million dollars which. Parenthetically has to has to kill them that they didn't quite get over that. That be so so it's been a pretty good ramp up and, several of those years were profitable it looks like they they ramped up some expenses in 2017 and maybe weren't as profitable. Scot:  [28:17] Yeah and then the growth rates to just look at the growth rate between 14 and 15 like almost 400% growth so crazy but that was exciting time to be there and then from 15 to 1613 per cent growth death definitely Torrid but not as crazy as 400%, and then between 16 and 1734 per cent and in this is where you know what I'm imagining happened is that kind of said. Yeah should we go raise a $59 in turn around or should we just slow the growth rate get profitable and prove the model. This is interesting decision because what most pundits would tell you is while she loves growth so if they could have. I have gone public at 100% growth rate that probably would have been a different outcome than 34% but you know I think in hindsight it may actually. [29:09] Better that they're growing a little bit slower and more profitable because with the. I mentioned it the the Snapchat problems and questions around their ability to get profitable and then Blue Apron kind of hitting the skids. I think this is this ends up being a nice balance between growth and profitability of so so it will have to kind of see how it prices and then you know. What I'm engine is if they. Delray's over north of $100 that gives you a quite a bit of jet fuel to get that that engine going back up so I bet very quickly they'll try to get back to triple-digit growth building unnoticed looking at some of the numbers they don't. [29:47] The NEP now they don't specifically breakout sales and marketing or art effectively, marketing but I do kind of wrap it up into a number that has gnats GM and that is actually growing a good bit faster than Revenue so, between in 2016 840 per cent versus Revenue at 1:13 and then in 2017 and grew 55% versus 34% in. What you will you see inside a subscription models is in the early days you know it's you can you find your early adopters and it's pretty inexpensive too. Get to them but then as you grow your having spend more and more and more on the acquisition of of customers are the metric commonly known as cat that cost to acquire customer. Did you see any other metrics around that Jason. Jason:  [30:35] Yeah it was like I was the one of the really interesting things is are they. Capturing repeat customers and what's the lifetime value of those those customers, so they they did share a couple of things to give us some insight into that they they reported what they called this repeat rate which is. The percentage of customers from the previous year that purchase in the subsequent year and so they're sitting in in. [31:05] 2016 that was 83% and in 2017 that was 86% which sound pretty good, they also did this kind of convoluted cohort analysis that I'm going to rely on you to try to decode if anyone is cuz I I frankly didn't follow it it didn't seem quite as an. [31:28] As straightforward as I might have expected on one hand but on the flip side I guess I was pleasantly surprised that they tried to get some disability to that at all. Scot:  [31:39] Yeah and what you're trying to do coordinate a Caesar are very confusing because, we're trying to do think of it like a graduating class so teach your graduating class let's say you had a bunch of seniors that graduated in 2017 from high school, and then you followed him through college and the rest your life and you kind of saw what happened to those people that's a cohort analysis secret you lock in time this group of customers acquired from a certain. And you see what happens to them. So The first thing to do in the cohort analysis is they they look at a 2014 cohort and they show the value from that Court was 639. [32:19] And then the value of its dollar so than the value of a 2015 cohort with 718 so I think it is a fault this 14 people. [32:28] From 14 15 16 17 and they said those guys generated 639 / user / that life. [32:36] And they followed him and they said that. That actually went up pretty nicely you know about I will see what is that 10% in so that's good that shows inside of that cohort what you have is a lot of factors you have to learn so it's people that say. I tried this I'm no longer going to use it. It's more complicated in these models that do you have the on-demand like when does someone turn maybe they're on an annual plan you have to wait a whole year to see if they've turned maybe they're there every two years they want to get a fix or no. If someone moves from a monthly to accordingly that's not really churn so you. It gets really hard to measure turn so inside of that 10% increase you have some customers they're leaving but then you also have some customers that are buying more. So what their kind of saying here is the customers that end up buying more. Hope you're over Road by about 10% economically. The factors of turnt that's what's the story they're trying to tell I'd it's interesting I bet you know we don't have privy to this but I bet if we looked at the initial as when they filed this wasn't here and this is a reaction to Blue Nile to Napoli now but Blue Apron. Yeah I just felt like my at yeah it felt very much like a oh crap we have to really kind of figure out explain to people what's going on here. Then if you take that data point then they kind of looks and looks like the 16 cohort came down a bit and then they start