← Making It with Jon Davids
Making It with Jon Davids
250 - He was kidnapped at gunpoint. Then he built a $1B business | Omair Tariq, Cart.com (encore)
00:52:26
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- [00:00]
A
Today we're bringing you one of the most popular episodes from 2025. John's conversation with Omar Tariq, the founder of cart.com. what's up, guys? JD here. And on today's show, I am talking to Omer Tariq, founder and CEO@cart.com Omer is an e commerce OG check this out. He started@blinds.com, took that business to $400 million as the CFO, then went to Home Depot, ran a multi billion dollar business there, then then went out and created cart.com, which is now a $500 million business. Not even five years old. But we're gonna start with an even crazier story, and that's the time Omer was kidnapped at gunpoint and almost killed. True story. This is nuts. That's coming up in just a second. But first, if you're a fan of this podcast, do me a solid. Help me spread the word. We are the number one marketing and business podcast all over the world. But there are still so many people who don't know the show exists, and that bothers me. But you can help. Leave a rating, leave a review wherever you're listening. Apple, Spotify, YouTube. Go ahead and send this to a friend to get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com now let's get to the show. You're listening to Making it with John Davidson. So, Omer, it's 2000. You're 15 years old, you're a kid in Pakistan, and you're kidnapped at gunpoint. Tell me what happened.
- [01:34]
B
So I had a friend of mine came to me and said he wanted to go basically pick up his family from the train station. And at 15 years old, not a lot of people have cars. And I was dumb enough to rent a car and have one. And so I was like, okay, I'll drive, you know, and him and I, we were basically driving to the train station to pick up his family. I think it was like, December was kind of coolish. So we had our windows rolled down. And in Pakistan, you drive on the right hand side, right? So driving the car, we stop at a red light. And around that time, we were maybe seven minutes away from our home. So we had just barely left. And, you know, I felt this cold thing on my. On my right floor, forehead, you know, this, this portion. And I was like, confused as to what it was. And look to my right, there's a guy screaming at me to move over and sit on my friend's lap. And I'm still very Confused. I noticed he has a gun at some point during this interaction, and he spoke very authoritatively. So I. I did what he said. I moved to my friend's seat on the passenger side and actually basically kind of sat on his. Sat on his lap. So he comes in, enters the driver's side door, gets into the driving seat, Another guy comes in from the back, opens the back door, and is sitting in the back now. And they essentially start driving.
- [02:58]
A
As they start driving, a dangerous neighborhood. Like. Was this something that happened?
- [03:02]
B
No. I mean, look, I think you have to remember the late 90s and early 2000s in Pakistan. There was a. There was a lot of turmoil that was going on around immigrants that had come into the country from other countries that were almost terroristically haunting people. So this wasn't like, you know, some gang on the road. It. It was. It wasn't people that were from the country. Right. So they essentially had a plan in mind of robbing the citizens of Pakistan at that time. So, you know, look, it's never been the safest country in the world, but, you know, this was unusual what. What had happened. And so, you know, as this is unfolding, I go back to the back seat, the guy starts driving the car, and I realized what was happening and asked me to give me, you know, my wallet, my phone, which I obliged to do. But, you know, he carried on and basically drove around the city and used our car as the getaway car to rob other stores. So he would go to a grocery store, rob it, and one of them would go out, rob the store. The other would hold us on gunpoint. And he did that three or four times until I think he got to the. I think the fourth or fifth shop where the shopkeeper actually had a gun. And a shootout ensues, right? While we're in the car, the shopkeeper comes out and starts shooting at the car, thinking everybody in the car is just a criminal, right? One of the guys that was sitting with me in the back actually got shot, and somehow he managed to come back, and, you know, we all escaped, thankfully. Otherwise, the shopkeeper would have probably killed all of us, not knowing who's in the car. And as they start driving around, you know, they're speaking in a. In a language called Pashto, which I did not speak, but my friend did. So I got the translation of it later on. What they were basically saying was, there's been a shootout. I think I just killed one of the guys at the shop. And this has now gone from robbery to a murder situation. And we got to take these two kids and get rid of them.
- [05:07]
A
Oh, my God.
- [05:09]
B
So they drive around and take us to this area, very desolate area. There's, like, this little mountainous region very close to Karachi called Paharganj, where they take us. And once we're there, they ask us to get out of the car, which we did. And, you know, note that I still don't know what's going on, right? Because I don't understand what they were saying, but my friend did, and I can see the terror on his face. And obviously, I'm scared because I'm 15, and, you know, nobody. Nobody's prepared to go through what we were going through. But I think it all kind of came to fruition when he asked us to kind of kneel down and basically were gonna shoot us execution style. And, you know, we. We kneel down, and the guy's like, okay, say your prayer. And then he loads his gun, puts it on my head, and, you know, takes like, two seconds or something, and then presses the trigger and nothing happens. Loads his gun again, puts. Does this seven times. And I'm still like. I'm just like. I'm, like, not understanding what's going on, right? And I think it's crazy, like, when times like this happen. You know how this show in the movies that your entire life kind of shows, you run a flashback reel? So I ran a flashback real while, you know, hearing the trigger seven or eight times and just waiting for it to pierce my head. But his gun didn't work. And, you know, they start talking, and the other guy was out. He didn't have any more bullets. And then that point, they're like, how do we kill them? And at some point, they discuss killing us with big rocks and then saying, that's gonna get messy. Like, we don't want that. And then they just left.
