Goodreads

“Social objects, objects that people like to talk about that therefore can be the basis for sharing on a social network. Photos are super strong for that. Articles, cooking, like anything that people could kind of experience together or separately, but like hav…”

“Amazon wanted to invest in social, and I finally had permission to Go unprofitable. So we grew from 35 employees to over a hundred, I think in two or three years.”

“So I'm actually starting to tinker, for the last six months, I've been starting to tinker on a new project, which has been exciting. I don't have anything to announce, but it's in the space of trying to Address the problem that I think that the new, how people…”

“And I think by the end of Goodreads, we had maybe 40,000 of them were making tens of thousands of edits a day, which is why Goodreads has one of the best catalogs out there. In the world.”

“I think we had a lot of statistics on, on our users in terms of just education, gender the site's 75% women.”

“Yeah, but we owned most of a website that was one of the top hundred websites in the U.S. By traffic.”

“Someone at Random House, the very nice woman named Julie Sills pinged us and said, hey, I love your site. And you know, I'm at Random House. I'm in charge of marketing books. Is there any way we can work with you? And so she Set me up with the guy at Random Ho…”

“We got it up to a 100,000 users. I think registered users by the end of 2007 with no other employees, no other help. It just the two of us.”

“But no, I mean, it turns out Amazon could not have built a successful social product because they are wired for commerce. This is my impression. You know, they shared with us a bunch of thinking they had in the social space, and it was just clear that they, wh…”

“I went Talked to those people and showed them the product. I had no deck, and they all liked it and said yes, and so then after that, we were able to finally go and hire some employees.”

“And then literally two weeks before we were going to launch, we discovered Shelfari, which had two co-founders, three employees, and a million dollars in seed from Amazon.”

“And I remember when we were looking at the Series B, we still had most of the Series A in the bank.”

“And so we had this strong vision, and we met with Amazon, like I said, four or five times over the years, kind of talking about, would we do this? And they were always into it. The issue was, it required deep integration to pull off, and they weren't comfortab…”

“There was definitely a month, which was probably the most stressful month of our lives, where we couldn't talk to anybody, we had to stop talking to all the VCs, we had to stop talking to anybody else, and all we did, probably 18 hours a day, was due diligence…”

“Amazon made it a little easy in that they told us they would want to run us as an independent subsidiary and an independent brand, just like they run Audible and IMDB and Zappos and now Twitch, and they have a long list of track record of doing this.”

“But if Kindle hadn't launched in 2007 and moved, you know, started the digital reading revolution, I don't think Goodreads would have flourished. Industry trends have to align. And if that hadn't happened, you know, my old CEO would have been right. It would h…”

“I don't think that was ever disclosed, so Guy Raz has the exclusive. I think it was 10 or fifteen million, I actually don't remember, but one of those.”

“I think for the first year of Goodreads, I had no salary. Then I had like maybe 30,000 a year. And then I just, once we had enough money where we were hiring some people, I just kept my salary at the top person's level. I never paid myself more than the top pe…”

“Mashable wrote, wrote a story saying that we had just launched, and our growth went from 10 users a day to a hundred users a day.”

“And then I tried to go buy good read, singular, and it was like 50,000 dollars, and I was like, okay, forget that. And then I tried the plural, good reads, and it was not available. So I just bought goodreads with a z dot com for, you know, just to use while I…”

“But actually that the first growth wave really didn't come from that. It came from discovering that there was a huge community of book reviewers who were existing on kind of the blogging platforms of 2000, you know, six, seven. And what they were looking to do…”

“So affiliate was, we get, you know, an eight percent cut of a book when we refer a customer to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or somewhere where they buy a book.”