Making Physical Retail as Easy as Opening an Online Store - Ali Kriegsman and Alana Branston

So there were a bunch of questions about you guys, kind of like pre-YC. I think maybe the easiest way to do this is to flow through from there. Before you guys were in YC and then fellowship and then Corps, and then now. So going all the way back, Phil Thomas asked what did you learn from the fellowship that you applied during the main YC core program?

Yeah, I think so. We did the fellowship in winter of 2016, huh? When Kevin Hale was running it. So I think for us, YC fellowship was all about figuring out product-market fit and figuring out what we were. Because we didn't know when we got in. We were basically the concept was this cooler curated Etsy. So everything was online; we would find these cool emerging brands, sell their product online, and have a content element to it.

It wasn't really working. We had some brands selling with us, but there were clear problems. I feel like fellowship for us was about acknowledging this wasn't working. And like really, it actually wasn't really good for that.

Yeah, it really is. So acknowledging that wasn't working and then, it's almost kind of gave us permission to just totally tear that down and try a million other things. I think before we kind of got into YC, it just got into that whole mentality where we were like, this is our company, and this is what we're doing. We're gonna just keep doing this until it works. I feel like Kevin and the program in general basically allowed us to be like, okay this isn't working, let's try literally 15 other concepts and see if we can get something with some momentum and go with that.

We basically used it; I think it was two months, that program, and we just ran like experiments every week. We were like, okay, what if we—most of them were ridiculous.

What was the worst one?

Okay, the worst one was we were selling all of this niche, emerging brands on our site. Kevin was like, why don't you go to restaurants and see if they need help designing their stores? Or if they need a programmatic like interior design solution or a way to replenish forks and knives and stuff. So we spent an entire day, the two of us, bopping around to different Brooklyn restaurants and being like, how do you find your knives?

This is like a business where they like razor-thin margins. Really, what do you think about if everything was handmade and way more expensive? They were like, no, we would never use this.

And we also knew nothing about the restaurant industry. Some guy pulled out his phone and was like, here's an app where I can order like 800 limes on demand. Do I need it? This has been figured out already.

So that was definitely the worst one and the funniest.

And then, by the time you started working on your product as it is now, that was before YC core, right? That's what you applied with.

Well, there was a whole chunk of time after YC fellowship where we had realized that this editorial magazine model wasn't working. In the spirit of YC, we asked our users. We asked all of the brands that sold on our platform what they wanted, and it turned out that they actually needed more help selling offline than they did selling online. They weren't really looking for another multi-vendor online marketplace or another Etsy or anything of that nature. A lot of them made boatloads of money doing craft fairs and selling in retail environments or doing pop-ups or markets.

So what we did was we listened to that and said, okay, what if we basically just started doing this as many times as we can, as frequently as we can, as inexpensively as we can, just to see if there's there there?

So I’ll let alone take over how we found our 18,000 square foot parking lot. Basically, we're an outdoor pops-up pitch tents in rain or shine in this almost 20,000 square foot parking lot in Williamsburg for six consecutive months.

The worst part? We wanted to test this concept without spending a lot of money, and that's kind of what we did from the beginning. So we were just looking for the cheapest possible space to run these things, and it works. The same way it works now—like the brands that pay a weekend fee, they come up in person and sell their product.

We looked everywhere, and the first place we ran it was at a bar with a big courtyard. We had like 40 brands a weekend on a good weekend, and they'd pay about $300 a weekend. That would give them a table and a chair that we provided. They'd basically come and set up their product like a little booth, and we would just run a market for Saturday and Sunday, so our weekends.

This was all we would do. We did it at this courtyard, and then we wanted a bigger space. I found this massive burger—oh, it looks like a toxic wasteland. Good. It was totally overgrown. It's like this asphalt parking lot sitting on top of a swamp.

So it's primo, obviously, you cannot develop on this property. Yeah, God, it was a very good location. It was like in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, right on the subway stop. We just called the phone number on the parking lot.

Yeah, I mean, I dealt with them. I got it for super cheap where we could use that every weekend. We ran it from like April of 2016 till the end of October that year, and it was a total nightmare because we were outdoors. It would be like the middle of July in New York City, and really brands would just text us and be like it's a hundred degrees, we're not coming.