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A
So wait. Okay, so back up for one second. When this shootout was happening earlier in the story. You're. You're in the car. You didn't try to bail at that point. So was there ever a point here? Because this is definitely like. This sounds like a Scorsese movie when you're. When this is all happening, was there ever a point where you're thinking, let me just open the door, roll onto the street and see what happens? Or, you're not doing that.
- [07:10]
B
We're so scared. Like, so, you know, there's. The driver never left the car, right? So he always had us at gunp. And the. The guy in the backseat who was sitting next to me would go out and rob the stores and come back while the driver held us at gunpoint. Right throughout the four or five times they stopped the car. So there was always a gun close to us. And I. I mean, dude, I was so scared. I did not, you know, all the hero. You're. You're going to sit there.
- [07:38]
A
Yeah.
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B
No, I was like, there's just no way because, like, you know, like, I didn't grow up in Pakistan, Right. I grew up in. In Sharjah, which is like essentially a zero percent crime country. And so this was like, you know, I was visiting Pakistan because that's what you did in summers and winters and cousins are there and families there. So this was like. This was like not Earth for me. Right. That was going on.
- [08:03]
A
Well, this wasn't part of your itinerary.
- [08:05]
B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
Jeez. Okay, so you get out of that. And I'm just curious, so when that is over and you survive by some, you know, just absolute miracle times seven, because he had took seven attempts at the gun. So you survive out of that. What's the next day, week, months of your life, like, do you just get back to real life or are you a changed person?
- [08:26]
B
No. So, I mean, look, I think a couple of things, right? So remember I told you, like, during the shootout, the guy had gotten shot. So when he had gotten shot, I remember I had this brown and white sweater that I was wearing that he made me take that sweater off and he, you know, put it around his arm where he was bleeding. And then, you know, when they left us, you know, he. He gave that sweater back. And, you know, I was cold and I put that sweater back on, so I had his blood. It just was very scary. Right?
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A
So that's one of the dumbest things, because he's basically giving you his DNA now.
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B
Right, exactly. Which, you know, whatever, right? And it was just. It was just the whole thing was just so weird. So we kind of at that point in time when they left, we got into the car and my friend was a lot more in it than I was. I don't know what the hell was going on. We drove to a police station and, you know, we filed a report. The problem was when we got there, somebody had already called, you know, Pakistan's version of 91 1, reporting a black Honda Civic robbing stores. So the cops were like, hey, like, how do we know you're not part of the gang? And just because, you know, you have blood on your sweater, maybe you killed him or something, and now you're coming in pretending to Be a victim. And I was like, no, no, dude. Like, I'm not from here. Like, I'm like, you know, I just visit Pakistan. I'm, I'm moving back to the US and anyways, that kind of caused more problems because now the cops were like a little corrupt and they were like, we could make money from him. Anyways, the next couple of weeks were kind of crazy. And I'm really grateful that I had people who could, you know, guide me through the process while I was there that knew the court systems and police systems. But man, here's the crazy thing. So when something like this happens when you're this young, you don't really quite understand how it impacts you, right? You kind of get over it two days later. As kids, you are, you're very resilient and, you know, so you didn't really feel anything. But it shifted something pretty drastically in my personality that I didn't know until much later in my life that that had happened. So I used to be this absolutely optimistic, like, I could walk on a tightrope with alligators at the bottom and not fall mindset person to an absolute paranoid, pessimistic, worst case scenario planner. And it was such a drastic bipolar, bipolar shift that much later into my life. Like when people met me that knew me in my teenage years and then they met me in my 20s and my 30s, they were like, what happened to you, man? Like, you were like this guy that like didn't give a about any. And now you're like, worst case planning, you know, scenario planning about everything. And I'm like, you know what? I don't know. I don't know. So, you know, after I reflected on it, I realized that I think going through something that traumatic had essentially rewired my brain for the rest of my life, which, you know, turns out to be a good thing to have when you're building a company, right? Because people think that you need inspiration and bravado when what you really need is risk planning and paranoia to prevent your company from failing. And if you have enough of that, then you will build a valuable company one day, right? And so it turned out to be a blessing, I guess.
- [11:49]
A
This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook here's the truth. Your website is either making you money or it's costing you sales every single day. And most businesses just aren't optimizing their websites as they should be. This leads to fewer meetings booked, lower average order value and just a whole lot of people clicking away as fast as they arrived. That's revenue you're losing. You can change all that right now with the insights in my Playbook website selling machine. Grab your free copy@johndavids.com playbook. You know, what you're saying is so true and we'll get to your company in one second. I can think about this for myself and a lot of entrepreneurs I've talked to. What happens in your really formative years when you're 5 years old, 7 years old, 12, 15. It really comes back to reflect upon you when you're 30, 40, 50. And maybe you think, oh, I was just a kid. I'm a different person now. No, you're a different person now because of the experiences you had. And like you said, the idea of. And I'm sure it impacted, like, every day. It's more precious now because you almost lost those days when you were 15 years old.
