Squarespace

“Rather than go run out of the gate, create some custom, beautiful blog, better is just use out of the box tools, you know, WordPress, Squarespace, whatever, and just really focus on what you're putting out the door. And for a company, it should be matching, ba…”

“So for us, because the company did not need to raise money, right? I mean, we've raised very little over the years. We had that primary round we did before doing the direct listing, which was done for A number of reasons, but otherwise we didn't need to raise …”

“I started the company with a 30,000 dollar investment from my parents and ran it through Break even for seven years.”

“In the private markets, we did a four and nine A, we were doing it monthly, but you know, it's kind of, it's not that volatile.”

“We do monetize all of the payments flowing through the e-commerce platform. Long ago, we made a, we were one of the, I think, first large companies to do it. We partnered with Stripe to enable the, our merchants to get online and to accept payments. And as par…”

“I think my problems were not exactly money dependent back then as much as they were making the product easier to use or, you know, engineering management or things like that, that money can't just directly fix.”

“I think the other thing I started to realize is I spend every day thinking about Squarespace, but for public market investors, they have their own portfolio. Maybe they're looking at 70 companies, 80 companies. You're one sliver of their time, and, you know, w…”

“The ability to sell things on Squarespace has been the most requested feature for a decade. We started investing in our e-commerce platform. That's basically physical goods, digital goods, eight years ago.”

“We've also spent hundreds of millions of dollars, probably a billion dollars on brand”

“To date, Anthony has raised over nine hundred and forty eight million dollars for the company from the likes of General Atlantic, Index Ventures, Tiger Global, culminating in their IPO in May 2021.”

“Back when I took some secondary, I would say it was, and this is 2010, it was very much not the norm, and I was looking to do it for a very specific reason, because I didn't want to sell the company, and at the time I basically owned all of it.”

“Squarespace has grown up with about fifty million dollars in primary capital invested, save the round we did right before going public, which was a couple months ago and had a different use. But for 17 years, it was essentially under fifty million in primary c…”

“There was an uphill battle along the way, obviously, selling people on, frankly, the importance of design and what it could do for them, and, you know, we look at it now, and it's obvious that was a huge differentiator in the company, and it really set us forw…”

“It was about 30 people, maybe, run rate of around, around ten million. So we got from nothing to there, you know, with 30,000.”

“The analogy that I sometimes like is that on the early days of the web, you could use kind of like something that would Create a website for you, right? You could use the equivalent of a Squarespace or for weeks, and that would make you feel good, right? Becau…”

“But those businesses will clearly disrupt the square space and the web flows and et cetera.”

“I think it says the pre-AI business is terminal. That's what the public markets are saying, right? And they don't think that the AI play is enough to rescue it from terminology, right?”

“Shopify destroyed them all. There's no reason to use. This is another category where the low end was destroyed by Shopify, who amazingly went up market and down market successfully at the same time. And there's just, it's not worth it. You can't save enough mo…”