Really? Yeah, 'cause it would be so hot. It would be like genuinely like, yeah, like it was crazy. There were a few weekends that were inhumane. But the good thing was that we were starting to actually make money, and the brands were making money, and we were starting to prove out the model. We could see, like, okay, we now know we’ve proven that brands want to sell in person and they'll pay to sell in person.

There's definitely this lack of easy-to-access physical space. I feel like we were able to prove that that summer.

Okay, and then so at what point did you decide, like, all right, let's do YC?

At the end of October, we were like this is crazy. We can't do these markets anymore. So we were like, what would be a more long-term solution? We started looking at actual physical retail spaces, just a normal store within. So we found a store which we still have now. It's like a great store in Williamsburg.

We basically moved to the same model—this membership-based model to the store. The brands would pay this monthly fee, they'd get access to space, but the store was totally run by us. So they didn't have to show up, and it allowed us to work with larger brands.

We really felt like that model was working even better. We were onto something bigger. We're like, this isn't just going to be another early one. We booked it out in less than two weeks. It was crazy.

Yeah, like, I want to say we had 35 brands paying the membership fee within 12 days of announcing that the store was going to open.

Wow.

These are all people that were doing the parking lot version. Some of them were, and then some of them were. A lot of the parking lot people were like, Pete, see, you know, some of them were from the parking lot.

Yeah, yeah. There were a lot. Honestly, I do want to call it; there were a lot of friends that have stuck with us from the very beginning, but mostly it was new. Mostly it opened the door to other types of like slightly larger brands that maybe wouldn't sell on a parking lot all weekend, but they’re not carried in Sephora all over the world yet.

Okay, so like to put a finer point on that, Brian Chappell asked how did you actually find your first customers?

So you filled that quickly, but how did they even find out about you?

To answer that, I'd say when we launched the digital, shoppable magazine version of Bulletin, we would just reach out to brands that we loved and be like, can we do a profile on you, and a long interview, and original photography? Make this beautiful page for you, and they'd be like yes.

So we would do that. They would see zero sales on our website, but it's so pretty. It was really like no one had anything to lose in this situation. Through just maintaining those relationships, and then eventually moving into the market model, we reached out to those brands that had been on the editorial site. They said, oh I know these two girls that I worked with on this previous iteration of a company would recommend other brands to do the parking lot.

It was honest, so we always had great referral.

Okay, and I think that that was how. With opening the store, it was basically tapping the network of brands that had been doing the pop-up and creating a nice little email, sending that to brands on other e-commerce sites that we thought might want to sell in person.

We obviously looked at New York Now, Renegade, other sites that did this like IRL sales thing that we were trying. We just always had very successful outreach with potential customers, and I think we still do.

Yeah.

And what was your strategy around pricing? How did you figure that out once you opened the store as far as the membership and everything?

Yeah, I think we had an idea of what brands were willing to pay from the markets. We could look at an existing market and see, like, okay this one is a massive one, and they were charging $1,000 a weekend. We started very low.

I think we had an idea of what they would pay from that, and then moved that over to the store. But even now we keep that number very accessible for brands. We like the idea of brands that are emerging to be able to partake in this, and you get a very wider range of brands that would sell in the space, which is kind of cool.

Okay, because, yeah, I mean, like, what kind of scale are we talking about? Do you even know the annual revenue numbers of a lot of these brands?

Yeah, I was saying on the smaller end, you have brands that have literally just started. They maybe sell their products on Instagram, and like they probably don't even tell you what the number is revenue-wise, which I think is kind of cool to have a certain percentage of the products in this store be this very homespun vibe.

But there’s, I mean, we have brands that sell on Sephora. We have brands that are like big brands that are doing—I wouldn't say big brands, but maybe they’re doing like $10 million a year in revenue.

Oh, okay.

So, they're still, you know, out there building their brand, but like they have manufacturing figured out and distribution and just like a much more established brand.

Okay, got you. So, Adora had a question for you about store expansion partners. Yeah, well, Ship has been there from the beginning.

Oh gee, she asked you about a couple of things, but one of which was store expansion. So for you guys, how do you think about opening up new spaces? How do you find them? Do you think it will work in every city? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, for us, so we have started in New York City. Obviously, we have new stores here. We'll be doing one more store in about a month, so we'll have three stores for 2017.