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B
Oh, yeah, 100%. That's the other thing, man. So you're absolutely. I didn't talk about that portion. Like, so going through that experience, I realized how fragile life is, right? And everything I did from that point onwards was like, I only have like, five years to live, so, like, I need to do this now and that. Like, so I got married when I was 18. I got, you know, I had my first child when I was my 20s. You know, I bought my first house in my 20s. I had all these goals that I want to be this much. I want to retire by 40. Like, I just sort of like, assume that I only have five more years to live. And that's really interesting because it, it becomes a forcing mechanism, right? Because, like, humans are designed to be lazy. Like, they don't want to get up and do anything. They'd rather sit in bed and watch Netflix. Not if you know you're going to die in five years, right? And it's like, you know, and it wasn't like, God forbid. It's not like I had a disease or something that made me have that confirmation. But going through that experience, I was like, man, life is so damn fragile. You could be like, on the road and get kidnapped and shot in the head. Which normal people don't think about that shit, right? Because they don't have to go through that.
- [14:14]
A
But once it happens, you're like, oh, geez, it actually could have. Yeah, it's, you know, you're. You're bit by the radioactive spider at 15, and all of a sudden your whole perspective changes and you really, you really came into this superpower. So tell me what, what is cart.com?
- [14:29]
B
yeah, so my, my background on the professional side was less Dr. I've been part of e commerce retail companies for a while and one of the startups that had joined early on in my career is called vines.com. i was a CFO and chief operating officer there. Grew that business to about 400 million and we sold it to Home Depot back in 2014. And during my time at Home Depot, where I was there for about six years, we were part of the interconnected retail team where we were focused on basically unifying the customer journey using technology and bringing the operations and marketing and stores and online all sort of together. And I realized the power of that when, you know, Covid happened and digitalization accelerated for everybody. And I noticed that these large companies like Home Depot or Walmart or Amazon had like an asymmetric advantage of like being able to, you know, bring technology and operations and experiences together for their end consumers. But the mid market segment, which was not, hey, we have a Shopify website and we're only selling stuff online. The mid market segment has the same complexity as a Home Depot minus the balance sheet. Right? So we sort of had this epiphany that man, the mid market segment is reliant on this Frankenstack of vendors and software solutions and service solutions and operational partners that they have to frankenstein together and then basically try to solve for a unified customer journey. And we were like, what if we could build a vertically integrated infrastructure where we would provide everything from logistics to services to software to help them sell on different channels, to help them optimize their traffic conversion, to help them get product faster to their customers. But we would essentially build a Home Depot like infrastructure except it would be open to the rest of the world in the mid market segment. Right. We focus on that segment specifically and,
- [16:30]
A
and market higher than what a Shopify would focus on.
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B
That's right. Yeah. So these would be brands that are doing, you know, they've grown past the point of like selling on their website because like at some, you know, most companies, not all of them, because there are some companies like resident that did 500 million online and they continue to grow. And blinds.com actually did 400 million online and continue to grow. But some companies or most companies actually reach 5 or 10 million and then they're like, okay, I gotta start selling on Amazon now. And then they get to 20, 30 million, they're like, okay, now I gotta sell through stores and do a deal with Nordstrom if you're a high end product or Walmart if you're a low end product. And then you do realize that, okay, I need to also be selling on TikTok and Instagram and oh by the way, I need to have a whole B2B motion, right? So as you start sort of leveling up your business after you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million in revenues depending on your product, your complexity goes up exponentially. Right? Because you're now selling across multiple channels. You have to have inventory and pricing and product manage across those channels. Marketing has to be unified. All the data. So it becomes, and, and by the way, most of these brands with the way they build it is they like, you know, they go with something and then they tack on something and then they attack on something else because you know, they're just solving for the next 12 months and by the time they're in the mid market segment they have like a Frankenstack right Is what we call it. So we wanted to sort of simplify that and unify that and that's where we come in.
- [17:58]
A
So as businesses grow, so you might start selling something on a Shopify store and then you open up a TikTok shop and essentially as you cap out these sales channels, you're adding new channels on top to continue the growth. And at a certain point what ends up happening is like you said, you wind up with 17 pieces of software and you know, Lou and Steve know how to use these two and we're going to bring this specialist in to know how to use that one. And then you guys came in and said this is a problem. And so how would a Home Depot when you're there, you know, doing tens of billions in revenue, what does their system look like? Do they actually have one unified stack where one piece of software controls everything?
- [18:37]
B
Yeah, I mean it's, you know, look, it's never going to be that for any company in the world, but it's pretty close to that, right? Like they have invested significant amounts of capital in interconnecting the retail journey is what they call it, right? Where merchandising, marketing, operations, sales services all come together using, you know, a core architectural platform that you know, the teams have put together. Because if you, and by the way, that becomes apparent right? When you, I don't know if you've shopped at Home Depot but you know, if you go online and you buy something, right Comes tomorrow you go to their stores and you need like a, I don't know, a fan or something, you Put a fan on the app, it takes you exactly where it is in the store and if it's like not there, then it gives you the option where you can say, okay, ship, you know, from fulfillment center to my house tomorrow. Like, the journey is so damn unified, man. They're like, they're like, it's like magic, right? The consumer never feels that they're shopping in store or online. You can actually go on their app and say, you know what, I'm buying a roof and I need a roof installer. Right. Or I'm buying a window blind and I need someone to come in and measure it and like the whole experience just sort of comes together. That cannot happen when you have a Frankenstein powering it. Right?
