Same fight, different round
Allen Iverson recently gave a humbling speech where he talks about life and its ups and downs. He compares life to a title fight, where each phase is a different round. This made me think a lot about starting Grand St. and selling to Etsy.
In his speech, Iverson says, “Some days you gonna get knocked down and some rounds gonna be good, some gonna be bad. But the only thing that matters is getting back up and fighting again”.
When you start a company, it is really important to keep reminding yourself of that. It’s all just one big fight and you have to get up, over and over again, regardless of the situation.
Round 1: Take the jump
Joe and I had a plan on how to quit our jobs. Instead we got fired.
With no cash and no job there was no time to lose — we got to work right away. Having our plan blow up could have sucked. But getting fired was one of the best things that happened to us. We had been gifted a forcing function: there was no turning back, no real options but push forward into the unknown world of starting a company.
We had an idea for a website that would sell cool electronics. Maybe. Or maybe we would take on the used furniture vertical within craigslist. Thankfully, we decided to go with the first one. Grand St. was born.
It wasn’t easy, but we scraped together some money and made the beginning work. 401ks were cashed in and friends and family were asked to be part of our journey.
Round 2: Launch, Raise a seed round
We managed to launch and close our seed round on the same day. It was so much fun but it was also a grind. Staying focused on the product while continuously adapting our pitch was a challenge. At this stage its not so much about the initial implementation as it is about the dream. And we dreamed really big.
All the wires came in on time and our launch was a success. This round was a win. It was really hard, but it was fucking awesome.
Round 3: First business model, more fundraising
Our initial business model was event-based commerce. Fab in its early days is the best example. We took inventory, we had a warehouse. It was all about the customers end-to-end experience.
Sounds nice right?
Then came inventory risk. At certain points we had hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in inventory. At an early stage and with only a modest seed round raised, it was a mistake to allocate capital in such an illiquid way.
We managed to do over a million dollars in revenue our first year but given the comps at the time, that wasn’t good enough to raise money. As an entrepreneur, this is devastating. But we couldn’t give up so we got back up.
Round 4: Pivot to marketplace, launch (again)
Venture debt bought us enough time to build a marketplace focusing on early hardware — specifically Beta and Pre-Order products. From everything we learned about innovative hardware products, it felt like a good move. And it was.
Long nights and weekends were spent re-writing and re-structuring our entire business. We did it in under 3 months with a very small team.
Launching was certainly a high. Our team came together and accomplished something awesome. And it looked really good :)
Round 5: Raise on our sweet pivot
Grand St. now had buyers and sellers interacting without inventory risk or logistics support. We went out to get some more money. Signs were positive, but we didn’t have a ton of data yet.
At the same time, we heard from all the usual big tech companies, potentially looking for us to join them. We didn’t love the way that would shake out — breaking our team apart and spreading through a bigger org. We indirectly initiated these conversations. Since they weren’t looking at the business this taught me a valuable lesson —
Companies are bought, they are not sold.
In the end, we got a venture term sheet for our new marketplace. We still believed in the vision and the team and were going to take the funding.
Round 6: Selling to Etsy
Out of nowhere, Joe met with Randy, the VP of Design at Etsy, and quickly was on the phone with Kellan, the CTO, negotiating an offer. The deal they offered was unlike any of the others. They loved the marketplace work we had done. They wanted us to come to Etsy and do the same type of product development work there, as a team.
We weighed the options and went for the acquisition. This started the hardest three months of my professional life. Closing was insane. It almost didn’t work out. Many times. And all the while you have peoples lives hanging in the balance. But we did it.
It was ~2 years from getting fired to selling. A serious ride of ups and downs. But one I wouldn’t give up for anything. I learned more in that 2 years than I did in all my other professional and schooling experience combined.
Round 7: Welcome to Etsy
The announcement came and we showed up at this relatively big company, ready to take on some awesome problems. But it was a slow process. Trying to figure out how and where we fit took some time.
I learned a lot during this time. One big takeaway from the acquisition was:
You can’t force people to change overnight.
The management taught us this valuable lesson in giving us the space and time to figure our shit out; to figure out how we fit at Etsy.
Taking our knowledge of early hardware and crowdfunding, we launched our first product here — Fund on Etsy in June 2015.
We realized our experience put us in a unique position where we are good at building new and innovative products, with some inherent risk and uncertainty. So we established the Maker Innovation team to do exactly that.
Round 8: ????
Whats next? I don’t really know. We have nearly doubled the size of our team (tripled engineering) and are working on some really exciting products. There is still a lot to learn and cool things to build.
Every change is an opportunity to grow, to learn something and to do great work. We never let any ups or downs stop us. Like Iverson says, whatever happens, you have to always, always, get back up and keep fighting.
