Evite co-founder Selina Tobaccowala describes how venture capital expectations and startup priorities inverted during the dot-com market crash.
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
What-if
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”