- [19:56]
A
Yeah. A Home Depot does that really well. The other one is Ikea where they will tell you literally, like it's in this bin, you know, bin a 97. You go there and it'll be like, hey, there's three of them. Oh, good, there's three. Exactly what I need. And the part two that I need is right next to it. And so they have to think about how to coordinate and place these things in the warehouse. So, yeah, that definitely makes it feel like magic and seamless to the consumer. I'm just curious, I want to get to how you built it in a second. But for a Home Depot example, is this homegrown software? Are they building it on Salesforce, Oracle? How are they actually doing it?
- [20:28]
B
Yeah, look, it's always a combination, right? Like a lot of the technology is homegrown and they obviously have partners that they're using for different components of their overall platform. But they're not over reliant on an external piece of software because they're too big of a company to do that. Right. They obviously have instances of Salesforce. They obviously have ERPs, Microsoft Dynamics, ERP. There's always those components that are powering, but none of them are powering necessarily. The most important part of what Home Depot does, which is what makes them valuable.
- [21:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by my one minute marketing roadmap, available@johndavids.com roadmap in 60 seconds, you'll get a custom report showing you how people are finding your brand, where you're losing them and how to fix it. We used a decade of data from Influicity and layered in AI to give you a real action plan. It's fast, it's free, and it might just change your business. Go to johndavids.com roadmap and get yours right now. So you have this idea for what ultimately becomes cart.com? what was the first thing you did? Was it an mvp? Was it going out and raising money? Was it talking to a partner? What was step one?
- [21:39]
B
Yeah, you know, we knew early on that we were, we were building a business that kind of differentiated itself on the merits of being end to end and vertically integrated. Right. But you can't build everything together, it takes too long. And if you don't have all of the components, then how do you sell, Say you're end to end. It's like a chicken and egg problem, right? Totally. And oh, by the way, like, you need to have like so many customers to be able to fund the vision that we had. Like that's one big problem with like really big ideas. Right. Which is that the how do you go from zero to one is where like everything falls apart. And you know, we were very lucky in a few different ways. The first was the golden decade of venture didn't end until end of 2021. So we capitalized on that. So we raised a lot of capital. Two, we capitalized on the overall excitement with unique business models in commerce enablement. And that excitement existed in employees, customers and investors. And then the third thing is that we built a management team from day one that looked like a private equity buyout management team versus a typical west coast venture backed company management team. We made seven acquisitions the first 12 months of starting the company. So we started building our end to end infrastructure using both organic and inorganic levers which gave us like this asymmetric advantage of within 12 months having an end to end infrastructure. Which by the way, if you go back to a lot of people ask us like why the hyperspeed. Remember I was only going to live for five years in 2020.
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A
So let's translate this though because you're using a lot of fancy words. So inorganic and organic means basically you're going to build it virtually versus buy it from somewhere else.
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B
Correct.
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A
And you said you went In 12 months, you had seven pieces of software.
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B
We bought seven companies. Not all companies were software companies. We bought a few software companies, we bought a few services companies, we bought a few companies in the logistics supply chain space. So we kind of acquired based on as you're putting this puzzle piece together, right. Of like, how are we going to be a vertically integrated end to end infrastructure. We kind of created a strategy that said, okay, we're going to build all of this and then we're like, okay, we're going to have to buy all of this other stuff because it's going to take too long for us to
- [24:25]
A
build and there's an opportunity cost. So let's just again go back because this sounds amazing and I want to get into the weeds on a lot of this stuff. But where did you start, though? Like on day one. And I understand you're starting from a running start because you already had a lot of pedigree, but I'd imagine you kind of got some co founders, raised some money and built something. What, like, how long did that take? Was that all in the first three months or what?
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B
Yeah, so we acquired our first target six weeks within starting the company, actually.
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A
And was that. And you had the, you had raised the cash to do that or you had the deal and you went out and got the money?
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B
Yeah, yeah, I raised, I raised. I raised 20 million from my first meeting. Seed investment.
- [25:12]
A
Okay, there it is. I was trying to get to that. So you raised 20 million, I'm assuming, on like a PowerPoint, right?
- [25:18]
B
PowerPoint and good looks, I guess. I don't know, dude, that's it.
- [25:22]
A
That's where it's at. Okay, so 20 million and just for the listener, because everyone's going to hear that and go, oh, there it is. But like, to get to the point where you could raise 20 million bucks on a PowerPoint and hand some looks, you obviously had to do a bunch of groundwork. So, like, you already had years and years of experience. You had built a $400 million revenue business, so you already had pedigree.
