why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public
record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable
ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't;
assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card:
▮▮▮▮▮ certainty ·
▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Disclosure
Eddy Lu: GOAT faked early seller listings using different Home Depot tiles
“In the beginning, we were the only seller since no seller would wanted to list on code because we were unknown. So what we did is that we went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of different tiles. So you see, you have like the wood tile, those one foot by one f…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eddy Lu: 30% of Yeezy sneaker listings on eBay are counterfeit
“You go to eBay today and type in Yeezy, and about 30% of the listings aren't real.”
Insight
Eddy Lu: Prime physical retail rent is equivalent to digital ad spend
“Well, for me, I don't think it impacts margin structure too much because while there's store overhead, if the store is in a Class A location, it's no different than spending money on Facebook marketing. Instead of spending it on digital ads, you're spending it…”
Insight
Eddy Lu: Founders should execute daily micro-pivots when things are not working
“You make micro pivots even when you're building a startup and you have that initial vision. So for me, it's, you know, whether it's a micro pivot on a daily basis or a big pivot, if you know that something's not working, Just change it up.”
Disclosure
Eddy Lu secretly bought shoes on GOAT to fake their first sale
“And I went in and secretly bought a pair of shoes so that I could tell the team, Hey guys, we sold something today.”
Disclosure
Eddy Lu: GOAT rejected a $5M Series A offer post-Y Combinator
“We went out to raise, and we actually got a five million dollar offer from a top tier VC, and it was sitting for us, waiting for us at the table, and, you know, we saw the valuation. It was a fair valuation, but we actually said, Hey, you know what? We're goin…”
Insight
Eddy Lu: Operating a bakery is definitely not a passive income source
“Let me just say that there are very few passive income opportunities, and bakeries are definitely not one of them.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Eddy Lu: Half of GOAT's Y Combinator cohort split over co-founder friction
“Half our white combinator batch broke up right after the batch because of co-founder issues”
Insight
Eddy Lu: Co-founder breakups stem from ego and fighting over CEO titles
“One place where I see that it goes wrong is ego, to be honest. When we saw our Y Combinator batch, there was a lot of people who wanted to be CEO because that was the position to be, rather than saying who's the best person to be CEO.”
Disclosure
Eddy Lu: High customer acquisition costs made Grub With Us unviable
“What we saw was that it cost so much money to acquire a customer because of all those friction points that we knew that, This wasn't going to be a just a mass market business.”
Disclosure
Eddy Lu: Grub With Us pivoted to GOAT with $1.5M remaining
“We raised over seven million dollars and had only about one and a half million dollars left.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eddy Lu: GOAT gained 100,000 users in one week during Black Friday
“So that week leading up to black Friday, we had over a 100,000 users sign up and it crashed our site every single day.”
Assertion Supported
Eddy Lu: Physical sneaker retailers only stock around 200 shoe models
“If you go into a sneaker retailer today, there's about 200 shoes that you can buy, and those are shoes that didn't sell out, that are just kind of the sale items that they couldn't move.”
What-if
Eddy Lu would have written off Grub With Us as an investor
“If I were them, I probably would have written us off too.”