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Josh Udashkin

Founder & CEO, Raden · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutive

Josh Udashkin is the founder and former CEO of Raden, a venture-backed smart luggage startup that operated until 2018. Prior to Raden, he practiced hedge fund law and worked in international development for Aldo, later serving as North America Managing Director for RIMOWA.

16statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.94/5average certainty → 1.88/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 18said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 4 opinions · 5 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Josh argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Udashkin: Raden's five-year roadmap centers on mobile travel software
“Most of our roadmap is really around the mobile experience and really connecting with a travel experience that engages users of our product and provides them with all sorts of other information about where they're going and the airports that they're traveling …”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 26:28 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Udashkin: Global luggage market is a $40 billion annual business
“The industry in our case is a forty billion dollar a year business globally.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 21:09 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
0% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4 · compression 3.8

redirected or did not address 1 of 24 assessed questions (4%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

242 words/min while actually speaking · 32.3 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,148 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 45%

Everything Josh Udashkin said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Josh Udashkin: Building a consumer brand requires a physical retail footprint
“I think it's very hard to build brand, which is, you know, first and foremost, what we're up to here without some type of You know, physical footprint or place for consumers to interact with you being, you know, even your retail associate and how they're train…”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 6:12 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Opinion
Udashkin: Traditional luggage brands assemble generic parts into 'cyborg shells'
“The luggage business is kind of a Mr. Potato Head business, I call it, The traditional brands, the companies take catalog parts from a number of different factories, and then they put them together on some randomly designed cyborg shell. And then they spit it …”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 8:29 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Opinion
Udashkin: Pure direct-to-consumer strategy does not work for every category
“I'm not really a big believer in the whole direct-to-consumer narrative in every single category. I think omni-channel retail for me is the way to go, and for others”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 10:36 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Opinion
Udashkin: Crowdfunding platforms generate sales but fail to build lasting brands
“It's starting to become, first of all, very, very difficult to build a brand off of those platforms. I think they're good at generating a certain level of sales, but then you never actually build, you know, a brand or any type of marketing funnel or really fig…”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 23:06 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Opinion
Josh Udashkin: The luggage category lacked strong brands and consistent pricing
“There were very few great brands. There are a couple of luxury products. You know, the merchandising seemed all over the place. The pricing seemed all over the place.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 3:42 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Insight
Udashkin: Hardware founders fail by prioritizing product development over brand values
“Whenever I talk to people starting these things who are so focused only on the product And getting it out the door, and you know, whatever it's going to be named, that they forget that in order to build something, you need to communicate your values, and it ne…”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 9:23 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Insight
Udashkin: A hardware startup is effectively multiple companies in one
“It's multiple companies in one. So you have a luggage firm, you have an electronics firm, you have mobile development, firmware development, then you have all the things around building a brand. Then you're a retailer, you're a distributor, you're a marketer, …”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 12:56 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Disclosure
Udashkin refuses meetings with VCs inexperienced in hardware investing
“I tend to generally stay away even when I get a request for a meeting. Don't really want to be their first foray into investing in a hardware company.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 13:38 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Insight
Udashkin: Hardware founders should secure manufacturing partners before pitching VCs
“My advice to entrepreneurs is, you know, do the sourcing work, and a lot of the things around VC will come easier, because they're really the people that are going to invest in building your prototypes.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 14:28 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Insight
Udashkin: In-app support is the future of customer experience
“When you can communicate with your customer at the touch of a button on an application, that's the customer experience of the future. Instead of having to dial one eight eight eight and get somebody on the line and coordinate some type of return for us, it's, …”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 16:31 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Udashkin: Aldo's power SKUs generated 70% of total product sales
“We had these power SKUs that really were selling 70% of the assortment, so we would make a couple of products, they would turn into bestsellers, and the bestsellers were really carrying the entire business”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 4:28 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Udashkin: Aldo.com outperformed physical store sales tenfold
“You know, we said at Aldo that aldo.com was our number one store by tenfold and very, very efficient store at that.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 5:09 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Disclosure
Raden hired former Beats by Dre designer Kenny Sweet for luggage design
“I met Kenny Sweet who had worked on the Beats project for a number of years, and we really vibed, and I had this merchandising concept around a single almost unlined product, you know, that was very stark and looked like many of the products that we've been bu…”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 8:04 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Assertion Contradicted
Udashkin: Global luggage market is a $40 billion annual business
“The industry in our case is a forty billion dollar a year business globally.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 21:09 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Disclosure
Raden sold out initial inventory, driving shipping delay to 15 days
“We sold out of all the product that we had made, even with venture funding and working capital funding and everything else, and so now we're You know, 15 day shipping times when really we're meant to be a same day or second day business.”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 23:48 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
Prediction Held up
Udashkin: Raden's five-year roadmap centers on mobile travel software
“Most of our roadmap is really around the mobile experience and really connecting with a travel experience that engages users of our product and provides them with all sorts of other information about where they're going and the airports that they're traveling …”
Josh Udashkin Jul 1, 2016 ▶ 26:28 20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden

The other half of the tape: Josh Udashkin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 11 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 18

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00105201020162017episodesmentions
051020162017episodes it came up in
001521020162017episodesmentions per episode
2017 16 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear a Jul 1, 2016 18m
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