- [25:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, it was three things, right? It's always three things. One was what you just described the experience and having a background, I've been there, done that. Successful exits, scaling from 0 to 1. In my college years, I had built a business on flea market. So that's where I had my 0 to 1 experience. You know, blinds.com was a 1 to 10 experience. And then at Home Depot, I had the 10 to 100 experience. And everybody I hired was like, cooler and smarter than me. Right? So, like, we, we really had a good team. So when we were, we would go and like show up to the meeting, people would be like, okay, they're gonna build the next Amazon, right? So we, we really got the right team and experience and expertise. So that was the first thing. The second thing that helped us do that was, man, for a year and a half before starting card, I just deliberately started donating my time to anything and everything. And what that means is, like, I would go to like a VC and say, let Me, be an advisor for your companies, don't pay me anything. And they'd be so confused and they'd be like, who are you? And I'm like, I've scaled blinds.com from blah, blah, blah to 400 million. So like, I'm not an idiot, like, I can help you, right? And they were like, you don't want anything back? I'm like, no. And so I would just start helping, right? And then I would like help companies that were in the five to $10 million range and I would just show up to like, events and like, meet people. Like, man, I invested so much time that it was stupid. And I was doing that because what I was really trying to do was two things. One, get to know people in the space, but then to get people to know me in the space. So as I started connecting the dots, when time came to raise capital, it took one meeting to raise the first 20, took two more meetings to raise another 25. Like within 90 days I had raised 45 million.
- [27:37]
A
You raised 45 million and you say it took one meeting, but I'm going to guess that one meeting was with somebody who had already known you for a couple of years and seen you in action.
- [27:46]
B
No, it wasn't, it wasn't. This meeting was with a gentleman by the name of Jim Jacobson who had founded Arctic Coolers, a competitor, yeti, and he had founded another company called Line Group, very successful entrepreneur in Houston, him and I. He had reached out to me back in like May of 2020 or something because he was looking for a CEO for his company, our ticket, whatever, and we never could have that meeting. We scheduled it. Things didn't quite work out. Then in August, September, I reached out to him back on LinkedIn and I was like, hey, we were supposed to meet, like, you know, let's just meet up. You are based out of Houston? I'm based out of Houston and we're both in the retail space and you know, I think there's some cool stuff that I'm working on. So I went to meet him and it was a 30 minute meeting, ended up lasting for like two and a half, three hours. And we just basically laid out what cart.com was supposed to be. That same night he bought the domain name for like millions of dollars. And he was like, I'm all in. So no, it wasn't someone I knew for two years.
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A
Was he, Is he a co founder or he's an investor now?
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B
He's, he's an investor, essentially. He, you know, I don't I don't know what to call him. You can call him co founder, you can call him investor, you can call him the guy without which cart wouldn't have happened, I don't know. But you know, he invested the capital upfront and then the first 60 ish days he was very involved. 90 days he was very involved in the business, helping just him and I just rift on things and put the team together and rift. And then, you know, he's, he's sort of been on the back seat since then.
- [29:22]
A
Wow. Okay, so you got 45 million in the first 90 days or so, you acquire seven businesses and now you're up and running. So 12 months in, and what year are we in now? 2020 or 2019?
- [29:32]
B
So, you know, we started the company in November of 2020, and I would say by end of 2021 is when we had essentially made all the acquisitions and done all that.
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A
And the acquisitions themselves. Were these companies that you had an eye on and had relationships with because of your years of experience, or were these all things you were finding on the go?
- [29:54]
B
Yeah, so both. Right. Like, so not just me. Right. So again, remember, remember the. We called it the Avengers team, literally, because that's what it looked like. You know, there was like Captain America, Hulk, and then, you know, it was like Iron man. And like, literally like everybody that came to the table that we brought in the early days had like a playbook, right? Like, they knew players that we could buy from, they knew infrastructure capabilities that we could go get or investors that could come in and participate in the round. So we just, you know, had between the five or six people that I put together, we, we basically knew 80% of the things we wanted to go, go out and buy. And then I would say for the remaining 20%, we did, you know, look outside research. We never hired bankers. We did all of it ourselves because, you know, we don't want to have any spread going to anybody other than the seller and the buyer. And we focused on companies that weren't, weren't represented by bankers, and we weren't representing ourselves with bankers either.
- [30:53]
A
And so you just had lawyers paper the deal, but you negotiated them yourselves and sourced them yourself.
- [30:57]
B
That's right. Every single deal. I got on the phone with the entrepreneur and talked it out. That's how every deal got done. Literally. There was no spreadsheeting. I mean, obviously we did diligence after the fact that. But I never went back on any of my deal. Deal making is art, man. It's not science. And at the End of the day, no amount of analysis tells you what something's worth. Right. So you're really betting on the person you're bringing onto your team. And if you feel good about that, then you buy it. If you don't, then you don't buy it.
- [31:25]
A
Did you have M and A experience before this? Or this was your first M and A stuff?
- [31:30]
B
Yeah, had tons of M and A experience. Right. So blinds.com, we had made acquisitions, and I wasn't like the lead in all of those acquisitions, but had a lot of experience going through them. And then at Home Depot had a lot of M and A experience. So new MA pretty intimately.
- [31:45]
A
So when you buy these, are you keeping the leadership in charge or did you have a way to bring them in and then totally bring new people in, or are you basically buying them to keep running as they were?
- [31:56]
B
No, no, no. So we, every single deal, we focused on filling up our org structure. So people that were running the company that we were buying would become part of our leadership team or our management team. So we would like, inherit the organizational structures. And that was actually one of the things that helped us do these deals very successfully because these sellers were not like just selling something and walking into the sunset, handing us like a dumpster fire. Right. Like, that was never going to work. So we kept them engaged for a very long period of time, like multiple years.