looking at some of the first half's and what you see there and they had a little blurb in their hair that said. [34:07] The call in first half of a year so it's kinda like the six months. [34:13] Piece of the second six months they show you some of that and it's really fun and loaded so what happens is people by a fair amount in the first six months and then it kind of declines there, Ina, they talk about it as an opportunity it's also kind of weakness but it's not fair to do for them to get better with the data science this mirrors personal my wife. That was a stitch fix user had it for about four or five months and you have by the end of their had had. [34:41] Acquired enough clothes in it was kind of burned out by the processor forgetting to return it and getting fees and all this kind of stuff so hopefully something a little bit of yellow flag something they need to work on when I do my mask. [34:54] They give you just enough kind of figure this out so this is the first half of 2016 is 3:35 but then the total was like an essay. 5061 FM 506 so that when you do the math in the second half is 154 if so. [35:10] Literally dropped by half over at the pier to be here so let's see what that be 2/3 would be in the front half and then a third on the back half so interesting kind of. Trend air it's not clear how much that Stern and I got two people saying I don't want to box it all or how much is you filled up their wardrobe in their closet they're good to go. Jason:  [35:31] Yep and I I guess I should have mentioned another potential way to think about this is we did not mention the growth interactive customer base but, the back in 2014 when they did 73 million and sales they had 261,000 active customers with their defining as. Someone that bought a box in the latter the received the box in the last 12 months and if you look at their growth of active customers. [35:56] At the end of 2017 they are like almost 2.2 million active customers so the the growth has been. Year-over-year it is always the same order of magnitude as their revenue growth but it it has been slower. Then the revenue growth so that the the fact that they're the revenue is growing faster than active customers. [36:21] The week like on the surface looks like a good thing because it that that implies that they're they're driving greater Revenue per customer as as they get a a bigger and more mature customer base. Scot:  [36:31] Yeah yeah yeah I agree in, I have a feeling that as they do their Roadshow so wanting to keep an eye out for if if this is topics interesting for you, when you do your road show you actually have to record it and it's part of the SEC rules that anyone can watch the road show so it's on Retail Road show if you go to Retail Road show.com you will find that, don't be a window of time in any sings expire pretty quickly so but Jason I will treat when it's up in what you have there probably is Katrina and probably the CF oh and maybe someone else maybe the cool actually walking you through the Roadshow and I. Bats that they have to peel out a little bit more information cuz I think investors are going to be very keenly tied into this and trying to understand really what I think. I think that's the one piece missing hearing and people don't want to know that so it's me an option to see if they have to disclose that. Jason:  [37:28] When are there fun tidbits when you were talking about this this sales and marketing spend they did mention in the ass one that they actually hired miller-brown to do this aided awareness study so essentially in like May of are in December 2016, they went out and interviewed a bunch of women that were in their target market which are women are making over $50,000 a year that live in us and said, are you familiar with stitch fix and 28% of the women that they surveyed said yes in, in December of 2016 so then in May of 2017 after they sort of double that adds fan that aided awareness went up to 41%. [38:11] Like I would take it away Ernest with a pretty large grain of salt. Cuz you're you're asking someone if they remember if they're from they were something in a lot of people will just frankly lie because they don't want to say, they're not friendly with something but if it's true that that 41% of their target market are now from there with them. Like that implies that the the next big tranche of growth is probably harder to achieve than the. The last one was cuz it's it's a heck of a lot easier to go from 20% to 41% then it is to go from 41% to 75%. Scot:  [38:50] Absolutely yeah yeah and then I Delray had an interesting article about talking about how you know it's really kind of a non Coastal audience I don't know, is data that really supported that but I think when you get too many people you have to kind of be spreading out to the Midwest and what not so interesting. Jason:  [39:06] Yeah and I think part of it is just that their price points are like these are not like, super premium price points and you know in general these are not Designer level Apparel in so it's, you know it's it's meant for sort of a more modest consumers and I think there was even I can't remember was in the interview or something that Katrina said recently but she talked about that they at one point had a pretty bad. Inventory glitch where they weigh over bought and the, the root cause of over buying the wrong inventory was it they were buying sort of on-trend stylish stuff and their customers were we're responding that they didn't keep any of the items because they were inappropriate