Yeah, I think we—it’s tempting to want to just do this very quickly. We have so much demand from these brands that want to get into spaces. It is expensive to open a store; there's real costs behind all this, obviously. So definitely trying to be careful there.

But I think now that we have two successful stores, we will have the third opening soon. It gets easier for us to look at the data to understand what's performing, what products are performing, what neighborhoods work best for us.

I feel like even now we have such a good idea of what a successful store looks like; as far as square footage, location, and the types of neighborhoods. We’re getting smarter about it, and I think as the company grows, it's easier for us to actually look at things like customer data to understand what the next city is.

So like we have our online business still. Understanding where those customers are from helps us decide like, okay, maybe LA is the next place that we're going, and just being smarter about it—not go crazy.

Yeah, I will say when it comes to how we pick actual stores and the availability of stores, real estate is in crisis right now, in particular retail real estate. And you can speak more to it, but we don't really have a dearth of real estate. People are like reaching out to us to have us help them make their spaces successful.

Yeah.

Which is really exciting that you know both ends of the marketplace when it comes to having a wait list in Williamsburg and Nolita for our two stores. And then also having this pool of real estate folks that want us to open bulletin spaces for them and with them. It's really exciting.

Okay, so can you contextualize that a little bit for people? Because I don't think it's totally obvious. Like, even in—I’m trying to think, like, maybe it was in Carroll Gardens where there's just like strips on main drags of stores just vacant. How did that happen, and how are you guys making money off of that opportunity?

I mean, it's good for our business, but I think everything started to change a little bit as like people's shopping behavior has changed. I think like Amazon definitely plays a role in it. I don't think it's the entire reason that everything has changed so much.

I think people have less of a reason to go into the store for their normal, like just utility kind of purchase, and so I think those traditional retail stores do get hit because of that. And then for us, it does turn into an opportunity because I think all of these property owners or brokers, they'll cut deals with us that we would have never gotten nine months ago.

Like if you want to do a short-term license agreement and test out a location and do it at a discount with the option to renew. There’s just so much that we can do now because of what's happening.

What's happening, meaning like a single store is just way too expensive.

Yeah, there's basically a mismatch between the cost of real estate and how much it traditionally costs a brand to take on a lease.

Also, restrictions around how long that lease should be. You know, brokers and property owners want 5 to 10-year leases; they want long-term leases, but for brands, you can see by all of the hundreds and hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores belonging to big brands that have closed this year alone that they're not—it’s not their profit center anymore.

It just does not make sense to throw tens of thousands of dollars behind a lease every month, do build-out, and staff and maintain it when there’s—you know, who’s to say that that will actually yield crazy revenue?

Right, I think it’s not obvious. If you live in a big city, you're like, what are you talking about? All these stores are opening up everywhere, and in reality, most of them aren't even making money. They just look cool to be in Soho.

Well, there has been a crazy spike this year. I just read a report on how many stores are opening. Like, there are a lot of brick-and-mortar stores opening, but I think that's only possible because real estate players are realizing that the terms that they've set for their inventory to date is just not gonna fly anymore.

I feel like it a lot of it comes down to what the brands are using the stores for now.

I think is like what has really changed. So rather than it being like, you know, an old-school retail brand signing a 10-year lease and saying we want our customers to come here and buy product, I think you see a lot of these newer players and direct-to-consumer startups using it as more of a marketing channel or as a way to interact in person with this massive digital audience that they've grown.

In those scenarios, it doesn't make sense for them to sign a 10-year lease. That doesn't—if you are comparing it to like a Facebook ad or some other kind of marketing, you wouldn't buy like a 10-year Facebook ad or something. It makes more sense for it to be targeted and short-term, something that is experiential and more on the marketing side rather than your major profit.

But real estate hasn't caught up to that.

Yeah, yeah.

So you got a weird time. Are they catching up to you? Like, are you guys this arbitrage right now until the market changes, or is this always going to be an opportunity?

I think that you'll see a lot of these direct-to-consumer startups, especially the ones that have been around longer. You already see people—like we’re doing this, where they have like more traditional longer-term leases, and I think that totally makes sense for them.

But I think you'll see a mix of both. I think it's nice for the customer to have this influx of rotating stores and experiences, but I think for the smart direct-to-consumer startups that nail the experience and nail the purpose of their store, you can kind of move into a long-term lease.

That's actually what we're starting to do with our business. We started off with these six-month license agreements where we would test out a space. In our Williamsburg store and our Nolita store, it works well for us. We’ve kind of nailed the experience, and so now we've moved to long-term leases there.

Okay, and so we have like much more reliable supply where we can put out brands months in advance and not be kind of like [Applause].

Yeah, too bad.

Do you guys have to get fancy with your fundraising? Because this is kind of non-traditional, right? Like having all these leases and stuff. Is it different than a normal startup raising money?

I think for this stage it didn't seem to be too different. I think we definitely ran into a lot of questions about like who's—like a physical, like thing and a real estate thing and like there are a lot of questions, obviously.

But I think we had enough traction and data to show that the unit economics of this shared retail space works and that it is scalable because of the membership model.

But yeah, I think anytime you're dealing with real estate or anything, I think WeWork definitely paved the way.

Yeah, I feel like okay, WeWork with their co-working model. Granted, you know, they're light years ahead of where we are. It will take some time to get there, but I think that given how well they're doing and their valuation and just how prolific they are and how many spaces they open up, it's like oh, okay, physical space isn't necessarily like the scary devil end-all of—it's not gonna kill us!

So yeah, luckily, we had them as a roadmap.

So speaking of killing, Adora asked why did old department stores just die off?

Like what?

So many reasons. I think it’s a few different things. Ilana kind of touched on this. The way that the internet has just changed how we shop, the internet will win at a series of things that stores will always fail. Like with the internet, you can get anything you need immediately, there’s a wide selection, you can toggle for a specific price, a specific location, a certain delivery date.

I think with department stores, that's what they still do. When you walk into a department store, it's just like a massive empty space with a ton of different product categories, not tailored to a specific customer. There's no experiential or discovery element, and it all just seems kind of odd.

There's kitchenware with maternity clothes with baby clothes with fancy handbags, just like this never-ending.

And it's like if I wanted to explore product like that—like if that's where my head's at, I'm just gonna go on Amazon, or I'll go on the internet, or I'll go on Bloomingdale's.com. I'm not gonna like physically show up.

So I think department stores have failed because the things that they're good at are the things that the internet is good at, and the internet will just always win because it's right at your fingertips.

I think the other thing that department stores aren't good at is just product selection and replenishing the store with fresh new product. They can't be super reactive. Oftentimes, they're buying a ton of product up front. They're doing crazy flash sales to offload products that they can make way for a new product, but that just seems to cheapen the entire department store experience.

So I feel like they're just kind of stuck in this weird middle ground where the things that they're doing to try to improve are actually hurting them in a lot of instances.

I don't know if you'd add anything to that.

I think in a lot of cases too, they have these massive footprints and these stores have been around for a long time, so it’s no easy task to be like, oh, let’s just renovate hundreds of stores around the country that are massive. They're in a very difficult position.

While we're yet innovating, it's not easy for them, and we're obviously at an advantage of very new having two small stores. But I think for us, we can see like okay, we know that we can compete with Amazon and like the internet, right? With experience and with these stores that are experience-driven and that are built around a certain community.

Being able to start from that point and build from there makes it a lot easier for us to do that.

Yeah, obviously, it’s heavily curated, right? Like you’re definitely picking vendors rather. So how are you deciding what goes in a store?

So, Mike Malcow, I mispronounced everyone's name, and they say it on everybody. It’s okay.

How do you know what users want at these stores?

It's honestly a ton of data feeding into our selection process. We look at Instagram. We look at the posts that are performing well, not only on our Instagram but what's going on in the zeitgeist of Instagram right now. Like, what is our customer looking at? What does she like and engage with?

We’ve segmented to female buyers.

I just asked for both of our stores. We obviously look at sales. This successful store didn’t crop out of nowhere. As we've told you, we had markets that sold product. We had this initial version of the store before we turned it into this editorial theme that sold product.

We have three years of data around things that definitely have not performed well and then the things that have done pretty well. So that information has been really helpful.

Maggie, who I mentioned earlier, basically goes through all that data and looks at the brands that are applying to sell with us. She says, okay, this brand is great, but these are the five products that will perform best. We're really low on this product category, and I think it should be this aesthetic over this one because last month, this crafty look didn't do well across five different product categories.