- [32:30]
A
So can you give an example of maybe the first two or three or the biggest ones you did? Like, give us an example of a thing you bought and what it accomplished?
- [32:39]
B
Yeah. So at the end of 2021, we acquired a company called FB Flurry that was a supply chain logistics player, three facilities. Jeff Zisk, he was the founder of that company. What was really unique about that was they had actually started off as a software company where they had built an OMS and a WMS for the Army Air Force Exchange and ultimately grew that platform to do B2B and B2C fulfillment and then ultimately tacked on warehouses. So it was like, started the other way versus most supply chain companies that start off as warehouses and then they use third party software and then ultimately decide that we have to build our own software. So that was really cool that we thought that would be a superpower for us. You know, meeting Jeff Sisk, like, again, another serial entrepreneur. You know, the guy had built and sold multiple companies. And I met him and I was like, holy man, holy crap. This is the guy that I want on my side, right? So we acquired his company with the idea that we needed the order management system and the WMS to expand and accelerate our ability to build those things and have all of our facilities using our own proprietary technology. We needed to have that. His company essentially enabled that and became the foundation for what we do today.
- [33:58]
A
And so when you are buying these things, I'm guessing it doesn't always go perfect. Did you have things that broke or things you bought and you said maybe we shouldn't have done that?
- [34:07]
B
Yes, 100%. We bought a couple of things we shouldn't have bought. And I say that. But honestly, man, the stuff we learned, maybe it was worth it. But it became a very big distraction at some point. Like we had acquired a smaller player based out of Austin that was in the supply chain space fulfillment company Single Node, that was operating third party software and you know, doing 10 million in top line, but not making money, actually burning money. We acquired it because we felt that we could learn a lot from that one facility and the management team that came from it. But that turned out to be like a really bad deal for us because it became a distraction. Right after we bought it. They lost two of their major customers. The software was not their own, which the management team. It was very challenging for us and we ended up essentially unraveling that whole business ultimately. And that was essentially a failure for sure. We did make mistakes.
- [35:12]
A
Yeah. Well, I think McKinsey says 70% of acquisitions fail. So it seems like your hit rate is well above average. But it's not going to be.
- [35:20]
B
Yeah, it's not going to be 100%. Yes, I wish it was.
- [35:24]
A
So you have this business and it's running, it's sort of built pre and running during COVID So I'm guessing you probably had a bump and then maybe things kind of kind of fell back. And as you said, you raised a whole bunch of money during that VC boom. How have things sort of like gone since then? Like, did things get really bad post Covid 2023, 2024, or were you kind of just up and to the right the whole time?
- [35:47]
B
We never had a Covid bump for anything except for fundraising. Our business went from like zero to now. Like this year, I think we're going to cross 500 million in revenues like in four years. Right. So that kind of growth cannot happen without compounding rate. So like every year, like our CAGR is like a stupidly insane number. Right. So we've grown insanely every single year. I think a lot of companies that got the last tail end of the golden era of venture capital where money was easy and Covid boost and funding and all that stuff. I think a lot of companies used that capital in a different way than we did. We used a lot of that capital to buy assets that were already producing value and then investing in go to market versus science experiments. And I feel like, you know, that helped us like so, you know, you know, 2022, the world changed in fundraising environment and you couldn't raise capital anymore and you couldn't get the stupidly high valuations anymore and everything just became harder. But we still raised 60 million in 2023 and we got a up round in a down market with no structure, right? Like we were like one of like maybe six companies at the growth stage worldwide probably that had the ability to do that, right? And those things, you know, our looks didn't matter anymore, right? We had to have a real business. And you know, so we were very lucky that again, this goes back to the paranoia part, right? Which is, you know, even with all the capital we raised, I, I was just like, everything can go wrong tomorrow, so we have to operate like everything will go wrong tomorrow. And then when things did go wrong tomorrow, we were just like better prepared than everybody else.
- [37:46]
A
So I'm curious about the way that you think about this startup or when it was a startup. Maybe you still think about it as a startup. You know, a lot of people go into business and they're thinking about product and customer experience and that sort of thing. But you mentioned that this was really looked and felt like a private equity play from the beginning. And even now you just mentioned cagr, compound annual growth rate, which is a metric that's used, I guess, by companies. But you know, it's almost like we're leaning into the private equity world of you're buying these things and as soon as they come into the cart.com machine, they get more valuable and they grow faster because of this infrastructure you have. So do you think about this like a tech startup or are you really thinking about it like a private equity firm?
- [38:29]
B
Honestly, man, I don't know how to answer that question. I'll give it a shot. The way I think about it is that I spent all my life being the customer that we're now serving. So like, I know nothing about supply chain software services. Like, I've Never had a B2B company, right? But I've had an e commerce company, I've been part of a retailer. So I've, I'm now selling to who I used to be. So I understand their pain points. And then I used to be a finance guy for like the longest period of my life. Right. So I knew that in addition to solving a business problem, I had to solve a unit economic problem both for myself and my customers. And I think when I thought about it with those two lenses, we built cart.com, right? So we didn't have like this dichotomy of like, oh, we're going to build it like a private equity roll up or oh, we're going to build it like a tech startup with MVP and product, you know, testing and all that. Like it was somewhere like we just sort of enhanced, we focused on solving a pain point that I just knew existed. We didn't do any market research. I was like, I was on the other side. You got to believe me. Yeah, we should just build us.