to wear at the PTA meeting for example or that you know, the the the sort of everyday occasions that their customers were we're hoping to use the products for it so I think that that helped Define the. The Target in the use case for Katrina. Scot:  [40:08] Yeah that and that's a really good kind of transition to the AI machine learning in the personalization it's this is kind of a it's really interesting weed from that perspective I've never, you seen anything quite like it so and I know you spend some time on it so it should take us to that. Jason:  [40:23] Yeah yeah it so it's it's almost hard to talk about machine learning and personalization separately Katrina and her in her letter talked about those. Tubing Big premises personalization is super important and then machine learning plus humans you know being the secret sauce, and the reason it's hard to talk about separately is because largely what you're doing with machine learning is. [40:47] More personalizing the the offer in case the actual products to each customer. [40:55] So I do want to start by talking a little bit about this how they use AI overall, so you fill out a 60 question survey and then they want to pick the five items that you are most likely to keep and they said they don't have a standard starter box so it's not like they're sending the same box to everyone. Everyone's box is going to be different based on current trends. Seasons what they have in inventory right now and the the answers to the 60 Questions that they know about you and so one way to do that is have a stylus that. Read your 60 questions and then have him or her go pick the five items in another way to do it is to to use some sort of algorithm to pick those items in so initially, the the model at stitch fix was let's establish a computer algorithm to pick those items and then lets it let the stylist. [41:54] Override it so we know what will pull up a list of candidate items for The Stylist and maybe you know that has eight items in it and you let the stylus pick the final five or maybe that the algorithm shows the first. 5 in the stylus can say yay or nay but interesting Lee. Early on they hire this guy Eric Olsen to be their Chief algorithm officer and build this Audrey them to figure out what you you send in that first box based on the answers to your survey and. Eric is an interesting guy because he was literally the VP of data science at Netflix which we all use as one of the best examples of. AI driven businesses I think he was also a data scientist a Yahoo to a super credible guy that's been working at stitch fix on the this interesting answer to this question. How do I pick the five right things to send to this first customer so that sticky so that she buy some of them so that you're she's profitable but also said that she keeps using the service, cuz it does first five items are wrong your your odds of getting another chance or dramatically lower. So then they're also going to use a I once you. [43:06] Pick some of those first items and don't pick some of those first items they're going to use that data to refine the items they send you in subsequent boxes and that's where they start getting this really valuable contextual data that's both implicit and explicit like they, implicitly know you return something and they can make inferences about why you returned it but there's also an option for customers to tell. The Stylist why they didn't like something until they get this explicit information the him was too long it didn't fit me well. All all of these sorts of things and so very early on situation was a believer in leveraging deep learning. As the merchant instead of heading human sort of dictate what styles customers would get exposed to which Tamiya super interesting. But then in more recent times it actually taking it to the next level so we mentioned. That they started watching their own products and I'm not sure we said this but if it sounds like about 20% of all their sales are from what they call Exclusive Brands which are predominantly. Brands that they created and they're actually using AI to design the products they offer and so what they'll do is they'll say hey. We have a big segment of customers that don't like a neckline lower than. 8 cm and the majority of product we buy from third parties have this 10cm neckline and so we're going to design your own product and it's going to have a 7cm neckline and said they're actually using their they broke each. [44:45] Each piece of apparel into 60 different attributes and they're using a guy to define the attributes that their customers would want that might not exist in that Marketplace in so they're using that too to dictate what what new products. [44:59] The build which is super cool they had not that I have seen disclose any. Hard data about how successful that AI is or how successful that AI versus a human is but another in RF event there the interest x on it in San Diego this year and one of the speakers was this woman Megan Rose, and Megan is the founder of a a smaller company that in some ways is stitch fix for jewelry it's called Rockbox and. Very similar to stitch fix you get a box of five pieces of jewelry to keep what you want you buy it. You return what you don't want the others extra model where you can kind of rent The Jewelry by just keeping it for as long as you want until you want a new piece, but they also are leveraging aai's their stylist and what I found interesting is Megan shared some of the statistics that when they transitioned, from Human