Evite

“And I think, I'm not sure if this was IAC or his next gig, but he ended up taking over the post bubble Evite team. That had shrunk from like hundreds and hundreds of people down to this like very small group and grew it to like, I think you grew it from like a…”

“We're sitting outside, and we said, oh, well, what if we take this web calendar thing and we let consumers do it? Let them organize stuff with their friends. And that was the birth of Evite, and this was July, August, 1998.”

“One of the learnings we had was you couldn't put the information in the email because then nobody would click through. So we put enough information in the email to entice you, and then you would click through, and you would come to this page, to RSVP.”

“With the way that Evite was designed, by nature, as soon as you send one, there was an average of 18 other people that found out about it, and then one of those people just had to say, oh, this is interesting, I'm gonna go ahead and create an Evite, and then t…”

“And we raised our first financing around 5.7 million dollars from August capital.”

“We raised thirty-seven million dollars for online invitations.”

“All of the venture capitalists at the time, they were focused on this metric eyeballs. How many eyeballs do you have? How many? And that meant like how many people are actually visiting your site? What's your growth in terms of actual, just unique visitors? Th…”

“In the first year, we had at least a million users using the product.”

“Even though we had some of these big brands, we were starting to see some revenue, but no way were we close to profitability. And you suddenly have 70, 75 people on your operating expense.”

“We went down from 73 to 28.”

“Yeah, we knew people loved the brand, and people recognized the brand, and so we said, look, like, let's put it out there, and let's do something bold, and we did, and that did bring multiple buyers to the table.”

“We definitely could have continued with a thinner staff, but the main concern was from the venture capitalists in the sense that they are looking at, can this become a billion-dollar valued business? And given that, all of a sudden, valuations had fallen throu…”

“So actually only two of us went with the deal. Myself and this other guy, Jim, who was in charge of all of the advertising relationships. And so we were literally moving the company down to LA, and we were going to rebuild.”

“The guy who was in charge of it actually for most of that time was a gentleman named John Foley, who's now the CEO of Peloton.”

“And I think we bought it for three million dollars, because it was 2001, and everything had crashed. And so, it had, at one point, a 120 people. I got it down to six people.”