- [39:42]
A
You felt it in the trenches and you, I mean this was like a really high class problem because like you said, you sort of have to be doing 10, 20, 30 million to even know this problem exists. And then as you get bigger and bigger, like this is the sort of thing that billion dollar companies feel as well. But you're not going to read about that in Fast Company or Entrepreneur magazine.
- [40:02]
B
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
- [40:06]
A
This episode is brought to you by Influicity's new tool, the AI Ads Generator, available now at johndavids.com ads Great ads aren't about luck, they're about leverage. The brands that win are the ones who can launch faster, test smarter and outspend everyone else without wasting a dollar. That's exactly what the AI Ads generator gives you. Instant ad copy that speaks to every customer and feeds the algorithm high performing variations your competitors can't keep up with. It's like strapping a jet engine onto your marketing. And right now it's free. Yes, it's free. Go to johndavids.com ads that's John davids.com ads so when you're. Okay, so you've gone from zero to. I think you have 2000 employees now.
- [40:54]
B
Yeah, like 1600 or something. We go up and down based on peak volume. Right. Sometimes we hit 2000 because we have to hire a lot of temp workers for certain times.
- [41:02]
A
How much of your time, you know, your time personally or just as a leadership team is spent on like fundraising to continue the growth engine or let's like, you know, sit down and kind of operate and, and clean up what we have. Are you always in fundraising mode?
- [41:16]
B
I mean, yes and no in the sense that we've raised a lot of Capital in the last few years. So we've had to be in fundraising mode for that forever. Even though we're a profitable company, we're total cash flow positive this year. Our intention is to be at least and we're very capital efficient. But remember, I only have five years, right? So I am looking at global expansion right now I'm looking at acquisitions in the European UK region. I'm trying to hit a billion in revenue by 2027. I'm trying to take the company public by 2027. So capital helps, right? We don't need it. But if it, if it comes, then it helps accelerate those visions.
- [42:00]
A
Okay. You're, you're a $500 million revenue profitable, cash flow positive company.
- [42:07]
B
All very cash flow positive. Yes.
- [42:08]
A
Isn't that sort of. So don't you have investors on your back saying guys just grow faster, you shouldn't be profitable?
- [42:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean we have investors on both sides, right? Which is, hey, don't raise any more capital because I don't like dilution. Just self fund it and grow slower. And then we've got investors that are like, dude, just go raise a bunch of money, double your business, keep going that way, right? So we have a good balance. And you know, I listen to both of them.
- [42:34]
A
He listened to both of them. He listened to one on Monday and the other on Thursday. So at $500 million in revenue, obviously you just stated your goals like get to a billion by 2027, go public. What are the constraints right now? Because a $500 million revenue business is something that most entrepreneurs will never touch, even super successful ones. What are you thinking about at this level?
- [42:56]
B
What are the constraints? I mean, look, I think the first constraint is like scaling without imploding, right? Like the reality is we're still just a four year old company. And I mean, trust me, like it hurts to be 500 million in revenue right now, right? Because like it, it takes heroics. And I mean I'm just so proud of my team that I have like everybody that works at cart, they are walking into the gladiator ring. They understand that they're not coming to work a, a side hustle, right? This is going to become their life. And I think.
- [43:34]
A
And why is that? Why do you say it's a, it's difficult to run a $500 million business or to be in a 500.
- [43:40]
B
It's not difficult to run a $500 million business if it has been around for 10 years. Because if every year you're growing and then you're investing to bring up your infrastructure, then you're growing again and then you invest to bring your infrastructure up. Like you don't have as much mayhem as you would if you're growing this much. And then you're like trying to get up to the. And then you grow again. So you're like your operating infrastructure as a company is always behind the ball to like. And then, and then, oh, by the way, we operate in an environment where you can't just waste money, right? So like you have to make money. So it's like that's another constraint which is, you know, four years, 500 million revenue would not be as painful if like from a capital standpoint we had lots of it. Then we would be just throwing money at the problem and making some of the pain go away. We can't do that. You have to be good and make money and move fast. Which in that quadrant of, I don't know, quality money and speed, you can only get two. For us, it has to be all three. And that's really hard.
- [44:44]
A
I remember talking to the Shopify guys early on when they were still a private company, relatively small, and they were saying, we're literally changing everything every three months. Like our org chart changes our stuff, like our systems. You know, things that work when you're $20 million don't work when you're 100 million. And if you're growing at that pace every three months, that's what it's like.
- [45:07]
B
I could not. That's literally what I would say. That's what we're feeling.
- [45:12]
A
And so is there a. I mean, you already mentioned the goal is. Is. Is to IPO in 2027. Are you kind of like on track to do that? Is there are the big hurdles you have to cross.
- [45:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're on track. You never know, right? Public markets, you know, when you, when you think about going public, there are other macro factors that you have to take into account versus just micro. Like I don't know if the world is going to shit and we're suffering stagflation and the market's down 40% and interest rates are high and nobody has any money and unemployment is at 8%. Like you want to go public that time, bad idea. So, you know, depending on kind of what's happening in the rest of the world, we aim to do that in 2027.
- [45:54]
A
Do you see cart.com as kind of your. Like is this. Do you have, I know you think in five year increments, but do you have other sort of plays in you or do you see this as your, as your sort of grand piece of art?
- [46:07]
B
You know, that's a, it's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way. I think this is the biggest thing I've ever worked on and I think this has the ability to be the biggest thing I'll probably ever work on. So if those two things are true, then it would be the latter versus the former. I think this is the big thing, that this is my grand piece of art.
- [46:29]
A
Because as you scale, as you scale at the levels you're at where you're at 500 million in revenue, this could easily get to a billion. This could be 2, 3, 5 billion in revenue. And then at that point or even before that, this thing could be other things. So the fundamental vision you had on day one of let's unify the E commerce stack. Yeah, great. That could be product one, but then there's other things you could do.
- [46:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, honestly, Ben, if our luck doesn't run out and we keep executing, this company will last for 500 years. Because, I mean, that's just, you know, that's what we're doing. Like, you know, a lot of times, like people like invent a better pen and that only lasts until like someone comes out with a better pen. Right? So like, this is not this. Like I always tell people, I'm like, man, like Amazon's like, and excuse my choice of words here, but just going to say them as a, to make a point. But Amazon's the monopolistic infrastructure for marketplaces. There's nobody better and bigger than them. Shopify is the monopolistic infrastructure for front end. Like there's nobody that's better than them. Cart.com wants to be the monopolistic infrastructure for everything else.
- [47:40]
A
Yeah, I totally see that and I get the vision and it's interesting because if you want to build, you know, people like, what does it take to build a billion dollar company or these days, what does it take to build $100 billion company? You have to have surface area that is so large and expansive and growing that as you said, the vision is we want to monopolize this. But what this is today is actually a fraction of what it's going to look like in 5, 10, 20, 30 years. And it just keeps on growing. And I think you kind of found that space.
- [48:09]
B
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
- [48:11]
A
So have there been moments where you've been up against the ropes? I mean, the story is just like, it's funny, like, your first story that we started this off with is, you know, you should be dead. And this story, this is like up and to the right nonstop. Have there been moments in this story that have, you know, kind of gone off the rails?
- [48:28]
B
I mean, I don't know, I feel like we've almost died a hundred times. Like, I mean, it's just the reality, right, is like, if anybody tells you that it's been up into the right, I do not believe that that's not how things work. Right. I mean, yeah, I mean, there have been some crazy times, like from, you know, when we were raising our series A round, we had like a day before that something had happened. If that incident wouldn't have been curtailed, the whole funding would have evaporated. You know, when we were raising our C round back in 22 and we had a strategic investor coming in, the strategic investor ended up having some public market drama and they actually backed out. And then we had to go get other investors to go, like, I mean, yeah, dude, there have been times where I've liked close the door in the closet and cried because I was like, oh my God. And it wasn't about like, you know, at this point in time, it's like, it wasn't about like, thankfully, like, oh, if card goes upside down, like, I don't have money to feed my family. Like, thankfully, this is not. I've done okay for myself in my past, but this was more about like, man, this can't be a hundred billion dollar company. And if this doesn't happen, then like, the opportunity cost of what the world can be a better place because of us is just like, it's just immeasurable in my mind. Right? So our intensity of emotions when things would not work in our favor would be more to that versus, you know, out of our eight ELT members, we've had 11 exits. So everybody has had exits prior to this. And like, we're not. We're not here because we're trying to make a quick buck. We're here because we're trying to change the world.
- [50:10]
A
You know what this is, And I can just talking to you, I can see that. And I think you just hit on a point that is so important for everyone listening to pay attention to your business on one hand serves you, it pays the bills, it makes you happy. That's all good and cool, but can you honestly say if my business goes away, this world is going to be worse off than it is if this happens? And I've heard In the early days, Elon said that Tesla can't die. Not because of me, but this world needs Tesla and all kinds of businesses. You know, if you're honest with yourself and you say, if I went away tomorrow, would it actually have a negative impact on the world? And I can. I can see that you really feel that in your bones.
- [50:49]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, we. We believe that there is this phase of death that companies go through in retail where they go from zero to one and they sell a bunch of stuff online. But then for anybody to become a Home Depot, there's like this graveyard of companies, right, that die. And that graveyard in many cases happens because they cannot figure out their product, in which case that's on them. But in many cases it happens because they cannot figure out how to get their product to the right people at the right time. And we believe that the second problem we can solve in a way that nobody else is focused on. And if we don't solve it, then the graveyard between the 0 to 1 in the home Depots of the world is just gonna get bigger and bigger, and we wanna avoid that.
- [51:35]
A
Omer a billion by 2027. IPO. I'm gonna be watching.
- [51:40]
B
Fingers crossed, man.
- [51:42]
A
Thanks so much for sharing the story.
- [51:44]
B
All right, thank you.
- [51:44]
A
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a rating or a review on Apple and Spotify. Wherever you listen to podcasts helps other people find the show and it lets us know that we're doing something right. If you're spending more than $50,000 a year on marketing, I've got something for you. It's a playbook I wrote called how to Build a Social Media Selling Machine. You can grab it now for free at johndavids.com playbook. This is the nine step formula we use for our clients at Influicity to turn their social media channels into reliable revenue engines. Grab it right now@johndavids.com Playbook.