curators to machine learning the purchase rate on the first box increase by 300% so that that computer was. 3 times more likely to pick items that that customer would keep they were able to improve their inventory efficiency by 85% when they went to the the AI BAE Systems and they they still cheap stylist but they have the. The way I am. [46:20] Inform the stylist exactly like stitch fix is doing and that enabled them to reduce their stylist cost by 30% so. stitch fix is getting anything like those results that's super substantial. [46:34] Improvement via this machine learning and what's terrifying about it and cool at the same time is. [46:42] If you had a great stylist a great person picking all these products, and she kept doing it and should get better over time and the first time she reads a survey she gets it you know I'm kind of right but by the, thousand times she's read a survey she's much better at it right like this the person wouldn't learn over time and her hit rate would keep getting better but then when you hire the next person. [47:04] They would start at zero just like the first person did right and the magic thing about this that this machine learning algorithm is. [47:13] It has learned from all two point, two million customers of stitch fix and it keeps getting better and better and so it it's scales much better and we worms much faster than a human can come in so you don't potentially the more customers in the more time in service all these things get in the better of the algorithms get, the the the profitability metrics on this business potentially keep going up. Much faster because the conversion rate just gets better over time whereas a lot of other things we do tend to regress to this mean and you kind of keep the same. Same conversion rate over time so it's going to be super interesting to see you know if the actual performance of the company kind of bear out. Does hypothesis is but for sure a hypotheses I always say that wrong for sure. Ate a significant angle of stitch fix is. Personalizing the offer based on this machine learning I think they said they have over 75 data scientist on staff now. We used to joke because every time Katrina would speaking an event the number of data scientist she claimed, had that double then it it almost didn't sound credible but now that we see the the. Numbers behind the business it it turns out that we probably should have been joking cuz it seems like they're all sort of credible number isn't in line with the the revenue growth that they've they've been experiencing. Scot:  [48:44] Yeah one of those things I thought was interesting as they also have a section in there that talks about. Their usage of data science and the obvious one is you went through all this The Styling algorithm, and then they also talked about nustyle development and then what you covered another one is so they have something like how many was it was 3,400 Stylistics. [49:08] Yeah there's a human stylist so, actually have the kannada matchmaking algorithm and so this data science will actually kind of say you know maybe, maybe some The Stylist our new moms and I'll map you up with other new moms so I don't know what day they're looking at but that that's kind of cool and then these 3400 Silas, many of them are part-time so I don't know how the interface works I've seen Amazon. Do this with customer care, you do the thing where you can kind of check-in check-out and and then there's an online your face where you can kind of do whatever style posting things they do did they talk about an application in the s-1 about, I thought that was interesting kind of a matchmaking is how to use data science that use a lot of demand forecasting so you know. Understanding. [49:56] This is is interesting because they send all these products out right so the return rate is pretty important and it's not entirely clear to me what happens to all the stuff. The comes back out of it goes in other people's boxes or what happens but there's some demand forecasting that has to happen there, and then there's merchandising optimization which is. Understanding how to order what size color and style kind of information and even talked about they use a lot of data science in the filming centers in a used one example they have five fulfillment centers so there's a matching of, which people go to which data which fulfillment center and then also they optimize inside the Fulfillment center using the data science for pick path optimization so I thought it was interesting that they've, this YouTube Don't this engine and they're using it in like I bought this at like 7 or 8 different, parts of the business so there's really good scale from those 75 data scientist. Jason:  [50:53] Yep and we should mention I think they filed a number of patents as a result of all this right like they have something like eight eight pending patent application. Scot:  [51:01] Yeah I also thought it's interesting day they love data science but they also talk about there's a human kind of check elements I guess you know. I guess maybe something has arrived at these things sometimes like it want everyone thinks they need purple socks or something that don't have humans to catch them. Jason:  [51:19] Yeah I interpret that is twofold like that there is sort of the final check but I also think that they have decided that customers respond better. To a human interaction so I think, the reason that that one of those core principles is AI plus humans is you know there's a lot of businesses where they