Max Rhodes, co-founder and CEO of wholesale marketplace Faire, reflects on how decision-making and capital allocation differ between early-stage startups and scaling companies.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.1s
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“When you're an early stage startup, speed is so important. And there's so many unknowns that you can easily waste time trying to predict what's going to happen. And a lot of times the best way to figure out what's going to happen is just to do it.”
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More from Max Rhodes
Insight
Rhodes: Unsold inventory risk is the primary barrier for retail buyers
“The trade show solved like a really fundamental problem for retailers, which is when they are placing an order for a product, they need to know that it's going to sell. If it doesn't sell, they could go out of business. And so there's all this anxiety that's w…”
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Insight
Rhodes: Keep conducting executive reference checks until you find negative feedback
“And then using references to round that out, and to make sure that, and doing a lot of references, like, for really senior roles, five, six, seven references, one of the pieces of advice I've gotten is keep digging until you find something bad, and then are th…”
Max RhodesFeb 18, 2022▶ 26:5520VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
Opinion
Max Rhodes: Interviewing candidates on childhood yields less value than recent work
“But I think the value of that time is a little less than the value of more recent professional experiences.”
Max RhodesFeb 18, 2022▶ 31:2720VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
AssertionPartly supported
Rhodes: Etsy and Bonagora failed at wholesale by ignoring retailer demand
“Moving that online, people had tried it. Like Etsy tried this. There was this other website called Bonagora a while back that tried it. Everyone who tried it Would get a bunch of brands signed up, but then they couldn't get the retailers to order.”
Max RhodesFeb 18, 2022▶ 7:2220VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
AssertionSupported
Rhodes: Faire launched with free returns and net 60 terms
“And so we realized in that moment, that was the core problem that we had to solve. And that's how we ended up launching fair with free returns, net 60 payment terms, basically like try before you buy.”
Max RhodesFeb 18, 2022▶ 7:4220VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Faire requires annual CEO and pod-level written strategy docs
“Every year I write a strategy doc for the whole company. Every product pod writes its own strategy doc that kind of ladders up to the broader strategy doc.”
Max RhodesFeb 18, 2022▶ 12:4620VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
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