Max Kolysh
Visiting Partner, Y Combinator. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Max Kolysh is a serial entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Zinc.io and Dover. After graduating from MIT with a degree in computer science, he took both companies through Y Combinator and later joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner.
1shows
1appearances
19statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Max Kolysh said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
The Amazon-to-eBay retail arbitrage market is heavily saturated and exhausted
“Amazon to eBay, it's definitely kind of exhausted. There's a lot of sellers doing it.”
Long-tail arbitrage niches are too fragmented for software companies to pursue
“There's a lot of niche opportunities that aren't super, you know, they're not million dollar opportunities each, but they may, they might make somebody a hundred K, 200 K a year. And so not an R incentive to kind of seek all these out.”
Zinc bought cheap eBay items to acquire dropshipper phone numbers
“So for a while you're actually just buying stuff from eBay from almost every seller. And we would, you know, our office was basically filled with junk. We threw a couple office parties where we just gave away lots of stuff and it would be like the cheapest thi…”
Kolysh believes Zinc is a top-two scraper of Amazon
“We are probably like the number one or number
Two scraper of Amazon and all these other sites.”
Kolysh would reject a $25M buyout for Zinc, but accept $100M
“Twenty five million? Probably not, but somewhere. That way I'm pretty like optimistic about the company as a whole. And there's a number for sure. I mean, everybody has a number, right? It's not, you know, I would sell for a hundred for sure.”
Zinc was Jet.com's biggest service vendor prior to its launch
“We were actually like a, their kind of biggest vendor of services before they launched for a year and after they launched, a lot of their sales were actually happening through us.”
Zinc captures 20% to 40% of arbitrage sellers' overall profits
“We take about 20 to 40% of the profit that the person earns.”
Zinc holds under 15% of the Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage software market
“In terms of the market, we probably have less than 15% of it in terms of Amazon to eBay.”
Kolysh: Priceyak accounts for about 60% of Zinc.io's revenue
“About 60% of the total revenue of the company, I would say, comes from Priceyak.”
Zinc's Priceyak automates 20,000 to 25,000 daily orders on Amazon
“And we place like 20 to 25,000 orders a day on Amazon.”
Kolysh: Priceyak has roughly 1,000 customers with heavily skewed monthly revenue
“So we have probably around a thousand customers on priceyac and it's very skewed. So there's some big customers that pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month and there's a lot of smaller ones that pay us on the order of hundreds of dollars a month.”
Beginner sellers pay Priceyak 25% to 30% of their profits
“If you're just the beginning seller and you have a couple hundred items, you'll probably be paying us a 102 hundred bucks a month, which works out to like 25, 30% of your profit.”
Kolysh: Priceyak generates about $250,000 in monthly revenue
“Yeah. I mean, based on that, it's probably a little bit less, probably about half of that, but yeah.”
Zinc raised under $400,000 total while generating millions in revenue
“We took one 20 back then, but yeah, we did that, and then we raised a small pre-seed round after that, so the total fundraise was under 400 K”
Kolysh: Zinc Maintained Profitability for Three Years, Doubling Annually
“We've maintained profitability for the past three years, and we've pretty much doubled every year”
Zinc's top accounts pay $10,000 to $20,000 monthly
“The LTV for these customers is probably in the high hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. And every once in a while we can, you know, hit a jackpot with a guy who's paying 10 or 20 K a month.”
Zinc used mandatory EU seller addresses for direct-mail marketing
“In the EU and UK legally sellers have to have their address on the listing. So that was even easier to get their contact information. We did a postcard campaign where we just mailed them postcards with some you know, information about Joe Lister and about Pric…”
Zinc drove roughly $260 million in platform gross sales in 2018
“That being said, like last year, I think in total sales driven, we, it was like two hundred sixty million or so.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Max's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Visiting Partner, Y Combinator | 1 | 19 | — | full record on Top Founders → |