would just try to get the AI really right and have a very impersonal experience, and you know just have to let the customer know the computer is selecting these items for you I think the stitch fix model is. That they would like you to build a relationship with that stylist and rely on that stylist as a person, and if you're going to fight or stitch fix I think they want you to feel like you're firing your friend Susan who's your stylist not just fire firing some. [52:06] Some computer that's that using math to pick out that's for you and so I think the human element both has a practical element but I also think it has a strong marketing branding element for them as well. Scot:  [52:19] Yet they get this really interesting case study and then we can move on from machine learning they said one example or Delila embroidery neckline knit top is purchased 52% of the time, and then what's interesting is are algorithms, I can determine How likely a client is up to 80% to purchase the item if we include it in that's in her specific fix them so they can kind of show the power of the you know if you just blast it out to everyone you get 52% but if you can like use the machine learning. Machine engine you get like a order of magnitude higher conversion rate which is pretty neat to your point on the, what they're saying about the machine learning stuff is it used to be in that venture capitalist would look for your eyes looking for a company that has a bit of an unfair advantage and that unfair Advantage used to be Network effects, you like marketplaces are the kings of this like eBay or buyers Springs more sellers is this network effect LinkedIn the more people social. [53:19] That works out this too but now it's interesting is those that data on 2 million clients and think about all the. The transactional data there's there's probably I don't know zillions of Dana Point's there. Any company even an Amazon that has to compute these guys that they're going to have to climb that mountain so it makes it really really hard for a startup to catch up, you pretty quickly dwindle down the number of Cups companies that, eat here too but maybe three or four you can have maybe a Macy's and end their advantage would be they have more customers so they can get to that two million pretty quickly so. Pretty interesting application of machine learning and I think this will be the first machine learning IPO that I've I'm aware of so that'll be another kind of neat thing and that it's also in our space of e-commerce. Jason:  [54:06] Until I mean two things I would just highlight there that. [54:11] I think they're trying to generate you know a version of a virtuous cycle here or an Amazon flywheel that they. [54:19] Significantly invested in their own machine learning Tech and so that they have that capability that we just covered but they also have a business model that just gets them more. Valuable data right so if you think about it and most apparel manufacturers are totally disintermediated from the customer so they get. No data from their actual customers and even if you're a retailer or even if you're a vertically integrated retailer your the Gap and you make all this stuff and you sell it through your stores once it leaves your store for the most part it's gone and you don't you have a return rate you wanted to be as low as possible, but you really you know this this try-before-you-buy send them five things get back what they don't love. Get you a much more valuable data source so the fact that they both. Have this more valuable data and then they have proprietary technology to act on that that data is a potential flywheel for them. [55:19] Oh, I still think it's interesting and somewhat controversial the amount of investment they made in the the. [55:29] The core machine learning technology right like so I could imagine when they they say. Started this in 2011 and I assume that machine learning came in a couple years after that 2013 you could look at it the state of what was out in the market and say if I'm going to be good at this have to build it myself and if I wanted to be a core competency I need to. To build it myself and for sure you need your own experts but. [55:52] The last five years have seen such a huge Improvement and evolution of the off-the-shelf tools that it almost certainly has to be the case that. These guys have spent a bunch of money building their own machine learning tools that are frankly probably inferior to the the version of tensorflow the Google gives you for free today and so it. It is they may have been a little early in the curve having expertise about their data and about the the. Applying machine learning models to their data and having a unique data set seems like a huge competitive Advantage I imagine some smart people could debate about how valuable their their investment in their own. [56:40] Machine learning technology was versus leveraging some of the the amazing technology that's coming on the market now but but I'm not sure whatever know the real answer there. Scot:  [56:49] Yeah, tell if a competitor can get there with a lot less and catch up then it was worth it get a couple of anything else on machinery. [57:04] A couple other, miscellaneous little tidbits they talk a lot about being a good brand partner in this one so they they talk about they have over 700 brand partners and some of those brand selected to provide some exclusives in in the stitch fix this and then as Jason mentioned they do have their own private label and they call that