Assertion Contradicted
Chandra: Kaboodle coined the term 'social shopping' in 2006
“And so we ended up focusing a lot of our energy on fashion and women and coined the term in 2006 social shopping.”
Insight
Chandra: Silicon Valley excels at software but is not good at managing inventory
“I realized that Silicon Valley, we are good at a lot of things, but managing inventory is not our forte. You know, we think of things as very fluid and consumer and bits and bytes. So I said, that's not that inventory is not a great thing to do, but just, we a…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Poshmark paused marketing for a year, delaying funding by 18 months
“And we cut down growth by taking our marketing and bringing it down pretty close to zero for almost a year before we restarted it while we rebuild the infrastructure. The hard part was that this year of no growth Ultimately meant that to get a real funding rou…”
Insight
Chandra: Not all distribution and revenue are good for a startup
“And being an entrepreneur, I was just going wherever the money was, and wherever the distribution was, instead of sort of saying that all distribution and all money is not good for the business.”
Assertion Supported
Chandra: Marketplace sales tax slowed Poshmark growth and derailed 2019 IPO
“Just adding that sales tax caused the transaction volume to drop, the business growth to slow down, and everything sort of moved down. Derailed our IPO. We could no longer be a public company because we didn't know what was happening at that time, you know. Li…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Poshmark lost money on early orders by charging $5 for $10.50 shipping
“We launched the app with five dollar shipping at that time, and our cost of shipping was turning out to be 10 dollars and 50 cents on an average. And so we were basically losing money left and right on every order.”
Assertion Supported
Chandra: In 2024 Poshmark maintains a 20% take rate and $7.97 shipping
“Today it's 2024, our take rate is still 20%, and our shipping is seven 97.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Poshmark grew 3x to 5x in two months from Facebook mobile ad beta
“And it turned out that in the first two months, it was an extremely successful product. And we just grew Three to five acts in two months.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Men's category became Poshmark's second fastest-growing segment
“It ended up that men became after women, the fastest growing category. And the way men shop was great for our women sellers because they are faster shoppers.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Chandra: Poshmark reached net EBITDA profitability in March 2020
“And then by March 31st, we actually had our first net EBITDA profitable month. So we hit profitability a year ahead.”
Disclosure
Chandra: Naver intends to take Poshmark public again in the future
“And their vision is that they believe the space can be an independent company in the future. So they want to, they want me to grow this company and at some point in the future, make it an independent public company owned by neighbor, but also a public. So the …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: VCs told him to avoid consumer tech post-dot-com crash
“Couple of VCs I talked to, he said, hey guys, if you did something in database, we'd, you know, look at you, but consumer, I mean, stay away from it, you know, and again, you have to remember, we are just coming out of dot com, so consumer is still not a very …”
Disclosure
Chandra took 50% of Kaboodle equity and split the rest with engineers
“I'll take half, and you guys, if you guys are willing to share the technical half, we'll divide it between the two of you. So we divided the company between the three of us, and reserved five percent for a consumer person that we're going to recruit in the fut…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Caboodle was never profitable under Hearst
“It was never profitable. And it needed like a three or five X growth before it would be a scale to be, you know, to have enough monetization and add engines at that time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chandra: Poshmark gained around 100 first-day users from PR launch coverage
“I think we had like a hundred users in the first day. It was all through PR, and, you know, we got an article in a pub at that time, which was very popular, called Refinery 29. We had a couple of articles in San Francisco Chronicle, print, and we started to se…”
