Casalena: Squarespace ran break-even for seven years on a $30K investment
Anthony Casalena · 20VC: Squarespace Founder, Anthony Casalena on Scaling Squarespace from Dorm Room To Public Company with over $700M in ARR, The Decision to Direct List over Traditional IPO or SPAC & What Changes When You Go Public? · Oct 8, 2021 · at 4:26
Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace, discusses the early financial history of the business prior to taking institutional funding.
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“I started the company with a 30,000 dollar investment from my parents and ran it through Break even for seven years.”
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More from Anthony Casalena
Casalena: Squarespace reached a $10M run rate on $30K seed capital
“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.”
Casalena: Capital cannot directly solve usability or engineering management problems
“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.”
Casalena took secondary liquidity in 2010 to avoid selling Squarespace
“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.”
Casalena: Squarespace chose a direct listing to avoid unnecessary IPO dilution
“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 …”
Casalena: Squarespace monetizes GMV via a revenue-share partnership with Stripe
“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…”