exclusive brands, I am Jason Howard debating my reed was 20% of fish stitch fix his exclusive Brands were were privately, 20% of everything was their own private label but you kind of red it is 20% could be kind of including those non stitch fix brand Partners exclusive thanks. Jason:  [57:44] Yeah they did mention that that some third-party Brands give them exclusive products and so like I'm quite aware that 20% of stuff that stitch fix design or a combination of stuff that's only sold by stitch fix. Scot:  [57:56] Yeah and this reminds me of our Amazon private label discussion where where. Part of Amazon's private label strategy is there their data science is saying look we need a widget like this and no one's doing it you know we need batteries that come. 24 to a box and not in a packaging that you can open and quantity 8 so interesting to see that. Another little tidbit is so they talked about Outsourcing the manufacturing of that private label called exclusive brands, but in 2017 they actually acquired a pretty large thing as 20,000 square-foot facility that's actually an apparel making. The equipment and & Company in Pennsylvania somewhere so it it felt like they were going to go all the way over to clean the grading and start actually making their own things and United States which is pretty interesting. Jason:  [58:45] Yeah although I do think in the s-1 they they made it very clear that the right you should not expect them like to actually fabricate in the US that they wanted some capability in the US for experimenting purposes but the like. [58:59] You should not invest in them based on the premise that they were going to become a US manufacturer. Scot:  [59:04] Yeah and then people wise they have. Pretty impressive 5800 people total 86% identify as female so that it is, pretty amazing what you put 55% of the management team to have 5 helmet centers / 1.5 million-square-foot 1,500 employees in the Fulfillment centers, 3400 Silas 200 client experience Associates million customers that's like what does that 1 / 100 no a thousand. Yeah so that's good ratio there did you dream team is actually pretty small I was surprised 95 Engineers so that's. [59:44] Pretty lean mean for kind of scale they're at and Sadie I guess the 75 data scientist get it closer to effectively. 150 which is closer to what I would think it would be so that's how the people break out largest chunk is the stylist and then the Fulfillment center employees followed by. You know the client experience Associates and then a relatively small Engineering in data science team. Jason:  [1:00:09] Yep and this was not surprising I suspect to you or I but I still talk to a lot of people that aspired to be a billion dollar e-commerce business and they still imagine that they're doing that out of a single fulfillment center. Scot:  [1:00:24] Yeah no. Jason:  [1:00:26] And I at yeah I mean yeah. Not very possible and I'm like this is a perfect example of what you know again at their they're not at a billion dollars yet and there and they they have a customer-facing business where humans interacting with every customer and yet still the largest portion of their, their workforces you know that are close to the the second largest piece of those Workforce it as all those fulfillment employees. Scot:  [1:00:51] Yeah I wanted more information on, fulfillment centers just because again I imagine that that almost every box comes back with something so imagine the it's the reverse supply chain that I'll Eat You Alive on the stuff so. Jason:  [1:01:09] Reverse Logistics are much more, challenging than I mean things are very hard to reverse Logistics are in order of magnitude harder in your right like that's cooked into this model is there's always going to be a high level of reverse Logistics so that that would be an interesting area to have some unique competitive advantages and if they do they they haven't pitched them very hard. Scot:  [1:01:30] Yeah and the day of science didn't necessarily cover that and you know, Gillett Wisconsin to it so what cities send out of too many customers let's say every month they send out a million boxes will probably less a900. Thousand come back with at least one item coming back so I'm have all of them but you know that's hard someone needs to go through there and figure out all that out you kind of know but you have to match it up happens to it. I don't, do the brands allow them to kind of like put it back, or do you have to liquidate it and then does each of these fulfillment centers have an outbound peace and an inbound if they put it back on a shelf that's like a whole it's really super inefficient to like open a bunch of boxes and put all that stuff on shelves that doesn't seem logical that I have a lot of kind of questions around that I bet. probably the Harry part of this thing. Jason:  [1:02:21] And there is like so I think this is more rumor than real problems but so all of these industries are plagued with a little bit of the like. [1:02:30] Oh wait a minute is this close stuff that already got returned from some other retailer right and that. The fuel gets playing there several of these services and I think including stitchfix have at some point shipped products that arrived at a customer's location with another retailers price tag on it. [1:02:50] Right and that you know puts all kinds of questions in the in the mind of the consumer and you start wondering like waiter is this a TJ Max kind of play where they're getting the. The leftover stuff from some some retard where