This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid.
Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions, review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business?
Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace Capital. Go to squarespace.com slash built for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loan issued by Celtic Bank and service by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb.
This past summer, I took my family to Athens, and it was truly an incredible trip. We ate amazing food, we saw Parthenon and the Agora, and all the incredible things you can see in one of the most amazing cities in the world. And one of the things that made it special was the home we booked on Airbnb. We could see the Parthenon from our bedrooms.
It even had a small jacuzzi on the roof, and we were walking distance from everything you'd want to see. We had such an amazing time cooking and just spending time together as a family in that home on Airbnb. If you've ever had a chance to visit Athens, I cannot recommend it enough. That's the thing about Airbnb.
You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting a home base that fits your trip. And while you're away, your own home doesn't have to sit empty. Hosting on Airbnb can help you earn extra money on your schedule with full control. Your home might be worth more than you think.
Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. So the How I Built This team is taking a much needed and very short break this week, but we will definitely be back next Monday with a brand new episode. As for today's show, well, some of you may remember a time not too long ago when e-commerce was supposed to be dead, like over. But today's episode is about two guys who never stopped believing in the internet or any many things that you can buy on it.
This one first ran back in April of 2018. Enjoy. So, all right, I'm going to read some of the websites that you guys launched. Hotplates.com.
I'm assuming that's sold hotplates. Yeah. Yes. Okay.
Allbarstools.com. I think that's sold. Yes. You're doing good.
You're doing good. All right. Mydinnerplate.com. Nice.
That's a classic. I love this one. Everygrandfatherclock.com. A very hot category online.
Who knew people were searching for that? We did. Robin VR is How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how an online search for birdhouses led two college roommates down an internet rabbit hole that inspired what would become Wayfair, an e-commerce company that now sells almost $5 billion worth home goods each year.
So pretty much everyone we've had on the show had a passion for a product that they needed to put out into the world. Lara Merican believed the world needed Lara Bars. Jenny Britton Bauer was convinced that her ice cream was going to change how people thought about ice cream. Even Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, thought everyone should have access to free knowledge.
But I'm here to tell you that that is not always the case. In fact, sometimes the product isn't what drives the founders. What really drives them is the challenge, or rather, solving the challenge. And that's basically the story behind Wayfair.
Neither Steve Conine nor Niren Shaw felt that strongly about home furnishings. But they did feel like people should have choices, no matter where they lived. Because there was a time when, if you lived in, say, Evansville, Indiana, you couldn't easily get the same type of cool coffee table or sofa that someone in San Francisco or New York could get. And today, Wayfair sells almost $5 billion worth of this stuff every year.
Wayfair was actually the third company Steve and Niren started together. They met as teenagers at a summer camp for math and engineering nerds in the early 1990s. They quickly lost touch. But then, almost a year later, as if fate herself was watching over these guys, they both ended up as first years at Cornell, assigned to dorm rooms on the same corridor.
Did you know both of you, did you know that the other one was going to Cornell? No, we hadn't really kept in touch, so I think it was a surprise. Yeah, pretty much. I was like, hey, what's up?
How you've been this past year? So were you friends, like, right away? Yeah, we were part of it. You know, I think when you're freshman year, you sort of have a small group of friends that you sort of connect with and spend a lot of your time with.
And we were in that group together. And then junior year, Niren and I started, we got to be a lot closer and lived together that year. Junior year and senior year, we actually lived together as well with a few other people up at Cornell. Yeah.
Did you guys, Niren, did you and Steve used to talk about starting a business when you were in college? I don't know that we ever talked about it per se, but our last semester at Cornell, we took an entrepreneurship course as one of our elective courses. And in this entrepreneurship course, one of the things you had to do was create a business plan. And what really happened is through the process of doing a project, which was creating a business plan, we basically started our first business.
Yeah, it was 95. And it was very early years of the internet. The Nescape browser kind of come out that year. Our idea was actually to develop some internet directory services.
And we would go downtown to the New York and try to pitch companies on paying us five bucks down and listing in our internet directory. And of course, most of us would look at us like we're nuts. A few would say, hey, that's interesting, but I don't even have a homepage all the time. Could you help me build a website and maybe at least get a person on the internet?
