Selina Tobaccowala
Co-Founder and CEO, HomeBoost. On 2 shows, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@selinato ↗LinkedIn ↗homeboost.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
She is best known for co-founding online invitation platform Evite, serving as President and CTO of SurveyMonkey, and co-founding fitness streaming app Gixo. She currently leads HomeBoost, a climate-tech startup providing DIY assessments and tools to improve home energy efficiency and lower utility bills.
2shows
1appearances
19statements
6resolved
4supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Selina Tobaccowala said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tobaccowala: Stanford Network Gives Founders Privilege to Secure Executive Meetings
“That is the beauty of the Stanford network. You know, these are the things that, that you can't discount when you think about privilege that people have. It's like, you reach out to, you know, an executive at Excite and their executive at Yahoo, and you say, I…”
Tobaccowala: Email Invites Must Withhold Full Details to Drive Clicks
“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.”
Tobaccowala: 1999 VCs Focused Entirely on Eyeballs Rather Than Revenue
“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…”
Tobaccowala: Dot-com focus shifted abruptly from traffic to profitability in mid-2000
“Everything was about, like, you know, the growth and the traffic, and there was no discussion or talk about revenue. And then the bubble burst, and all of a sudden, all anybody could I could talk about was, oh my gosh, all these companies are bleeding money. H…”
Tobaccowala: VCs Forced Evite Sale After Dot-Com Crash Erased Valuations
“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…”
Tobaccowala: Berlin Had No Tech Scene in Late 1990s
“There's so much going on in Silicon Valley. There's no technology going on in Berlin.”
Tobaccowala: Each Evite Sent Reached an Average of 18 People
“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…”
Tobaccowala: Evite Raised $37M Total for Online Invitations in 1999
“We raised thirty-seven million dollars for online invitations.”
Tobaccowala: Evite's Wall Street Journal sale ad attracted multiple buyers
“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.”
Tobaccowala: Peloton CEO John Foley ran Evite after Ticketmaster acquisition
“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.”
Tobaccowala: Former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg Resisted Formal HR Performance Reviews
“Dave wasn't a big believer in performance reviews and HR and sitting down, but once a year he would take me out to lunch and he would always say, this is what you need to do to become a CEO.”
Tobaccowala: Collage conceived personalized web homepages before My Yahoo
“And the idea was, is that you could clip together stuff from all over the web, create your own homepage, and then algorithmically, we would update it for you as things updated. And this was before my Yahoo, before that concept of creating a homepage.”
Tobaccowala: Early Startup Signed Exclusive Tech License With Excite
“We licensed our technology and product to them exclusively, so we gave them this huge window of time that they had exclusivity, and that meant we couldn't actually go work with slash sell it to anybody else in that time frame.”
Tobaccowala: Evite Conceived in 1998 as Consumer Adaptation of Web Calendar
“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.”
Tobaccowala: Evite Raised First $5.7M Financing From August Capital
“And we raised our first financing around 5.7 million dollars from August capital.”
Tobaccowala: Evite Reached at Least 1M Users in First Year
“In the first year, we had at least a million users using the product.”
Tobaccowala: Evite was nowhere near profitable with 75 employees around 2000
“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.”
Tobaccowala: Only two employees transitioned in Ticketmaster Evite acquisition
“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 other half of the tape: Selina Tobaccowala's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Selina Tobaccowala, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Selina's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, HomeBoost | 1 | 19 | 80% 4/5 | full record on How I Built This → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, HomeBoost | 0 | 0 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Masters of Scale → |