they couldn't sell and then their there they're selling it at at you know predominantly with price which is part of the reason I have such good margins. The. And and the explanation that that stitch fix gave and I think you know this is blown over several years ago now was no no no no we're not getting anything. Back from a retailer that were selling a customer but sometimes we buy something from a brand and we've had a brand make a mistake and send this inventory that was pre labeled. With another retailers labels on it before and so that you know then then created that whole set of conversation. Scot:  [1:03:38] Do you feel like the brands would let them return the stuff. Jason:  [1:03:41] I think you could I thought I do think Brands would let them take returns and resell it I doubt any brands are getting them stock balancing you know you like. [1:03:53] There's very little stock balancing in a pair of these days where you can actually just return stuff that doesn't sell you know they're there often can be some sort of negotiated terms where that the inventory doesn't turn gets. [1:04:06] Gets tossed reduced overtime and you get some price concessions and things that way but yet no I think. [1:04:15] That that stitch fix probably feels like a pretty traditional retailer in, having a match their supply to demand as well as they can and then having how to start a smart strategy for liquidating the inventory that they're not able to sell. So I thought you know I think the date they pay some of the same Challenges ever no spaces there I did there's one other. [1:04:41] I think that the s-1 reminded us up but we but we could have known before this stitch fix is running on an Amazon web services. Scot:  [1:04:49] Yeah yeah it sucks so does Netflix and always makes me wonder like do they sleep at night we're going to Amazon can you. [1:04:57] I don't think Amazon would ever do this but there's the potential for someone to Cana, take a little peek in there and see what's going on under the hood so that that would it's like one of those very very tricky situations there's not really a great Alternatives that I have found two but you know you're kind of your funding and your competitor and your competitor has potential access to your your secret sauce. Jason:  [1:05:20] Yeah and even if they had no access even if they're completely aboveboard and they would never look at the data you are you're still funding your competitor. Scot:  [1:05:30] Absolent yep so that's Amazon wins no matter what. Jason:  [1:05:36] I would prefer the record I would say like I mean AWS is a great service there's lots of reasons to use it it does to me feel like Microsoft with Azure in Google with Google Cloud platform like have some pretty competitive offerings these days. Scot:  [1:05:50] Yeah yeah once you kind of get married in the one who sings it's a little bit of a roach motel it's hard hard to check out. [1:05:56] Degree architecture at some level that you have to do so Jason was kind of. Land plane here with what do you think so we've gone through a lot of highlights and some impressive scale on Revenue growth slowed in a little bit, can't look like it's going up a little bit I'll TV hard to call with the cohort analysis looks like it's a little challenged on the back half of the first year, what's your conclusion Justice IPO mean that the subscription Commerce is the future or or or what do we look like your. Jason:  [1:06:26] Yeah well said to me that's a that's a funny question the. [1:06:32] Yeah we should have we should have mentioned earlier when you talked about it to some of these previous companies there there have. [1:06:38] In the past been these tranches where there was some trendy fatty thing in a bunch of companies had an exit based on that fad right and said the most most obvious recent one would be flash sales you know everyone got up. Advanced evaluation and a bunch of flash flash sale companies had. Had favorable exits in the beginning and less favorable exits at the end and you know today it's pretty clear that there's not a very exciting market for Standalone flash sales that you don't potentially that. A tactic that a retailer would have but it certainly isn't of itself a business model and so when I look at these guys if. [1:07:17] If you're evaluating them on the basis of subscription being the winning model. I think subscription is more likely to be a trend like flash sales I think it's a super valuable tactic. That retailers are smart to use but I don't think that the winning formula in e-commerce is just to go all in on subscriptions and part of the reason I think that is. Most of the companies we think of as subscription model businesses have. Why do they had to abandon their subscription model in order to be successful right and so you know stitch fix. Is a very Soft Cell on the subscription model like they started out subs

Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake talks with Recode's Jason Del Rey about using personalized data science to help consumers find clothing that fits and looks good. Stitch Fix's personal shoppers sometimes rely only on the numbers but usually use their intuition as the "last mile" between buyers and the right clothes, which are delivered in a try-on box. Lake says recent expansions into men's and plus-size fashion are helping the company grow. She also talks about what she has learned from serving on the board of food delivery service GrubHub, which went public in 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices