How I Built This with Guy Raz - Evite: Selina Tobaccowala

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

At the height of the first dot-com boom, Selina Tobaccowala and college friend Al Lieb were determined to start a tech company. After a few false starts, they landed on the idea for Evite—an on-line invitation business that within its first year, attracted a million followers and $37 million in investment. When the tech bubble burst, Selina and Al were forced to lay off dozens of employees before selling Evite in 2001. But the company has survived to this day, and Selina remains a role model for women in tech. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," Jamia Ramsey describes how her frustration with pink ballerina tights led her to create Blendz, apparel for dancers that matches darker skin tones. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com. The way that the dot-com was at the time was, you know, eyeballs. It was like everything was about like growth in the traffic and there was no discussion or talk about revenue. And then the bubble burst.

And all of a sudden, it went from spend, spend, spend to, oh, my gosh, we need to fire the team. So you guys had to lay off more than half of the people who worked at the company. We went down from 73 to 28. That was one of the toughest days in my career, even to this point. Brahmin PR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two friends from college pioneered the idea for online invitations and then rode the ups and downs of the dot-com bubble with their company, Evite. If you were to write a business idea in haiku form, it would go something like this.

It solves a problem, super easy to explain, people will use it. And back in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were a lot of problems that were right for solving, including paper, or rather how to use less of it. Think about the last time you wrote a letter on paper or filled out a registration form with a pen or filed a physical document into a metal filing cabinet, right? For the most part, email and electronic documents have replaced paper. Same with invitations.

Most of the invites I get, and I'm pretty sure you get, come in an email. And for that simple convenience, you can thank Selena Tobacco Allo. Because back in the late 1990s, Selena and her friend Al Lieb wrote the code that would power the first online invitation business, Evite. And for a time, Evite was a darling of the dot-com bubble. Within two years of its founding, it was valued at around $150 million. Of course, when the bubble burst in 2000, so did Evite's value. But unlike other dot-com-era companies such as Cosmo or Pets.com or Lycos or GioCities, Evite hung in there and it's still around today. In fact, invitations from Evite reach more than 100 million people a year.

The company is now owned by Liberty Media, and while it has tons of competitors, Evite is still one of the biggest players in online invitations. As for Selena Tobacualla, she's still an important name in Silicon Valley. She's become a kind of role model for women and girls who want to get into tech. In fact, back when she was a kid, she loved computer. She was obsessed with them. She grew up in Ramsey, New Jersey, the daughter of two immigrants from India. From my parents' perspective, if you ask who I was, I mean, I was always that person like waving my hand in the air with the answer in class,

which I think annoyed a lot of my teachers most of the time. I love to read. I am a terrible athlete. but I always love team sports. And it was something that was important to me. I actually was voted basketball captain of my Ramsey High School basketball team, but not because of my athletic ability, but only because I built a stats program in high school

to help the other players shoot better. Wow. You built a stats program on your home computer? I did. It was on the Ami Pro database, and I used to come home after every game and, like, database who shot from where. and then print out a sheet the next day and give it to the good players.

And they eventually decided that they wanted me to be their captain, which was very funny because I'd only play the last two minutes of the game, either if we were really up or really behind. How did you get into computers as a kid? So it was really from the influence of my dad. He started off as a punch card programmer for a company called EDS, and he was there for, I think, about 25 years. and he rose from being this punch card programmer to a multimedia president, a couple levels away from the CEO of this huge organization. And he always exposed us to technology when he would take us to work every so often. We would see that entire, you know, it was a huge mainframe and servers and you'd walk in and you'd see all the computers and the technology. And it was just always exciting to me.

And so he brought a computer home probably when I was, you know, eight, nine, ten years old. And I got excited about coding and starting to build things. And then my mom schlepped me to summer coding camps in all different places across New Jersey to expose me to it more. I mean, this is before, like now, of course, every parent's like, I want my kid to learn out of code. But like in the sort of early mid-80s, that was not the thing. What were you learning? What was the code? So I'm pretty sure it was logo and basic at the time.

And then I do remember learning Pascal when I was in middle school. Were you often one of the only girls in those classes? Definitely. And if I look back now, I think about that. I remember I took the AP computer science class in my high school, and I'm pretty sure I was the only girl in class, but it never occurred to me at the time. Do you remember, like, even as a teenager thinking,

like when you ask a teenager, what do you want to be when you grew up? And, you know, some of them have an answer, and some of them might say the president and some of might, you know, say a businessman or a billionaire. Like, would you say, I want to do something in computers? Right from high school, I wanted to do something in computers. Like, that was what I got excited about. That's what I wanted to study.

And when I was looking at colleges, you know, I was only focused on, okay, what are the best colleges for computer science? And that was my criteria. And so you decide to go to the West Coast to Stanford. Yeah. This is like the beginning of the dot com. Boom, like dot com 1.0. Did you get that feeling that was that, I don't know, was that energy present on campus in 1994? So that energy of starting a company and the company starting around you and that.com boom, I mean, that was all around you, especially by 1996, 1997.

I mean, there was excite, there was Yahoo. There was so many different companies. And that idea that you were a computer scientist and you could go start a company was absolutely in the air. Because 1994, an important year, right, the year net. The Netscape browser comes out for mass use. Do you remember using the web for the first time? I mean, I don't remember the exact moment I used the web for the first time, but I remember that my year, 1994 freshman year,

was the first year everybody had email. All my high school friends had email. And it just changed everything. Like that time in computer technology was just this mass shift to introducing that consumer to all of this content and communications that nobody had access to prior. I guess, like, in your first year, you met somebody who would go on to be an important business co-founder and partner later on a guy named Al Lieb. How did you meet him?

So I lived in an all-freshman dorm called Branner, and two doors down for me was this guy, Al. And he was from Wisconsin. He was a swimmer. But he loved computers. And he was always building stuff. And this will age us. We worked on the first yearbook that was going to be digital instead of physical. We put it on a multimedia CD and distributed it to all the brand or freshmen.

