The Exchanges

Q So how did you get to make the site successful? You need users on there uploading their books and talking about them and talking to other people and getting other people to do it, and so how did you get the initial group of people on?

A Well, we wrote an email to everyone we knew. Every email address we could find, and we BCC'd them and said, hey, we built this thing, come check it out. And I think, People started to sign up, and I would sit there watching the logs, and oh, someone's on. And I think it got up to about 800 people that way. And, and then I said, you know, kind of in January, 2007, I was like, Elizabeth, do you think we can, like, get some press? And so she wrote a press release and pushed it out to a couple places, and 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. But actually that the first growth wave really didn't come from, 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 was just connect to other people who were reading the same stuff as them. And when they found Goodreads, they started adopting us in droves because we, we were better at that than the blogging platforms. We, you know, you could just Go to the book page for the book they were reading, and they could find everybody else who'd read that book, and they loved that.

AI assessment note: “we wrote an email to everyone we knew. Every email address we could find”

Q So you were thinking about some kind of social network Idea that you wanted to build in general?

A Yeah, because I knew how to build one, because we were building two of them, right? Tickle was one, Ringo was one, and I think much, much later on, I landed on the really geeky term 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 have the same experience and And then want to talk about afterwards. And, you know, I think maybe subconsciously I was looking for books, because I was a huge reader when I was a kid. I was the kind of reader like my ten-year-old daughter is now, who reads under the covers at night. And then when I got to Stanford, I kind of had to stop, because you can't go to Stanford and read for pleasure. And then I went to Tickle, and I also kind of didn't get back into it, because I was Working so hard, and I was kind of, I kind of didn't like that about myself. I kind of wanted to get back to reading more books, and so I think maybe subconsciously it was, there was the idea that, hey, if I do it around books, I'll have, I'll probably be able to read a lot more books, and that would be cool.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, because I knew how to build one, because we were building two of them”

Q But at this point, I think, 2013, I mean, you guys were, you were getting more views on your book pages than Amazon. There's a New York Times article around that time came out and said you were rivaling Amazon as a platform for promoting new books. So they must have been, and Amazon had acquired similar companies like yours previously, right?

A They had acquired our Yeah, Shofari, who we talked about earlier, that they had seeded for a million dollars, they ended up acquiring. But yeah, it's funny. And that New York Times article you just referenced, I remember going to New York and going into their building for that interview, because I was there for a book conference. And I told them how many, how many page views or monthly unique visitors we had. I forget what it was at the time, maybe 30 or forty million monthly uniques. And they were like, that's more than the New York Times has. And I was like, Oh, that's crazy. You know, like I kind of knew that we had a lot, but to hear it compared that way, you're kind of like, that's one of those moments where I was like, oh, we have, we have something interesting here.

AI assessment note: “They had acquired our Yeah, Shofari, who we talked about earlier”

Q And at that point, did you have an idea for, for what you were going to start, like what you were, you were going to work on?

A Well, I think at some point in 2005, I had maybe what you could call an inspirational moment, which was I was in a friend's apartment in San Francisco. And when I walked in, he had, you know, his bookshelf in the living room. And, and, uh, if you're like me and, and Elizabeth, you know, whenever someone's got that bookshelf on display and you see it, you kind of gravitate right towards it. And, and so I had the opportunity to just kind of grill my friend about Every book in his bookshelf, you know, did you like this one? And what, what about that one? And, ooh, this sounds interesting. What, what was this one like? And I walked out of there with, like, five or six books that I was excited to read. And, you know, because in my day job, I was building these social networks that have profile pages, and in our case at Tickle, the profile pages were full of personality test results. But I was kind of like, that would be kind of amazing if I could just, like, break down the door of all my friends' houses and grill them about every book That they've read in their bookshelves. I'd probably have, like, you know, more book recommendations than I could ever read, and that would be awesome. Well, maybe I could just build a website where that's the profile page. The profile page is your bookshelf, the same one you've got at home, and people would just put it there, and we could browse each …

AI assessment note: “maybe I could just build a website where that's the profile page”

Q And clearly it was going to be ad supported, right? Because the site wasn't, there was no way for people to subscribe or pay more to be a super user or anything like that, right?

A No, no. So that we, I think we kind of stumbled onto a business model early on. 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, 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 House who, who does that. And he said, I'd like to do a 10,000 dollar campaign. And I was like, whoa, you know, that'll pay for months of servers. But I kind of just calmly said, great. And then I hung up the phone and I was like, man, now I got to figure out how do you serve an ad campaign? And so I Googled it and I found that there was this new thing called Google ad platform, something like that was about to launch, but it was in private beta. And I pinged an old roommate who worked at Google and was like, can you get me into this? And he got me into that, and it took me a whole day to set it up, and, and that was kind of the beginning of realizing that we had an audience that book publishers loved.

AI assessment note: “I think we kind of stumbled onto a business model early on.”

Q Tell me about, um, what kind of student you were. Were you committed to school? Were you pretty good at school from, from a young age?

A I was. I was one of those straight A kids, I guess. Though I didn't get the journalism gene. I got the engineer gene from my other side of, my other grandfather, who was the civil engineer. And so that's what I ended up focusing on. But you know, some entrepreneurs, they have that story. It's in a lot of books and interviews. Where, you know, they had some sort of business selling candy in elementary school and learned that they could buy it from here and sell it from more over there and make their first business. I never did that. Instead, what I did is I took apart every single thing I could get my hands on. And sometimes I would put stuff back together, but mostly I just disassembled stuff because I was, I just wanted to know how stuff worked. I was very curious.