What would that cost me? And so the business turned into kind of an internet consulting business that built sites for companies. And you kind of knew how to do the basics because you were engineering students? Exactly.
So you'd go from project to project and companies were trying to move very quickly. You know, different people would ask other people who could be hired, so on and so forth. We were one of the few shops that had actually done things. When you would meet, when you guys would go and meet with clients, did you ever get a feeling from any of them that they would look at you and think, wait, these guys are fired?
Wait, this is like a 22-year-old kid. What am I doing here? You know, we did. We were both pretty good sales guys, so I don't remember that being, snacking me too hard.
I mean, I think that, you know, the prices we're charging versus like what they would be looking at for consultancies, I think a lot of these bigger shops look at it as like play money. They're kind of like, well, whatever, how about I'm going to go with a couple of college students here doing this for us? If it works out, phenomenal. If it doesn't work out, you know, whatever.
We haven't really lost a lot. So I guess by that summer, you've graduated from Cornell and then you decided to move to Boston to launch the company? Yeah, so we had, what happened very quickly, as it sort of was clear, well, Ithaca is not really the right place to be. New York, in theory, would be very logical as a place to be, but we both had more of an affinity for Boston and we thought from Boston we could easily work with New York clients or what have you.
So we actually decided to move to Boston at the beginning of that summer. And how were you guys managing, I mean, if you were getting all these projects in, coming in, presumably one of the two of you to do the work, how were you managing all that work? We were working pretty hard. Yeah, we were working a hundred hour weeks.
I mean, we were basically, we set up the living room, we got an apartment, and we flipped coins on who got the bigger bedroom. I won it. Yeah, he won it. And the living room was basically the office, right?
So it was just desks with a young computer, and we worked, which was fine because you're working from like 7 a.m. to midnight, and then you're sleeping for a few hours and doing it again. It was exciting. Did it feel like you guys were building something really big?
Yeah. Yeah, it was our first year out of college. And so we were young, full of energy. It's very, very exciting.
It was all this hype around the internet, and everyone sort of got their eyes on it, looking at how the potential of it. It was a scenario where we first see new technology. You can envision the potential of it very quickly. I think it was awesome to be in the middle of it.
By the way, what did you guys call the company? Spinners. They just spin the web. No.
It was a worldwide web at the time. We were like, oh, spinners, you know if you're a spider, you spin the web. Oh, I see. You spin the web like a spider.
Oh, that's clever. Oh, my God. You guys are super nerds. So how long did spinners last?
About four years. So we started it in the summer of 1995. So I guess that's three years. Or the fall of 1998, so maybe a little over three years when we sold it.
So a little over three years. We were about 40 people when we sold it. Wow. And the internet had heated up a lot, and so there were starting to be some much larger consultancies doing the type of work we were doing.
And we didn't think we could scale as fast as these other ones, so we opted in the end to sell to one. But what did you guys sell it for? We sold it for a company of some cash in equity. I think it was $500,000 cash.
We each got like $250 cash. Does that sound right? I think it might have been a little more than that. I think we might have each gotten like half a million cash.
And then we got equity that was worth a few million bucks that then kind of the dot-com boom kind of went up tremendously and then came all the way, like all the way back. Down to zero? That's where it went. Yeah, got to watch tens of millions of road.
So you guys didn't really walk away with a whole lot of money from that venture? No. No. I remember I had this Merrill statement that says I was worth $27 million when I was probably like a 24-year-old.
I remember thinking I'm all set. And then six months later, it was basically back down to zero. So at one point, you were worth $27 million when you were in your mid-20s, but it was really just on paper. It was just on paper, but boy, what a good lesson to learn as a young fellow.
So this is like the early 2000s, 2000, I guess. And the two of you, I guess, decided to start a new business together, right? We did. Yeah, we had a lot of fun and success in the first one.
We thought, hey, this entrepreneurship thing is easy. Let's take something new and do it again. Yeah, so that takes us. So now we're at the beginning of 2001.
And we're like thinking of different ideas and we're not sure what we want to do. Long story short, we came across this idea around mobile phones. So 2001 was still pretty early for mobile phones. But we found that a lot of companies were starting to have a lot of mobile phones, but they weren't really managing them well because they effectively had thousands of phones, but they were on the wrong ones, they paid too much for some, too little for others.
So our idea was we would build a software platform that would allow these companies to better manage all their phones and their contracts. And we thought over time we could build that in to basically being a virtual carrier focused on enterprises. What's a virtual carrier? Think of Virgin Mobile in the UK where they use a Virgin brand name and they actually operate on top of British Telecom's network.
It's like branding on top of an existing network. To the consumer, it feels like they're buying Virgin Mobile. They don't think they're buying British Telecom. Got it, okay.
What was the company called? Simplify Mobile. Simplify Mobile. Yes.
But you would just call up companies and say, hey, can I talk to the person who handles your mobile phones? Yeah. I'm Steve. Simplify Mobile.
I've got a really great offering. I have to save money on your mobile phones. I'd love to talk to whoever manages that for you. And occasionally you get someone, right?
Yeah. We did have one key flagship customer that we had lined up who was very interested in doing it, which was Merrill Lynch. Big customer. Yeah.
Yeah. They have big phones. And so that was looking quite good. And then unfortunately what happened in 2001 was, you know, say September 11th was a huge impact for everybody and particularly for financial service companies.
In case Merrill Lynch, they lost use of their headquarters in the World Financial Center and their priorities obviously had to dramatically change. So with that, we lost sort of the flagship customer that we anchored around. And so the combination of everything caused us to become much less bullish on this idea, that the odds of it succeeding was just not high enough. It's essentially because many people that have been on the show have had similar experiences, but they've said, you know, we just kept at it.
The first year sucked. And then the second year was less sucky, but we just kept at it. And eventually it took off like a rocket. But you guys just kind of came to this conclusion that it was not going to work.
Yeah. I mean, we were in a business where you look around and we were the only one doing it. And that's always kind of a scary spot to be as well. And I think we thought about the market potential and the odds and what we've learned in that intervening year.
I mean, we spent by the last three months of that business literally just counting the yellow pages, just coming in and just taking rejection all day long and trying to see if we could help. We tried just really hard to try to sell it. And as entrepreneurs, I think we've been a big fan of saying, well, look, you can't. You've got to start with a sale.
If you can't sell anything, you don't have an idea. And so after validating that, I guess, we sort of said, it's time to walk away from this one. Was that rejection hard for you to handle? Was it humiliating?
Did it just weigh you after a while? Not too bad. I mean, it's not a lot of fun. I remember my dad getting a service.
He was a stockbroker for years. And he said, look, when you're going in and calling through the yellow pages, he's like, the thing you have to set yourself a goal. And he's like, your goal needs to be, when you get 30 rejections, you can leave. Because that way, if you look at it, every rejection is a good thing because it gets you closer to your goal.
So it keeps you motivated to working at it. You learn a lot more from when things are going bad than when things are going well. So I think we both, when I started thinking about just getting a job, I remember interviewing a few places and sort of thinking, hey, maybe I should go the more traditional career route. I think we both did that for a while.
And then we just loved being entrepreneurs. So when Simplify Mobile kind of like this was out, you guys both were starting to approach your 30s, right? So you're still pretty young. Did you have a sense of what you were going to do next?
Of course, you're going to get into furniture. Yeah, I mean, furniture on the internet. It's where it's all at. So what did you guys do?
I mean, you wind this business down. You're still presumably thinking, let's continue to work together. We went right back to the drawing board. So we started looking at that point.
We got very... Were you living in my basement at this point? That's right. So I, in your downstairs bedroom.
Yeah, so I was living there. Because we kind of brainstormed stuff. Right. And then my girlfriend at the time moved up from New York.
And I'm like, honey, it's a great deal. We can just live here. And the deal was, you bought the groceries. Yeah, and we bought the groceries.
And that only lasted about two weeks, though, before she decided that we really should get our own place. When you say e-commerce, what were they selling? I remember there was one lady who was selling birdhouses. She was storing them in a garage every day.
She was paying all the orders and collecting all the items out of the garage and packing them up. And taking them to the post office. And selling them online. Yeah, all birdhouses.com.
The theme we found was really simple. Consumers had realized they could go online and search for any product category they wanted. There were a lot of product categories like birdhouses that are just not really available locally with good selection. If you want to buy a birdhouse locally where you live today, where would you go if you want a decent selection?
You'd go to a local store and you'd find two or three different birdhouses and then you'd have to pick one of them. Exactly. And pretty basic styles, right? Because they're only going to have three or four, right?
And so all of a sudden, people started to realize, well, I don't have to be stuck with that. I can go online. And find a hundred different options. Exactly.
I can order whatever I want. I save the time of the trip to the store. It'll show up in the mail. Super easy.
And so about a month's worth of research kind of helped us figure that out. And so what we ended up doing is we ended up deciding that there was a big opportunity in buying these businesses. So the first website we ended up launching, we launched a site called racksandstands.com at the very end of August of that year. Which was?
TV stands and speaker stands. So it was entertainment furniture. Did you have a particular passion for TV and speaker stands? I was a mechanical engineer out of Cornell.
These things are central. But you know what you find? In those days, on Yahoo search, you could type in terms and it would tell you how many searches a month there were for that item. And on some of the product comparison sites, they would tell you their top 100 categories.
And so both of those terms were in the top 100 search product terms. Wow. So people were looking for TV and speakers. Why wouldn't they just go to their local, like...
You couldn't find anywhere to sell them. Same thing about just selection of only two or three. You can't find a good selection. The furniture stores want to focus on living room, bedroom, dyeing furniture.
So where would you go? Yeah. So wait, so you're thinking, all right, our first one is going to bring themselves TV and speaker stands. Just out of curiosity, where did you even go to find TV and speaker stands?
Well, in the beginning, what you do is you go online and you look for companies that made them. You also look at what the other online retailers were selling, what brands that they have. And you buy the audio file magazines and flip through and see what brands they're advertising. And so did you just buy a bunch of...
of TV and speaker stands and just have them shipped to your apartment in Boston? No, so at the time there was a bunch of electronics distributors that actually would stock small amounts of speaker stands and so we initially started off buying through them. So we'd buy out of their inventory so we had no inventory risk so it was all drop shipped out of distributors. And somebody would go to Yahoo or Google and type in speaker stands and that was one of the things that would magically come up?
Exactly. They'd click into it and it's the promised land if you're looking for speaker stands. So when did you launch the website? August 29th, 2002.
2002. And how long before you had your first orders? Hours. Hours?
Yeah, hours. When we come back, guys, you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 2002 and Steve Conine and Eric Shaw are on their third business idea. They're selling TV stands on the internet. It's a site called racksandstands.com and this was a time when a lot of people thought e-commerce was dead but Nearest and Steve they thought it was very much alive so they started to advertise. Google had just launched AdWords which is, you know, keyword bidding.
Right, people would pay money for Yeah, you'd write your text ad and you'd basically pay per click and we would track every time we got an order which advertising unit drove in so we'd either bid those up or bid them down if they were non-productive. And what kind of advertisements were they? What would they say? They'd be text ads.
You know, largest selection available TV stands or less. Hundreds available. Racksandstands.com So if you were a consumer you'd click on this and if you were adventurous in 2002 you would put your credit cards into the computer and then it would go to you guys and then you guys would order it from one of these companies and then have that company directly shipped to that customer? Exactly, correct.
We launched it the brand of August so September, October, November, December the fourth month in business in December of 2002 we did about $250,000 in sales in the category. Racksandstands. Racksandstands. And we grew to be one of the largest or the largest online seller in the category and what happened is our suppliers started telling us hey, you know, you become my biggest online retailer of TV stands or speaker stands or whatever but you know, my other online guys sell more of my beds or my other online guys sell more of my desks and so we started learning that in fact these other furniture categories that we hadn't focused on that they were doing quite well online as well.
And I have to assume that just like getting this off the ground wasn't that expensive, right? It didn't require a whole lot of capital. No, it didn't. There were some computers we'd pay, I don't know, $15 a month for hosting on a shared hosting platform and we had a couple computers in our office but it was very expensive.
We didn't pay ourselves a dime for the first year and a half or two. That was the biggest leverage was that we didn't need to pay ourselves and that we knew how to also build the software and do that work. We didn't hire anyone to do that work. And did you have a number on the website like a customer service number that people would call and you know, I don't complain?
We did. There's four phone lines in my house that it would ring right near my bed. And you were like one hand you were like programming the technology and the other hand you were picking up the phone? Yeah, well this is the beauty of that stuff.
So once you start selling racks and stands and you do pretty well what's the next category you go to? Mounts. TV mounts. TV mounts.
And we were surprised. So what happened in that time frame also the 2002 time frame is two different things. TV mounts were not widely available so we had a gym and you wanted to hang some TV mounts if you didn't know where else to buy them so on and forth. The other thing that happened is flat screen TV started becoming more popular and so people wanted to hang those on the wall and so our timing on that was quite good so we saw this huge sales sort of start, you know, kind of momentum so then we built a site just for that to have every type in.
What was it called? Mountsandmore.com But it didn't really matter what you called it, right? Because you would make sure that the search ended. Oh, these were brilliant branding.
The traffic was primarily driven by the advertising we do. The paid search and other forms of advertising that we would do. So the key to the name of the site wasn't so much that it was something someone would type in or that was memorable or they'd pick it over other items. It was more that it made sense as a place you would go for this item.
All right, so TV mounts and then how did that do? That did phenomenally well. We were the Mount Kingsman Internet. Oh my God.
And so then what came next? I think we started kind of a new beachhead and outdoor furniture and so we started a site called Teak Wicker & More which was basically outdoor furniture. I mean, it's so interesting because you didn't have to build a brick and mortar store and you didn't have to stand outside with a sandwich board saying, come on, 10% off today. Try our sample.
You just put this out on the Internet. You figured out how search worked and people... That was a sandwich board. That was a sandwich board.
We paid Google to run the sandwich board for us. And you didn't have to take in any outside investment at that time because the revenue from each expanding website was fueling the business? It was. I mean, this business is cool.
From that day, it runs a positive cash cycle so customers would pay us right away and we didn't have to pay suppliers for 30 to 45 days and so you had this kind of natural cash cushion. So yes, we were able to self-fund it very well. Do you remember how much revenue you were doing in, you know, I don't know, by like... 2003, 2004.
Do you remember yours? Yeah, so 2002 was our first year. We did about $700,000. 2003 was our second year.
I think we did about $7 million. And then the following year, 2004, I think we did $27 million. Wow. I mean, you probably had to just hire tons of people, tons and tons of people fast.
Yeah, so we started hiring as early as January 2003. We hired a couple people then. We probably ended that year with, you know, 15 people or something like that. And then that became the model that grows.
You know, we would be reinvesting aggressively by hiring people so that we could keep expanding the selection and expanding the categories, which then gave us more things to advertise, which then would get us more customers, you know, and that was the virtuous cycle. And we would take the money that resulted and we would invest that into growing the team to keep thriving. Just curiously, when people ask you, like, oh, Nersh, what are you up to? What are you doing in the States?
Would you say, oh, I'm selling TV stands? Like, how would you describe your business to people? I remember one time I was very uninterested in describing what we're doing and a lot of Indians in the United States are doctors. They assume I was a doctor.
And I'm like, oh, no, no, I'm so high, doctor. Oh, no, no, I'm not a doctor. No, I just sell furniture. Because if you say you sell furniture, no one's interested.
There's no problem. No, no, no, it's like silence is the conversation. Oh, I see, right? Yeah.
So that's a good way to wrap up the conversation. So obviously what you were doing is, of course, what would become Wayfair, but at this point, you started calling it CSN stores, right? It was a generic name we could use across any category. It helped with two key things, basically.
One is we needed a company name that sort of implied we had a lot of stores. Yeah, CSN stores. You don't want to just name it after one of the names, right? The second is, a lot of the suppliers are very traditional companies.
And so when we would go to the high-point furniture market and approach suppliers, you want to be able to get into a conversation with them. And during this time frame, 2002, 2003, 2004, they're still not very keen on e-commerce. They're not dead set against it, but their experiences have been poor. And so what happens is when you're badged to CSN stores, and where are you based?
So we're in Boston. Oh, we're in Boston. Oh, we're right in Back Bay. Oh, we have an office on Newberry Street.
Oh, great. Oh, what do you guys focus on? Oh, well, we're really focused on entertainment furniture. Oh, what do you carry?
Oh, we carry this brand, that brand, this other brand. Oh, great. You get into a conversation and they say, well, what are you interested in? Oh, we'd really be interested in this selection.
We think we'd do well for these reasons. And they say, oh, well, how big is your store? At that point, you'd say, you'd be honest. You'd say, well, we actually sell online.
And if you had to discuss online too early in the conversation, you'd get kicked out of the show. They didn't want you, they didn't want to be involved with that? Yeah, if you came in and it was like eshop.com, they knew right away. It's an internet guy.
But now they've gotten into a 20-minute conversation with you and you sound very rational and you're carrying a bunch of good brands. So now they're like, well, you know, I don't really do much e-commerce business, but maybe this doesn't make sense. Let's have a little more of a conversation. So the generic name helps you get deep enough into a conversation for them to really consider and understand you, which was really important in those days.
So, all right, I'm going to read a very hot category online. Painful to ship. Who knew people were searching for that? We did.
You could look online and see what people are looking for. Well, we definitely did. That was, I mean, you would find categories and then you would basically get these domain names and you started to build a huge business that way. Yeah, we got 250 of these.
How are you managing 250 different websites? How did you even get your head around that? We had a very good tech platform that was built around the idea of building. We had a centralized product catalog and then when calls came in, our call system would tell you exactly what the call was coming into saying you had to answer the phone.
Did you ever have a situation where somebody called the customer service number for racksandstands.com and then said, oh, thanks, I'm still looking around and then called the customer service number for mounts.com and then got the same customer service rep on the phone? Oh, yeah. When it was just your time working, it didn't happen all the time. Didn't they just talk to you at racksandstands.com?
They usually didn't put it together. It was the funniest thing. You were trying to hide it from them but they just didn't put it together. I heard that by 2010 you hit almost $400 million in sales.
You had almost 5 million customers and you had this aggregation of 250 websites. Nobody would have known what CSN stores necessarily was. No one knew who you guys were. I mean, people just knew allbarstools.com stopped and think about it.
I mean, it's like watching your kid grow up a little bit. It's just happening so incrementally and you're just following this playbook that you've got that's working well that when you step back from it and think, oh, wow, this has actually gotten huge. You try not to do that too much because it gets scary. And how about your relationship with the two of you?
I mean, it's just you guys are wired in such a way where you just kind of chilled out and get along and you don't have any tension. I mean, it is crazy that you're still, after all these years from high school, you're working together. No, gosh, it's interesting. When we first started working together, I can remember having arguments where he was usually right and he was telling me something I needed to hear but I really didn't want to hear it.
And of course, my emotion would flare up and I remember having to walk out of the room and just be like, I got to go walk on the block and just be cursing my breath at him for half an hour. When we got into this business, we were a lot more mature as individuals and had been through a lot of that, had both gained and lost a lot of money together. So I think, you know, greed is one of the things that can create a lot of tension in partnerships. I think we'd gotten past a lot of that and we'd also gotten to where we valued each other's advice and it got to the point where we were like, those traits may not be as common as you would think.
In 2011, I guess, it was when you decided that you needed to scale this even bigger and this is the first time you actually took in outside investment. Why did you allow venture capitalists to get involved in this company? We're definitely ones who would rather just fund it ourselves or self-fund the business than have it fund itself. The challenge became, in 2011, we believe the big opportunity to continue the trajectory and to really capture the big opportunity we need to build a brand.
And the amount of capital we thought to go through that migration and to build a brand that it would take was not an amount we could self-fund. Because you did not have a brand. CSN was not enough of a brand. Right.
You know, consumers didn't know that brand. It wasn't, you want to brand that one. You know, you think, hey, I need to shop. I want to redo my living room.