And it was just photos and you would put the CD in and there's your yearbook. Yeah, exactly. So you and Al, like, you work on this yearbook. And then did you just continue to kind of talk about ideas? So I had a little blip, which was I took a computer science class in my freshman year. And I didn't do that well. And I got a little nervous, which is, is this the right field for me? And that summer, I got a job, which was what I thought was going to be databasing activity in the mall.

And it turned out I was the mall greeter where I would literally stand there and say, welcome to Paramus Park. And I was complaining about it to my friend's dad. he ran the IT department for an investment bank called Warburg Pincus. And he said, quit your mall job, come intern for me. And I had the most amazing summer experience. I helped build one of the first websites for this investment bank. We built this application called morning meeting notes to help them, you know, record all their Monday meetings. And I fell back in love with computer science. And it was really then my sophomore year that I went full steam ahead on CS. It was once I saw using computer science in the real world, and I saw I was, I reaffirmed that I was good at it. You know, when you walk into Stanford and all of a sudden, you know, you have been the valedictorian and you've been the best student in your class, and then you walk in and all of a sudden, you're average. And it makes you question in the sense of like, oh, am I going to be good at this

when I get out into the real world? And having that summer experience, I saw, I can do this. I can make this work and I love it. So you go back to Stanford? Yeah. And what happens? You know, I kept in touch with Al. We weren't actually computer partners. He liked to work alone. Most of our projects she did with three people. And Al definitely was somebody who said, I'm faster doing it by myself. And so we didn't necessarily work together on projects in our sophomore year. And then in my junior year, I went and studied abroad in Berlin. And I was supposed to be there for two quarters, my fall quarter and my winter quarter. And your winter quarter is supposed to be an internship. And so I was talking to all these German companies. And I get this email from Al and says, hey,

I'm thinking about starting a company. You're the first person I thought of, do you want to do it together? And I thought and I looked, I said, there's so much going on in Silicon Valley. There's no technology going on in Berlin. There was no internship I was excited about. And I said, yes. And I came back to Stanford for the winter, and we started planning. What was his idea?

So we had, at the time, a pretty terrible idea. Our company was actually called Udleworks, which stood for object-oriented. template language. And we had this idea that we were going to help other people code using graphics. We were going to democratize coding to everybody. And we tested it with a bunch of our other friends and just said, okay, you're not a computer scientist. Like, can you use this? Can you try it out? And so it was kind of that early form of user testing. And it was very clearly and quickly that it wasn't that useful. And people who weren't computer scientists weren't actually that interested in coding. But we weren't ready to just give up on starting.

a company because there was so much excitement about starting the company and that we had really little to lose at that time. I mean, I was still in college. He had just graduated. You know, our expenses weren't high. And so this idea of we're just going to keep working until we find an idea that works. And that was the mode we were in. And what were you guys actually doing?

Like, take me into the brain center of that company. Were you just sitting at your computers and tapping away at keys? We would brainstorm and we would go back and forth and talk about different ideas. And then, yeah, then we'd like sit down and we just code and we code all day. And then I'd go to class and then I'd come back and code. But we had just a few different ideas. And we landed then sometime in kind of late 97, early 98 on this idea called collage. What was that?

So the idea behind collage was that you had now all this information on the web. You know, you would go on Netscape and you had your hometown newspaper, you had ESPN sports, which you might love. You might have the latest recipe of the day on the food network. And the idea was, is that you could clip together stuff from all over the web, create your own homepage. And then algorithmically, we would update it for you as things updated. And this was before My Yahoo, before that concept of creating a homepage. And that was our vision and our idea. And the concept was, is you'd wake up every morning.

and you'd come see the information that was relevant and important to you. Yeah. And so, like, to build collage, I'm assuming it probably didn't cost you that much because it was just your time, right? Yeah. So we had spent $299 on a Fry's server, and that was our only cost and then our little tiny office space. And the rest of it was just time. And we were, you know, living with a – I was living with a bunch of roommates, and we used to actually have like a $5. a day budget we set for ourselves for lunch for both of us and we would try to game it to like get

enough food. So I mean did you guys manage to like create a really working product like a web app or we didn't we're calling web apps but a site. Yeah so we created this site that you would go to. You'd create your collage page and then you could bookmark it and you could every day you could come back or a few times a day and you'd get updates on it whether it was your stocks, whether it your weather, whether it was your local news, the national news. And we started to get some consumers on it, but we also started to see the portals. We started to see Yahoo, excite. Really, those were the two big ones really starting to take off. And we thought, oh, okay, this is really interesting because these are becoming people's homepages, but they're not personalized. They're generic.

So no matter who you were, you would get the same article on the front page. So we thought, oh, our homepage is way better, right? We're letting you customize it for you. And so let's go talk to them and see if they'd be interested in buying our product. All right. But how does a senior in college and a recent graduate get that meeting? Or maybe it was easier then. So that is the beauty of the Stanford network.

You know, these are the things that you can't discount when you think about privilege that people have. It's like you reach out to, you know, an executive at Excite and our executive at Yahoo. and you say, I'm the senior from Stanford. You know, we'd love to talk to you about a product we built, and they take the meeting. So that's what happened, like you or Al or both of you, like, approached whoever was running Excite and said, hey, can we talk? It was, yeah, we approached Joe Krause, Craig Donato, like all these guys, and we said, hey, like, we want to talk to you about this product we've built. And we want to come demo it for you. And they're like, sure, come show it to us.

So when you went to Excite, what did you do? you kind of walked them through what you created and what was their reaction? So we walked them through what we created and their reaction was like, wow, this is really cool. We can see our users would love this concept of personalization and that wasn't there yet on the internet. Yeah. And it's just obviously so foreign to what's there today. But if you think about the internet in 1997, 1998, it was mainly content sites. So, all right, just to pause here first, first like, you were a senior in college.