So it's very—there is a lot of data being fed into the decisions, but we always have our own human touch on what we think. In ways, we are our customer, so it's like we're not like, what do we like? But we intervene.

It’s a little bit of our taste thrown in.

Was there something that you both loved and didn't do well at all? A product?

Yeah, I can think of something. So I was in LA for a period of time in 2015 during our editorial version, and there's this amazing designer. His name is Andrew Hahn. First name Andrew spelled normal, Han spelled Haan.

Okay, he does these insane, beautiful hand-drawn geometric prints on graph paper. I did this whole photo shoot with him, this long interview. He's like the kindest, most lovely, unbelievable man in the universe. We put his stuff, his work, in our Williamsburg store, and I think he's so—and granted, they're expensive. They take a lot of time. They're around like $125 to $250 depending on the print.

And he sold two.

And like that was that. And that was just kind of us like loving him and loving knowing how much labor went into these prints and how detailed they were. We thought they were absolutely stunning, and they just didn't perform.

But has art performed well in the past?

Prints do, yes. I think what we've learned with both of the stores and just in general is like the lower price-point products work for us. So we've kind of made the entire vibe of the store this very accessible price point, like less than 100 bucks type stuff even. Our average order value right now is like 40 bucks.

So I think it adds to the experience of it. We're like anyone that walks in can buy something. It's not this exclusive accessible place. We were just looking around being like, cool, I literally can't afford this. So, yeah, I think everyone, it kind of puts a smile on everyone's face.

Knowing who our customer is and what her disposable income looks like based on our information, it's like I don't think there's a world in which at this point we’d ever create a store like that, because that's just not what she can shop.

Should we do that?

That’s funny.

Okay, so going back to applying for YC, both of you are non-technical—is that accurate?

Okay, what is your advice? So Deepak asked, what's your advice for non-technical founders applying to YC?

I would say, I mean, for us, we applied three times. We applied for fellowship, we applied a middle time where we didn't get in, and then we finally applied the third time and got in.

I think to be able to like, one, be persistent and keep applying. But I think for us, we were able to show a lot of traction every six months when we were applying. Even when we started, like Ali and I were still working at our old jobs, but we had built all this stuff and built this whole editorial site. The second time we applied, we had this whole new model and we had revenue, and it was like, yes, we had just pivoted, but we had done a lot in a short period of time.

The third time, the big difference was we had a ton of traction. We had been working on it for over a year, and I think we were finally able to make the argument that this is very scalable. For the non-technical side, to be able to really explain confidently that we didn't actually need that at this stage of the business.

So I think obviously, like, you know, most YC companies have a technical co-founder, and that's a massive part of their business. I think for us at that stage, we were really able to explain why we weren't really at the stage just yet where we needed it.

I think we were approaching the stage where we were going to need it. Now we have a bunch of remote developers that are holding everything for us.

But yeah, I think we were just able to really show that for this stage of the business, we were okay without a technical co-founder.

So same advice for you, Ali?

Yeah, I would say the same thing. I think definitely speaking confidently to why you don't need that person. I mean, I think something that we always really emphasized was like we were cobbling together like pre-existing platforms that did what we needed at the time.

So for us, it's like we're focused on building a profitable business. Why should we spend time building a technology when we don’t even know what it needs to look like yet?

We clearly from telling you our story had no idea what we were building. We didn't build anything because it would have taken a ton of time and a ton of money.

Alana and I both from the get-go were like we want to create something that from day one someone is handing us money to give to them. Like we want to create a service. We want to create a product that we know people need from the start and then refine the service and the product around that customer.

So now we're building this platform after learning for the past two years what tech do we need to do retail as a service in this way? How will our customers work with us more easily and more efficiently through this technology? What do the elements actually have to be?

Right, I guess the advice I'd give would be, I mean, if you're building software, like get a technical co-founder. Like, you know, it's really important to have someone by your side to go through the ups and downs.

If the product is gonna be tech from the start, I don't really know why you would outsource that. But otherwise, if you're doing something unconventional like us—if we were doing a retail real estate business—just really go in there ready to explain why the tech isn't necessarily first and foremost right now.

I think we, by showing everything that we had cobbled together, was kind of impressive on its own.