You want someone to think, oh, I go to Wayfair. You want it to be a top-of-mind brand for a category, right? And that's not easy to do and even if you figure out how to do it, it's not inexpensive by any stretch, right? So we wanted to be able to do that.
The other, just minor dynamic I think that happened is investors, it started to change the pitch to being purely from we want to invest in a buy part of your company too. Hey, So it took about a year for all these sites to kind of consolidate on Wayfair and to the consumer Wayfair it seemed like a brand new thing, right? It did, yeah. It just kind of came out of nowhere.
People were kind of like, wow, this is a cool place to shop for home. And it's the fact that you guys got into home goods, it had to do with the fact that people were searching for these products. In other words, you could have ended up being a company that sold like personal grooming products, right? Yeah, the one thing I would say, you know, home, the beauty of home, most categories, people want to all buy the same things each other, right?
So, you know, AA batteries, you buy Duracell or Energizer or the private label. There's only a couple categories where a huge selection is really a key piece where visual and aesthetic considerations are very paramount where people want unique items and the two are really fashion and home. And we basically, by focusing on home where the logistics are quite complicated and different, where there are no brands, where the visual merchandising is critical, where people have a very unique style, and you can fight that out and try to find an advantage, but typically the advantage is either in price or speed, there's really no other way to do it. And so the beauty in home is that it's more multifaceted and it doesn't, if someone, a winner in these other categories, it doesn't automatically make you a winner in home.
You're a public company, you are listed on the Stock Exchange, right? Yep. And the company, I believe, is valued at more than $3 billion, $8 billion. I mean, could you imagine, obviously, both of you guys are still pretty on your mid-40s and, you know, there are other things you could conceivably do with your lives, you could start another company.
Could you imagine, I don't know, like an Amazon or Walmart, you know, coming to you and saying, hey, guys, we want to buy your company, we're going to give you X billion dollars. Could you ever imagine accepting that or agreeing to that? You need to be prudent, right? So we know all those folks.
You, of course, would have conversations with anyone who wants to have a conversation. Last year, we grew 40% from the year prior. You know, the company's getting bigger at a fast rate, and if you believe you can do a lot for the customer, that is more than anyone else can do, well, why wouldn't that continue to grow at a fast rate? So it's really super early days if, in fact, we can be the best.
So it would be very premature to think about selling it if we think we can win. How much of the success of your partnership has been? and the businesses you built is because of your intelligence and your skills and how much because of just lack and serendipity. It's all near to scale.
I just jumped to the office daily. You know, it's obviously a bit of both. I don't know that there are dramatic intellectual skill differences in humans in general, so I think it tends to be, you know, your ability to focus and keep doubling down on your own and believe in yourself and your work ethic and continue to focus on a narrow enough set of things you can win in, and we've been good at kind of staying focused on that and not listening to other people who tell you to try and do other things. You know, serendipity and luck always play a little bit of a role, right?
With all this stuff and home furnishings that you've done, are either of you any good at interior design? Nierd likes to think he has a design eye. He likes to comment on design, let's say that. And what about you, Steve?
I have a very clean, modern aesthetic in my home. And Nierd is, he has a much more traditional look. Your wife would probably kill me when she hears me say that. Exactly.
That's Nierd Shaw and Steve Conai, founders of Wayfair. I talked to them back in April of 2018, and today, in the midst of a pandemic, the company is actually doing incredibly well because so many more people are now shopping from home. In the last quarter, revenue at Wayfair jumped to $4 billion and the company just announced that it's profitable for the first time since going public. And by the way, one last question for you guys.
What's the weirdest domain name that you ever registered? What's the rooster decor one? Allroosterdecor.com. That's probably the best one, yeah.
People want rooster decor? Rooster, vases, pitchers, planners, pots, you name it. It's got a rooster. We're going to try to find a source and sell it to you.
I just cannot imagine having a bunch of rooster decor in my house, but that's just me. Maybe I'm weird. Someday you'll visit someone who's got a lot. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis or at Guy Raz. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Ramteen and Arab Louis.
Thanks also to Candace Lim, Derek Gales, JC Howard, Julia Carney, Neil Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.