And you're like in the boardroom of excite with Al who had graduated like a semester before you. And you've got you got this like business thing going. Did you at any moment think when I graduate I have to get like a stable, real job? Or did you think, all right, I'm going to jump in and do this? Because this is like at a time. I mean, now everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. But like in 1998, it wasn't so clear cut. Like there wasn't much of a template, right?

So I will always remember this day. There was the Stanford Job Fair. And I was at work, and we were renting this, you know, tiny office space. And I called my dad. And whenever I have issues or questions, even to this day, I call my dad. And I said, hey, dad, you know, I don't know whether to go to the Stanford Job Fair. And he said three things to me. He asked me three questions.

He said, do you like working with Al? And I was like, yeah, it's great. I'm, you know, I learn a ton from him. We challenge each other. It's fun. And then he said, do you. you enjoy what you're working on? I was like, yeah, I really think we're going to, like, help people use the web better. I love the product. I love the mission. And he said, are you learning?

And I was like, absolutely. Like, I'm learning faster than I think I would in any other situation. And he said, what's the harm in taking the risk? Like, don't look back. Go put your whole heart into it and go after it. And I have used those same three criteria, which is people first, you know, product slash mission, and what am I going to learn in every business and career decision I've made since then. So you decide, all right, we're going to make a go at this. You're at excite, and they are, sorry, excited about this, this thing that you guys build, collage. And what do they say? Do they say, hey, you know, we want to buy you? We want to work with us. What was their response? So we go ahead and sign this business deal with them, which in retrospect was horrible.

but we licensed our technology and product to them exclusively. So we gave them this huge window of time that they had exclusivity. And that meant we couldn't actually go work with slash sell it to anybody else in that time frame. So just let me try to understand this. You guys go in there with no one to kind of guide you through the process and they say, hey, we want to license this and here's some money. And you guys are like, great, let's do it. Yeah, I think the check was like $50,000 or $55,000 that we were going to get for the licensing when it launched. Sounds like insane money.

Right. Yeah. It was like, oh, my God, that's like an amazing amount of money. And so we like signed. And of course later, you know, when I talked to my dad about it, he's like, you signed what? Like, what were the terms? And but we had no idea. Like we were just so excited about it.

So you guys sign this licensing deal with Excite. They give you a $50,000 check, which is. More money than you've ever seen in your life. They don't give it to us. They weren't going to give it to us until we launched. And that's another story. Wait. Oh, so you got you.

Okay. So they didn't give you the check. They gave you the promise of a check once they launch. Yeah, until they launched or until I think it was like in November of 1998. So your job is to help them launch this thing out into the world. So what were you guys doing in 1998? Were you going into the excite offices and trying to make that happen? I was literally going there.

every day. And I would talk to the different product managers who were in charge of the homepage and I would show it to them and I like got to know people there. And we kept moving forward to try to get it out the door. And we were very close. But what happened? We're doing this final review with the executive team. And at this point now, they have a lawyer. And a lawyer comes in the room and says, you can't just steal this content from all these different websites. Like you have to, we have to go license this content. people. We have to go have these business conversations. And then all of a sudden, it was just dead in the water. Wow. Wait. So it's dead in the water, but does that mean you guys can take collage back and try and

retool it and sell it somewhere else? No, because we had signed this agreement that it was exclusive until November of 1998. So we said, okay, we need to like let that go until then and we need to work on other things. And so this was in like the early summer. And we started building other products. So you ended up getting nothing from Excite. Oh, so eventually when the expiration date came around, I, you know, called and I said, hey, you guys owe us this money. And we had no money. And so it meant a lot to us. So every day I'd call and I'd call. And this poor admin started to feel bad for me. And she said, okay, I see your agreement. I'm going to go into my boss and I'm going to try to get your check. And eventually, she got the check for us. And I think I sent her flowers because she was so excited that she got this check for us.

So you walk away from Excite with $50,000 but no product. And Excite, for the record, does not exist anymore, right? No, no. They got bought by at home eventually. Is that still around? I don't think so either. God. I love this period. I love this like period in Internet history because a lot of Like, so many of these companies were massive, and then we don't even remember them. All right, so you and Al go back to the drawing board. By the way, were you guys, like, crushed when it was clear that they were not going to put, you know, bring collage out into the world? So we had gone back to the drawing board much earlier because we saw that, okay, we signed this business deal.

We can keep trying to get them to do it. But in between, we need more ideas. We need more products. And so that summer, before even the November, we started building more products. This is the summer of 98. Summer of 98. We were in this like small office space on California Avenue. And a lot of the people in our building were these like small consulting shops.

This is in Palo Alto. This is in Palo Alto. And we started to think we said, okay, how are all these consultants scheduling their meetings and scheduling their tasks with all of their clients? because this time there wasn't this like web-based mail, web-based calendaring. Everything was just internal to your company. So we built this product, WebTo-Doo and WebCal. And we were going to go sell this product into company. This was going to be like what Google Calendar is today?

Yeah, so it was almost like the calendarly and Google Calendar. And so we built out these apps. We put on dress clothes. I still remember, like, we got, both of us got a suit. I said, okay, we're going to go sell this to people. And we went to this big consulting shop and we did the whole pitch. And this guy says to us, he says, so you're telling me, if I want to schedule a meeting, I have to send it to Boston. I'm like, send it to Boston.

He's like, well, that's where my computers are that run our servers. And we were like, no, it goes over the internet. He's like, no, no, if it goes over the internet, what does that mean? That's not going to work. My servers are in Boston. And so we go back and forth in this discussion. And we leave there. And as we're leaving, Al takes off his tie and he throws it.

