Zappos reached $1.6 billion in sales on just $10 million in equity
Alfred Lin · How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash · Jan 21, 2025 · at 45:48
Alfred Lin, Sequoia partner and former Zappos COO/CFO, describes how Zappos was financed and scaled prior to being acquired by Amazon.
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“Tony invested ten million dollars of his own money, but most of it was financed through being very, very creative, figuring out how to get merchants that we ordered from to give us credit and to increase the credit line. We had a, eventually got a line of credit from Wells Fargo, but the company burned very little cash, and for a company that went from zero, when we sold the company, it had 1.6 billion dollars in sales that really didn't have a lot of equity financing was pretty incredible.”
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