AI assessment note: “I was. I was one of those straight A kids, I guess.”

Q You guys are now, you still have the rest of your lives ahead of you, and you probably have enough money to fund a new business venture if you wanted to. Is that something you're thinking about? Is that something you might do? Start a new business?

A It turns out it is. 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 get their news and information today is, is, um, broken, perhaps is, is the word. I don't think people are reading the right content. I think the right content is often not the content put in front of us by the various algorithms and feeds, and I think that can be improved. So I'm kind of grateful and having fun just going on a learning journey and reading a lot of books.

AI assessment note: “It turns out it is. So I'm actually starting to tinker”

Q Okay, so meantime, you're, you're trying to raise fifteen million dollars, and you're gonna raise it, you're getting all these term sheets, because you've got incredible traffic, and what, what happens? I mean, again, just a routine call with Amazon, and-

A Well, somehow, their corp dev guys knew to ping us, and so they, they said, hey, we wanna have you, we've talked about this exciting idea in the past, we'd like you to come up to Seattle and meet some of the, the team, and, And chat about it again. And so I flew up there and I met with the Kindle leadership team. And you know, there's, there's a saying in business that companies are bought, not sold. And I think that's really true to any entrepreneur who's ever like, how do I sell my company? Like that's the wrong mental model. So we weren't trying to sell. We kind of sketched out these ideas and I think they liked them. And I think more to the point, they got to the place in their roadmap where they wanted to invest in social. And they, therefore, kind of said, hey, we're either going to build something in social, or we're going to buy something in social. And this time, you know, it turned out that we were able to get to an agreement on the numbers. And more to the point, I was super excited about the vision we had, we had sketched. On the other hand, I was not sure at all what to do. This was the hardest decision, I think, hands down, I've made in my life.

AI assessment note: “their corp dev guys knew to ping us, and so they, they said”

Q Wow. So once you, once you were an Amazon company, did it kind of take the pressure off in a sense? I mean, did, did you feel like a weight was lifted because you didn't have to hit certain benchmarks and be on calls with investors or, or were there other pressures that actually increased? Yeah.

A Yeah, I don't know how I did this to myself, but I started working harder than I'd ever worked after the acquisition. Amazon was not a place where you go to cruise. I actually remember I had coffee with another friend who'd sold his company too, and he'd sold it to another big slow-moving company. But I was like, how's your day going? And he was like, well, I play golf every morning, and then I go into the office for four hours, and then I go for yoga, and I'm bored out of my mind, and it's only been a year. Since we sold. And I was like, wow, I'm working 12 hour days as hard as I've ever worked. It's stressful, but it's super fun. And, you know, I think the learning curve of learning Amazon, the learning curve of, you know, learning how to be not just a manager, but a manager of managers, and then a manager of managers of managers was immense.

AI assessment note: “I started working harder than I'd ever worked after the acquisition.”

Q You get thousands of users, but when did you start to realize that, that this actually could make some money?

A So I think in 2008, I went to this entrepreneur gathering and, and I met a guy named Neil, Neil Patel, who was like one of the top SEOs in the world. And I was telling him about the site and he was like, how many page views do you have? And I, I forget the number, but I was like two million a month or something. And he was like, dang, you got an SEO site. And I was like, what does that mean? Uh, cause I kept looking at my Google analytics and it kept saying we have a lot of traffic, but I didn't really understand where it was coming from. And we had this unique content that was really good. And I think that's why, why Google's algorithms kind of recognize that and started throwing us more and more traffic. You know, it wasn't overnight. It was like over years. And so, you know, completely unwittingly, we'd made a site that started ranking really well for every book title. And so then what we did is every time the Revenue got big enough where I could afford another developer. We added another developer. And I think it took us several years until we had like six or seven developers.

AI assessment note: “So I think in 2008, I went to this entrepreneur gathering”

Q Was it like startup craziness? Like were you working from morning till night and sleeping at your desk and eating pizza out of a box? Was it, was it, was it like that?

A Yeah, it was a fun startup. It was a big floor. There's a whole bunch of us in our twenties, programmers working there. And the other cool thing about Tickle was they didn't just build the personality test, built a couple other products too, including a dating site and, uh, an early social network. So as soon as we saw Friendster taking off, we built a social network as part of Tickle. So it went from, you could take those tests and See what kind of dog you were to you could take the tests and compare what kind of dog you were with all your friends. We built a social network, a photo sharing social network called ringo.com, which was kind of like a early Instagram, but it was not on mobile because there was no mobile in 2004 or five. And it was really a fun time to kind of learn from the inside. Like, how do you build a social network? How do you make it viral? How do you do all that? Uh, really fun engineering challenges.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it was a fun startup. It was a big floor. There's a whole bunch”

Q So what, when, when did you start to think that you were ready to start your own business after you got that 80,000 dollar check?

A I mean, what, I knew I always wanted to start my own business. I had no idea if I could actually do that or if, you know, what it would be. But what it was, I mean, I, I grew up with two grandfathers who were CEOs of their own companies. And, you know, I think the positive side is you look at your grandfather and you can read about him in the press and read books about him. And on the other hand, then you go to Christmas with him and you realize he's a real, just normal person. Uh, and it gives you a sense of belief that if he can do all that, I could do all that. And I think that was honestly one of the core things that led me to think I could be an entrepreneur was he did it. So I can do it.

AI assessment note: “I knew I always wanted to start my own business.”