And he says, that's it. And Al's the calmest person you'll ever meet in the world. And so this was like, he said, that's it. We're going to figure out and do something for the consumers. And so we go to the grocery store, which is where we had lunch most days, because that was the easiest place to find cheap food. We're sitting outside. And we said, oh, well, what if we take this web calendar thing and we let consumers do it?

Let them organize stuff with. their friends. And that was the birth of Evite. And this was July, August, 1998. So you had gone to, like, businesses. You were thinking this is going to be a B-to-B product. And when you get that pushback, you both sort of decide to how with these businesses. Let's just put it out into the world and see if just ordinary people want to use it. That's exactly right. We started selling their businesses, and we just knew we said this is not the people we want to work with. We want to be consumers. We want to scale. And, you know, the part of what I've always loved about technology is this idea that you can use technology and reach millions and millions of people. And just

that's why I've always been focused on consumers. And just to kind of be clear, like, Eva, it was and it is, but then, I'm assuming it's similar to what it is now, which is you could get a template and design a cool digital invitation that would kind of be emailed to somebody, and then they would open it up as an attachment. So you would receive an email, and one of the learnings we had was you couldn't put the information in the email because then nobody would click through. So we put enough information in the email to entice you, and then you would click through, and you would come to this page to RSVP. And that was the main function, was finding out who is coming. And we built other features on, the ability to do potlucks, the ability to take different payment from people to give a gift.

I mean, there was a lot of it. But at the core base, Evite was always a place to find out who is coming. So you would go to the site and there'd be these different channels like baby shower, happy hour, sporting event, fundraiser for schools. And that made it easy to kind of, it was a template that made it easy for you to just like pick some graphics and then send it out. Exactly. So you as the creator would pick, you know, your category and then that would trigger a whole bunch of other stuff. Was there anything out there like it at the time? Not when we first launched. There was nothing that we knew about like it.

And then after we launched, there was service after service after service. See you there, time dance, when.com. There was so many competitors that came what we believe was after us. All right. So in July, I guess, of 98, you guys launch Evite. You launched this new product. How did you launch it? Was it just a web page that you just put out into the world?

It was a web app. We just put it out. And it was called Evite right from the beginning. And the first Evite was my indoor soccer team, which goes back to the fact that I'm not that athletic, but I always love team sports. And I invited my team. And then we actually had to go back to our consulting because we had to make money. Yeah. I mean, just to be clear, you guys were consulting on the side, right?

Like coding projects for other companies. Yeah. So we were contracting on the side to try to make our ends meet. Yeah. And we were working on this project. And I'm very, very clumsy. We have this fries server underneath our desk, and I actually trip over the cable. And the phone rings.

And somebody calls and says, like, hey, what happened to Evite? And so we plug it back in and we turn it on. And we realized at this moment that Evite itself had been growing. You know, someone from the indoor soccer team used it and invited somebody else, and they invited somebody else. And this was way before the concept of viral marketing was a word. But it was built into the product. This product virality was there and it was built naturally into the way Evite worked.

And I guess presumably the only way to get some attention is to start using it yourself, to send it out to your friends. You send it out to your soccer crew. But then how did other people find out about it? With the way that Evite was designed by nature, as soon as you send one, there was an average of 18 other people that found out about it. And then one of those people just had to say, oh, this is interesting. I'm going to go ahead and create an Evite. and then they kept spreading. So the idea was to get people to use it instead of paper invitations or just an email

because people still did paper invitations in 1998. We had a tagline on one of our T-shirts in 2000 that said paper invitations are so 90s. But the future was going to be electronic and no one was going to send out paper. And so this was a way to do it and it was going to be for free. Yeah. When you look at that time and that dot-com boom, everything was for free. You had email that had just come out, which was like Yahoo Mail, Excite Mail, Hot Mail, which was the big one. Yeah.

And then there was the beginning of the instant messenger platforms that were messaging back and forth. So if you think that when you look at what had happened to the Internet, it had started out as this content where all people were doing was consuming information. And then as the pipe started to get bigger, as people started to get more comfortable, it started to more veer towards communication and commerce. And that was sort of the big lift in the dot-com boom where people started to buy thing. You had pets.com. You had stamps.com. And then people started to communicate using email, instant messenger, products like Evite. And that was the really the influx of that dot-com boom. So you and L had had this kind of, let's say, bad experience with Excite, right? Because you license the thing you built. It didn't work out. You really kind of walked away from that with very little.

this time around, I'm assuming you wanted to be a little wiser and to do it on your terms. Yeah, so this time around, you know, we had this product which was kind of growing on its own and we were getting excited about it. And I, you know, tell my parents and my mom actually uses it to invite people to Thanksgiving. We always had this huge Thanksgiving because she invited all the Indian families all around who had nowhere to go. And she used it. And she said, wow, this thing is really cool. And my dad was out on the West Coast on a business trip, and he sits us down and he said, hey, you know, you guys really need to hire someone who is a business person. And a couple months later, we met a guy named Josh Silverman.

And he was Stanford Business School. And he'd written a business plan for this company. I think it was called To Gather, which was basically Evite. And we met up. And it was like he had the business skills and the business idea. We had the product in tech. And it was just so, such this match where you were complementing each other's skills. sets and we knew we didn't have the skill set of how do we raise money, how do we actually build a

team. And we were, this was our first job out of college. And Josh was coming, you know, out of business school, but with business experience prior to that as well. And so he joined as our CEO. So what was the idea at this point? Was the idea that we got to make this big. If we were going to make this big, we need money because we've got to hire people. And so how are you going to do that? So Josh had the network of venture capitalists and the concept understood fundraising in that market. And so, you know, when we saw, I was like, okay, this is an idea that we can go raise capital a lot. This is an idea that can become huge. And so he helped us raise money.

