A (3:22)

So you raised five with what, a PowerPoint.

B (3:24)

PowerPoint.

A (3:25)

So there was nothing. There was no. There was nothing. It was a PowerPoint. But you also, to be fair, had a great reputation at this point. You had. You had just come from DoubleClick.

B (3:35)

Yeah, you know what? Sure. But I also had great people around me. You know, I think, you know, everything is done within a team. You know, I mean, it's never one person. And I appreciate you saying what you just said, but, you know, there was some. A lot of enthusiastic, hungry entrepreneurs around me that were like, okay, Drew, let's. Let's do this. Right? And so we all got together and were able to. To do that, I think, in record time. It was. It was not even a priced round. It was a convertible note with, I think, a $40 million cap, which is ridiculous, right?

A (4:10)

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B (4:49)

Seed round. No product, no revenue. So we did that, and then we proceeded to build. And what I found out was that at the time, there wasn't the same available talent that there was to build companies in the U.S. so, you know, there's lots of great technologists and salespeople and all that, but not the startup sort of talent base that Toronto has now or, you know, that's here in San Francisco. And, and, and, and so I think we had some missteps in our first year building at the platform. I remember the launch being Canada Day, and, and sorry, I left out that we had then closed around a 25 million another year forward.

A (5:30)

Small details. So you raised five and then before launching, you raised another 20.

B (5:34)

Another 20, yeah.

A (5:36)

And how, just briefly, how did that even come? Did you need the 20 or did you already have that in your pocket? How did that even come to be.

B (5:43)

So it was actually, it was actually 25. And we, we did part of it as strategic. Right. Again, that triangle of value. I said, okay, well, we'll build the platform, we'll figure out the merchants. And not a lot of people were selling online at that time, but we need demand. Right. Like, people need to know about this thing. And so we partnered with a media company and they invested along with others, and we closed that round pre launch, pre revenue, and then it didn't go well. Right. We launched and I think we did $1,400 in our first day. We had our biggest.

A (6:14)

Holy.

B (6:15)

Yeah. We had our biggest supply partner essentially pull out because parts of management hadn't approved it and other parts had. And so it was just chaos. Right. But what an incredible team we had. Like, they persevered, they figured it out, we righted the ship. We did our first million dollars. We had our first million dollar day, 1, 2, 3, 4 months later. And then something interesting happened. Jonathan is, you know, when, when the stakes. So people often think you find out who people are when things go bad. Yes, sure. But you actually find out a lot about yourself and you find out a lot about everyone when things are really good. And, you know, if you think about it like we had gone from zero. I think at our peak, we were valued at $225 million in a very short amount of time. And there was starting to be some cracks, right. Some cracks in that amazing team and including myself, the stress, the pressure. And so, you know, we had raised that. We raised another 30 million in May of 2014. And, and then, you know, as soon as the company was recapitalized, it had 20 million in the bank. It had just finished, I think a $10 million month. And I stepped aside, didn't want to do it anymore.

A (7:36)

And. Sorry, how, how long into the journey was this?

B (7:39)

Like two years no, this would be about. Well, remember I started the company well before I came back to Canada. So I actually started the company in 2009 incorporated. So it was kind of five years in for me.

A (7:50)

So. Five years in and just to go back for a second, there's a bunch I want to pick out there. But the first day you spend probably a ton on marketing. I remember seeing ads all over the place. You had a building across the street from your office that was branded and you sell $1,400 that day.

B (8:07)

Yeah.

A (8:08)

What did you expect to sell that day? And what is the feeling inside the office when you say, hey guys, 1400 bucks. That's the number.

B (8:16)

Yeah, that's the, that's the proud thing, right? I mean, we never. Oh my God. What, what, what just happened? It was always like, oh my God, let's, let's fix this, right? There was such. Again, I'm not going to name their names, but it was an incredible group of people that had a lot of mental toughness, that had a lot of belief that E commerce in Canada needed, needed to arrive. Remember, Jonathan, this is when, like businesses were not selling online. There was no doordash, there was no Canadian Tire. Our largest retailer in the country wasn't selling online. Hudson's Bay at the time wasn't selling online. Like, nobody was selling online. And so we had this audacious and big goal and big dream. And to the credit of the team, I mean, any problems we had in those early days, we just worked through.

A (9:00)

Can you, can you give us a sense, Drew, of like just one or two things? Because this is what I'm super curious about. You got $1,400 and then you have a million dollar day a few months later. What are one or two things that you did to make that shift?

B (9:12)

What we figured out really quickly was that the best marketing was product and price. What I mean by that is like, if you have a product that's in high demand, and this is in the Chino now, right? If you have a product that's in high demand and you price it well and so you can make some money, but you price it well, it will sell. And so we figured out the sort of the 95.5rule really quickly as a business. And we focused on that 5% that would sell and had the 95% that wouldn't. But going back to that launch, I mean, part of the problem for us was actually the platform, right. Like we weren't even transacting properly. You know, the checkout wasn't working. Properly and all these other things. And so but again, like nothing really at that point had phased us. We were just figure it out, let's solve, solve, solve which I always say, like business is one thing, it's just about solving problems. Right.

A (10:08)

I think that's, that's a point just, just to nail that because people look at successful people and think, oh well, they, they just didn't encounter the problems that I encountered and you know, they were able to avoid those problems. They never avoided those problems. They probably had problems that you never even got to because all they were doing was just solving along the way. And I, I love also that you said it never phased us. You know, the $1,400 day didn't even phase us. It was just that's the start, let's fix it. And that's the attitude you got to have. Thanks for listening. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavid.com we'll talk to you next.