And we raised our first financing round $5.7 million from August capital. There's a story told about this era in Silicon Valley. And I don't know whether it's entirely accurate or maybe it is. that early venture capital firms or the existing ones were really ready to just throw money at whatever seemed attractive or interesting. Like it was kind of a free-for-all? Was that your impression? Was it pretty easy to convince, you know, venture firms to give you money?

In that year. And this is 99, right? Yeah. We raised $37 million for online invitations. Like, it's crazy when you look back at it. And all of the venture capitalists at the time, they were focused. on this metric eyeballs. How many eyeballs do you have? How many, and that meant like how many people are actually visiting your site? What's your growth in terms of actual, just unique visitors?

The conversation was never about revenue and never about how much sales do you have on the other side of it. It was just how big can you grow this free product? So when the VC firms were asking you these questions, no one ever, or very few people asked you, how are you guys going to make money? So for all of these free sites at the time, I mean, the advertising was the core business model. And so the very much the understanding was is that you grow your traffic and you get to enough traffic and you can start to get advertisers. And there was this still unproven of how much were brands willing to pay for that digital advertising. How big was it?

How many eyeballs did you have when you were raising that kind of money? In the first year, we had at least a million users using the product. Do you remember what the company was valued at that point? I would assume it was definitely over $100, $150 million. Wow. Was that crazy? I mean, you were like 22, 23. It was so crazy and also was so much on paper that it never really hit you because, you know, we were still living with, I was living with like four different roommates and we're working literally six, seven days a week, sleeping at the office a budge.

Like, we're so focused on just building the product and building the company and building the team that the financial part of it never really struck you because you weren't, it's not like you were out there like spending this money you didn't have or spending this money that was on paper. So with that $37 million in funding, what did that mean? I mean, did you guys get a big office and start to hire up? So, yeah, so we had this big office on 17th and Alabama. And when you looked at that area in Petrero, there was spinner.com. There was like so many different companies. This is all in San Francisco. And it was one of those warehouses that used to be a sewing factory.

And this was after we had had like a middle office in San Mateo with a bunch of inflatable furniture as we were still on the path to raising money. But yeah, that's what you did. And you built out your office. And then you started hiring people in all these different departments, engineering and product and design and analytics, marketing, and really started building out a company. So by December 99, early 2000, when you're getting, you know, a million plus hits on the site, did you start to attract advertisers? So we did start to attract advertisers.

And one of the things we actually did right was we decided to go try and partner with brands. And this was really more Josh than Alan I and this other guy, Jim Benton. And they went and they got, I remember, like, Finlandia vodka to go sponsor the Happy Hour Channel and then pamper's to sponsor the Baby Shower Channel. And so we got real brands and then built this like integrated experience with them, including like you'd respond to your Evite and you'd get this full page ad that we could make interactive for them. All right. So you guys have this thing going. You've got advertisers interested. You've got some big brands who are involved.

Does that mean that EVite? by 2000 was starting to see significant revenue? No. So the thing is, is that even though we had some of these big brands, we were starting to see some revenue, but no way were we close to profitability. And you suddenly have 70, 75 people on your operating expense. And, yes, you've started to sell some of these really big and important brands. But they were all still trying to figure out how to price digital advertising.

Right. Right. Nobody really had this sort of like, oh, the value of an impression on the web. How does that compare to TV? How does that compare to radio? And obviously that question still exists today to a certain degree. But there wasn't necessarily this whole like tracking infrastructure and all of that was still very nascent. But you had venture capital, which gave you guys a really, presumably a really long runway.

But even so with 75 employees and you got rent to pay and server space and other costs. I mean, that money was only going to last a certain amount of time. Did you guys feel any pressure to kind of hit profitability? Or were you not really worried about that just yet? So the way that the dot com was at the time, which is it was, you know, eyeballs. It was like, can you spend your money faster? I still remember one of the VCs in the board room saying, we need a billboard on 101 to be real. And so I was like, okay, then we'll put a billboard on 101, you know.

And everything was about like, you know, the growth and the traffic and there was no discussion or talk about revenue. And then the bubble burst. And all of a sudden, all anybody could talk about was, oh, my gosh, all these companies are bleeding money. How are we going to get them to profitability? How are we going to figure out whether these business models work? And just there was this huge shift in the middle of 2000. And that was the bubble that burst. And like it literally felt like it was overnight, like one day,

one month. It was spend more money in the next month. It was like, oh my God, what are we going to do? It was literally overnight like that. Like you had, it didn't feel gradual. It went from spend, spend, spend to, oh my gosh, we need to fire the team. When we come back, how Selena and Al broke some very bad news to their colleagues and why they eventually decided to put Evite up for sale.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the year 2000. The dot-com bubble has burst, and Selena and her partner, Al, they know they are going to have to make some very painful decisions. Because Silicon Valley, at this point, is basically in turmoil. So it wasn't just us.

Like, it was the whole ecosystem and environment around us. You know, we had all those friends that were entrepreneurs. And, like, you know, we had all had these dinners with, like, the portfolios of all the venture capitalists and they would invite all the founders and CEOs together and you would meet all these other people and everybody was suddenly like it was like this huge wave of oh my gosh what are we going to all do and when the rubber meets the road venture capitalists only focus is on their return and they're multiple and that was a huge learning for me at the time because you know all and i could see of like hey we can strip the costs down we can like get this

business to profitability pretty quickly and then grow it over time. But as soon as they invest capital and they invested at a specific multiple, unless they can see it getting to 3x, 5x, 10x, that multiple, they don't care. At that point, the venture capitalists become focused on how do I get as much return of capital? How do I get out of this as quickly as possible? Because they're valuing their time as well. Was that, I mean, it sounds like it was a revelation. And of course, yes, we now know that that's what venture capitalists want. They want they want to return. And many times they all say, oh, no, we're in it for the long haul, but actually they really want a short-term return or maybe a medium-term return. Right. Was that like a gut punch to realize that? Definitely. I mean, we were inexperienced entrepreneurs and, you know, you're thinking about I've poured my heart and soul into this product. I've poured my heart and soul into this company and this team. And, you know, the venture capitalists are focused on what their return. is and that is what they should be focused on because their responsibility ultimately is towards

their LPs and their funds. And that's what we want them focused on in order to make the whole economy work. And so it wasn't just like us and it wasn't just our company, but there was this definite, you know, as it felt, like instantaneous shift to we need to figure out what's going to happen to the economy. We need to figure out what's going to happen to all of our investments. So clearly you knew once the writing was something. the wall. It was clear that Evite was going to have to lay off people on, it seemed to 70, 75 people. I mean, you knew that people were going to lose their jobs. Yes. The laying off people was one of the toughest days in my career, even to this point. And because the team had done nothing wrong, right? Like,

they had worked hard. They had put their energy into the product. They'd helped. They did what we asked them to do. Like, we were actually executing really well. Like I said, there were tons of competitors around us that were doing almost the same thing, but yet we were growing the fastest. We were the best well-known brand. And so to feel like that we then had to go into these rooms and lay them off was a really, really tough thing and trying to get the right severance package with them from the board. And I still remember all of those arguments as well. And eventually, you know, like getting to a place where you felt, okay, we're going to treat people as good as we can. But it was hard because people had put their faith in you to grow the business. And they made the decision to come work at Evite

versus other jobs. So you guys, I guess, had to lay off more than half of the people who worked at the company. We went down from 73 to 28. Wow. And those numbers are like stuck in by head. And so there is actually this website at the time, and it was called The Company. And every day they would be publishing articles about which company was doing the layoff that day. And they somehow knew about it before any of the other employees had known about it person, you would think. And where the firing party was going to be after the team was let go. And did they find out about you guys eventually? Yeah, they.

And, you know, you tried to keep this, like, tight lid on it. But, of course, like, you had to schedule meetings for everybody and, like, put them in rooms. And so as soon as those meeting invites went out, like, it would get published on the company immediately. I guess around that same time, November of 2000, the board or the team decided to put an ad in the Wall Street Journal that said, we're up for sale. We're looking for a buyer. Yeah, we knew people loved the brand. and people recognize the brand. And so we said, look, let's put it out there and let's do something bold.

And we did. And that did bring multiple buyers to the table. Why did you, I mean, even after the layoffs, why did the company think that it needed to sell? Couldn't it have continued with like a thinner staff and just, you know, sort of try to save money and keep it going? We definitely could have continued with a thinner staff. But the main concern was from the venture capitalist in the sense that they are looking at, can this become a billion-dollar valued business? And given that all of a sudden, valuations had fallen through the floor, from their perspective, they wanted to sell the business. And Al and I didn't control the company at that point anymore. So the company goes up for sale. You get lots of suitors, I guess, or some suitors or some interest. And not that long after, March of two. 2001, Evite sold. It was sold to...

April of 2001. Yeah. I guess it was Ticketmaster at the time, but which is now part of IAC. Yeah, we sold the Ticketmaster City Search. And it was just this very, this concept that, you know, Ticket Master was going to be your big events, you know, the Michael Jackson's. City Search was going to be your local events. And Evite was going to be your personal events. And it was this like brand portfolio that we joined. And it was a really nice fit for what they were trying to do. were you happy with that decision? You know, for me, I had invested so much of myself and I think so much of my time into the product. And as it became clear that it made no financial sense to continue with this as a business, I was very focused on how do we find a good home?

How do we make sure that the product lives on? Because that was part of what you felt for these 73 people who had worked there. You know, people had put their time into designing the product or marketing the product or looking at how do we grow the product. And you wanted that product to live. And that was really a huge focus for me when we were trying to sell the business. So what happened after it was sold? I mean, you got this scale down company. Presumably you and Al become employees of the ticket master city search. So actually only two of us went with the deal. Myself and this other. guy Jim, who was in charge of all of the advertising relationships. And so we were literally moving the company down to L.A. And we were going to rebuild. We were going to hire a new management team for Evite. We were going to rebuild the engineers. And they were really only Jim and I that went with the deal. When the company was sold for, I think, for an estimated $25 million,

were you now, I mean, because just, you know, on paper, at least a year before that, you would have been set for life. But when you sold, were you set for life financially when that deal came through? We were not set for life financially. I mean, it was a very, you know, when we looked back, obviously it would have been much better for us to have sold the business and the peak of the business, which, you know, hindsight is 2020. Sure. So, you know, we got something out of the deal and we had this great experience and we were, you know, I think I was like 25 or 26 years old and had this great job to land into. But no, it wasn't. it wasn't suddenly that we were, you know, filthy rich and, you know, buying Lamborghinis.

Not that I would do that anymore. So you become an employee of this new company. You're essentially working for Ticketmaster. And how did it feel to work in a bigger corporate environment at that point? You know, I had never really had a job in a sense where, you know, yes, Josh was my boss. And he gave us feedback. but it always felt like a peer relationship because we were still the founders of the company

and we were very collaborative. It was just so different to go into an environment where all of a sudden I was like an employee. Like I had never experienced it before. And for the first like eight months, it was this position where I was like trying to build a team and then I was supposed to leave. But in my time there, I got to know the CEO and the CTO

at Ticketmaster. And I actually was enjoying what Ticketmaster was doing. what Ticketmaster was doing, which was like bringing people to live events. And I was like, these are people I can learn from. And the bubble had burst up here. And so, you know, in Silicon Valley, it was not that same like wave of innovation. And I thought, okay, like, I'm going to go spend a year at a bigger company and I want to learn from these guys. My initial intention was go there for one year, like get some experience and then come back up to the Valley. So you went on to work for Ticketmaster involved in the ticket sales business. You would, I guess, by two

2002, you really had nothing to do with Evite anymore. That's exactly right. Was that weird? I mean, you had built it in like a dorm room, and Evite was like totally in the rear view mirror. Evite was mostly in the rear view mirror. You know, I'd still, the guy who was in charge of it, actually, for most of that time, was a gentleman named John Foley, who's now the CEO of Peloton. Sure. And he was, he's a wonderful guy.

And, you know, so it would still catch up with him every so often and see how it was doing. And even today, there's the gentleman in charge of Evite Victor, you know, every so often we'll go grab a coffee and you'll tell me how it's doing. And he gives me swag. And I went and I did their International Women's Day and talked to their team because they were excited to have a female founder. But in terms of my learning and like my time to move on, it was the right time. So you end up staying there for six years, I think. So what made you decide that you wanted to finally leave Ticketmaster? So there were a couple factors, but the biggest was that Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation. And it was for me, the people and the culture is the most important thing. And it was very clear to me that the culture of the team that was coming over wasn't exactly what I wanted. But the second big thing is I was traveling 60 to 70% of the time because we had businesses in Norway, Sweden,

Italy, Germany, and I wanted to become a mom. And I didn't want to travel that much. So I had the very great fortune of meeting a gentleman named Dave Goldberg, who is the CEO of SurveyMonkey. And I joined as the president and CTO of Survey Monkey in October of 2009. What was the decision that, I mean, you wanted to be a mom, you said, and why was that the right company to go to? So Dave, and I'll tell you more about Dave, but he was just a fantastic mentor, a fantastic leader, and just had this vision for what we could do and what we could build together. And two days before I interviewed at SurveyMonkey, I was like, huh, something doesn't feel quite right.

And I peed on a stick, and it came positive. And I was thinking, what should I do? Should I still go to this interview? Like, I'm already pregnant. And I went for the interview. and I was living in London. I was flying back to London, and Dave had even upgraded me, which was like my first time. I was in first class, and I was like, wow, they give me pajamas.

This is amazing. And I land, and I check my Blackberry, and there's an offer from Dave in my inbox. What am I going to do? So I call my dad. I said, Dad, what should I do? And he said, put it all in one email. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you have to negotiate.

You know, you need to negotiate your offer. So negotiate your offer and tell him you're pregnant, all in one email. It gives them an out. And I thought, okay. So, you know, I send him, like, number one, like, you know, I want more equity. Number two, I'm in the exec staff for Europe, so I can't start for at least three months. And number three, I have early signs of pregnancy. And Dave wrote me back, I think, within eight minutes.

And he wrote why he was going to build a culture at SurveyMonkey that was going to be great for families. And yet, we were going to build a really, really big business. And you know what? We did both of those things. Did it feel like the kind of place you were going to spend the rest of your career at? So Dave wasn't a big believer in performance reviews and HR and sitting down. But once a year, he would take me out to lunch. And he would always say, this is what you need to do to become a CEO. And in February of 2015, he said to me, he said, you know, now you're ready to be a CEO.

It's just your choice. And I remember looking at him and saying, Dave, Being your number two is the best job I could ever have. And so I did think I was going to be at SurveyMonkey for a really, really long time. Not so long after that conversation, he passed away. It happened suddenly. And many people remember his wife, Cheryl Sandberg's beautiful remarks at his funeral and also the things that she wrote publicly about that.

At that point, did you feel like you weren't going to stay at the company? once he was gone? You know, when there's such a big change with an executive at a company, obviously, there's just a lot of change. So it's not like you initially know of like, this is a place I want to be, this is a place I don't want to be. It depends what happens with leadership. And so eventually it became clear to me that that wasn't a place I wanted to be anymore and that I was ready to move on. And part of it was I was inspired to do something in health and wellness after really taking a step back and looking and thinking about what happened to Dave. And fortunately enough, the timing was perfect with Al.

This is my same co-founder from Evite. And we'd had, you know, a couple lunches and getting together since about November. And we had talked about, hey, you know, like, would you be open to doing something again? And for both of us, the timing was just perfect. You hadn't launched a startup since 1998, right? And I guess in 2016, you thought you decided, you know, I want to go back to a startup. I want to try this again. And this is now your third or fourth startup together, right?

I mean, if you go back to collage and what was a company called with a weird name? Udleworks. Udlworks, right. You guys have been to that rodeo before you're back. So at this point, did you guys say, all right, we're going to do it differently this time the way we launched this thing? So initially, we were going to take a different approach in terms of we wanted to validate product marketing. fit of an idea first. You know, we were in a very different position where, you know, when I was 22 years old, there was no opportunity cost, right? So it was like if I was going to start a company

and I was going to code in a room, you know, I didn't have responsibilities. I didn't have children. I didn't have a mortgage. I didn't have other opportunities at my doorstep that I could also learn a lot and do a great deal with. And so we said, okay, we're going to give ourselves 2016 to prototype and user test a couple of products. And if one of the products tests well and we come up with an idea that we're excited about where we could bring our expertise to the table, if we come up with something that we then can go raise capital law and we'll do that. But until then, we'll sort of funded ourselves. And so that was kind of the different approach that we took. So you and Al, you mean, you're inspired to do something in health and wellness. I guess you start this thing called Gixo, which is like an exercise app. Yeah, you know, like getting people to exercise is hard. Like exercise is something that people have a tough relationship with. It's not something for, you know, I didn't exercise for six and a half years while I was at Survey Monkey.

The only thing I ever did was like walk from my car to the train station. And you don't prioritize it because it doesn't seem fun. And so we saw this big opportunity where can we develop a live group fitness class that's delivered via your phone and make it a great experience and make it disruptively cheap, which is what technology can do. And so that was our idea. And, you know, the thing that is definitely working for us is when people try our product, they're using it, they're loving it, we're getting good engagement. Once we get people to try the product, we've had really, really good results for them. Does it feel this time around doing a startup with a lot of experience, executive experience

under your belt and then earlier startup experience in your 20s now, you're a parent and you're a little older. And does it feel, is the excitement different? Is the experience radically different from what it was like in your early 20s? You know, the experience is pretty different in a number of ways. The first thing is, is that you understand more in terms of your responsibility as a leader. this is my first time actually being in a CEO chair. And, you know, everyone always says is like, oh, you know, it's like it's harder than you think. And it is more stressful than you actually initially imagine versus having always Dave there, you know. And so the responsibility when I was at Evite didn't really hit me until we had to lay the people off, you know, like, and then all of a sudden you were like, oh my goodness, like these people have been entrusted in me. But you didn't, you didn't feel it in the same way. I would say, Then the other piece of it, though, is like when you do have these other priorities in terms of your family and your kids, you have that ability to not just do it by sheer hard work. Like when you were young, you know, we were working six, seven days a week. We were coding all night.

We're sleeping in the office. And like, that is not an option. But you have a lot more experience under your belt so you can do things faster, you know? So, like, that is the tradeoff. When you think about where you have been, what you created and what you and Al built together, and even though Evite's not yours, it's still around today and it's still pretty significant. Do you think that that happened and you were able to find that success because of luck or because of your intelligence and the hard work you guys put into it? I mean, if you think of luck as privilege, then I had a ton of it, you know, to be able to. to have two parents who loved me unconditionally and sent me to Stanford without a penny of debt,

I'd say that's a huge amount of privilege that then you can work hard off of. So you would take luck and privilege, and privilege is an important idea. And a lot of people have written in to say, you know, when people say luck, they're not talking about privilege. And not enough people do. You would sort of make the case that that had and has had a lot to do with your success. Privilege has had an outsized impact on my success. When you see it today or when you get an Evite or when you hear somebody, because people say, oh, just send me an Evite, right? It's like just Google it. Like it's a Xeroxist thing. Like that's a thing. That's a term. Do you feel like it's yours or does it feel like something totally separate? You know, when I hear somebody say is like, oh, like, oh, just send me an Evite. And you realize that, well, they don't necessarily mean an actual Evite. They mean just no one.

electronic imitation, you do feel a little twinge of being proud, right? Because you think, you know, you put a word into the vernacular. And, you know, when suddenly, like, years later, your kids hear from somebody as like, oh, you know, your mom started Evite. And they've heard of Evite. And they're like, what, mom? Like, you started that? You know, it's like you feel that sense of pride from having built something and innovated. And it's exciting. That's Sillennazabakawala. She's the co-founder of Evite and Gixo. And since I last spoke with Selena, she and Al actually sold Gixo to a company called OpenFit, and she's now working there as chief digital officer. And by the way, a few years ago, Evite marked the two billionth invitation sent out using its platform.

And it remains one of the largest online invitation sites today. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. The world is complicated. But knowing the past can help us understand. understand it so much better. That's where we come in. I'm Randab de Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui and we're the hosts of ThruLine, NPR's History Podcast. Every week we'll dig into forgotten stories from the moments that shaped our world. ThroughLine from NPR. Listen and subscribe now. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. I had a love for ballet from a very young age. It was something that I really adored. Jimmy and Ramsey started taking ballet

classes when she was growing up in Atlanta. When I first started, my mom took me to the dance store to buy my dance clothes. So I got the pink ballet shoes, the pink tights. Pink shoes and tights are the standard uniform ballerinas have been wearing for hundreds of years. But when Jamia was about 10 years old, she spent her summer training at the dance theater of Harlem, run by the legendary Arthur Mitchell. He wanted to dispel the myth that black dancers couldn't do ballet. So it really felt great just to dance with other dancers who look like me and also had on their own individual colors.

Because at the Dance Theater of Harlem, ballerinas did not have to wear pink shoes or tights. They could wear tights and shoes that matched their own skin tones. But since no one made dance tights in darker colors, the company members had to dye them. They would use tea bags and so basically just put them in the water. soak your tights in there, and the longer the tights sitting the tea, the darker they would get. But when Jamea went back to Atlanta, she had to put on the pink tights and shoes again. And it just always felt like I didn't belong. My upper half of my body was one color, and then when I look at the bottom half of my body,

it didn't feel like a part of my body. And as Jamea kept dancing through high school and college, that feeling of frustration never left. So after she graduated, she decided to, open a small dance studio for kids in her neighborhood. And she wanted the kids to wear their own colors. So she explained to the parents how to dye their tights and shoes. And I brought the photographer in for our first performance. But when I looked at the pictures, I'm like, oh, God, this looks god awful. The tights don't match the shoes. The shoes don't match the dancer. The tights don't match the dancer. It just didn't look good. So Jamia decided to find out if she could

make her own shoes and tights for dancers of color. She took $4,000 in savings and she started to do some research. I would go to different studios just to see what most people's shades were and complexions were and try to match them up with different makeup. Jamea narrowed it down to four colors, brown, mahogany, cocoa, and tan. And she found a manufacturer in China who could make dance tights in those colors. It takes a lot of potion making. to make sure that the colors were just right. And then she found a manufacturer in Pakistan to make dance shoes to match the exact colors of the tight.

She launched the apparel last December on her website, and already dancers are starting to perform in it. It's just amazing to see the beauty of all of those different skin tones together on stage. You know, it's just wonderful to feel like, oh, maybe I'm inspiring the next dancer is a great feeling. Jamia's brand is called blends, spelled with a Z at the end. She's still in the very early stages of the business,

but she's made about $50,000 in sales so far. By the way, Jumea was selected as a How I Built This Fellow at our summit in San Francisco, where she won the competition to be on this podcast. If you want to find out more about blends or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.NPR.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build. npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show is produced this week by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumtin Arablui. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Sanaz-Meshkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.