Like, well, we have Squarespace doing this, and we have Shopify doing this. There were like six different existing platforms that were doing the job, and I think our biggest bottleneck was figuring out all of these things about the business and about the next space.

Real estate, like, it had nothing to do with technology. It wasn't holding us back in any way, so I think proving that helped.

I think that's a really great piece of advice; something that people even on the technical side should consider because so often they're like, well, should this be in Ruby or Python? And like how much machine learning do I need before I apply to YC?

For the most part, no one is using their product. Get it out there and see how people would use it.

Yeah, if we had spent a ton of money building some beautiful editorial platform, we would be like out of business on the way to front. This is the easiest way to find silverware!

That's so good.

Do you remember what the actual numbers are? This is such a common question I figured I’d ask: what did your growth look like before YC when you applied successfully?

Before we applied, like the zero.

No, yeah. So this would have been like October of last year. Our growth numbers were great then because that's when we started to do the markets every single weekend, and then we had just launched the store.

So that summer, our numbers—our revenue was like doubling every month because we were like we had more and more markets coming up, and all those were fully booked out.

Then we had just launched the store, so we had like six months of space booked out for that, and all of that's prepaid.

So our numbers looked really good because of that.

Okay, and it’s just kind of tangentially, but you guys have counterintuitive opinions about retail that you think—the markets changing in a way that most people don't.

I rely—I have like everything swings like a pendulum. So I don’t know. I think about the store that we’re opening for holiday, for example. The entire ethos of the store is like bringing back the nostalgia of going with your girlfriends or your family to the mall and like getting these malls, yeah.

Getting, you know, walking out with like a ton of stuff piling it into the trunk. I feel like with so many things going on right now, with like the state of our country and how the internet and all of this attention being on the internet and all this time spent being on the internet has just like kind of reached a tipping point.

I feel like people are looking and being like, "like, I don't know if I want to be staring at my computer all day," or "staring at my phone all day," or "like in this internet world 24/7."

I feel like there is going to be a pendulum shift away from this and toward like interaction and being in person and connecting face-to-face.

I don’t know when that's going to happen. Obviously, these things happen in like decade-long chunks, but I hope it comes soon.

I think that definitely informs how we approach retail and how we approach building our stores. In our holiday store, there’s going to be like a lounge area and activation area where people can explicitly do events and workshops and do things where there's community building and actual human interaction.

So I don’t know if that’s necessarily counterintuitive, but I feel like a lot of people are figuring out trying to figure out like how do we make Instagram more shoppable? Or how do we make our newsletters more shoppable? Or how do we do this?

It’s like my greatest joy in life is walking by our Nolita store on like an odd hour on like Tuesday at like 3 p.m. Maybe, and seeing that it's packed and just feeling like, wow, they're like I'm—we're not wrong, and there are women not like actually want to physically show up in a store.

And they communicate with each other, and I always get DMs on the Bulletin Instagram about how much they love our retail staff, and it warms my heart. It makes me confident that like this could be the direction retail is going in. If so, we're on the cusp of it.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think you also see a lot of trends in in-store retail design right now where people are getting like magic mirrors, like these crazy screens in the store, and like you can connect your online account, and like just all this technology in this chat.

You're online, but I think that’s something that we have really shied away from. I think that like we really like the store to feel like this in-person experience, and it's not about kind of going back to the internet or like somehow having a screen in your face again.

So I don’t necessarily know that be counterintuitive, but I think for us, to approach the store design in this new way, it is about the community in the store and about the experience in the store. It's not about like another—weirdly.

Is there a future of your store without any employees?

I don’t think so. I think that's for us—it’s such a big part of the experience. I think there's some technology that we are thinking about that will ease the checkout process or like the point of the employee being there isn’t to ring them up.

Which is part of what they do now. So I'd like to free them up even more where they can just spend interacting with the customer. But yeah, I think the in-store team is such a huge part of the experience and makes that probably like 50 percent of the positive feedback we got.

So yeah, we still need humans.

I'm sorry, if you weren't working on Bulletins right now, what would you work on?

Work on it together?

We would—we have like gone through Bulletin, or would it just be like Bulletin never happened?

Oh, alright. Alternate reality?

No. So today, okay, literally—it goes crazy somehow in it. Well, it's still going on—say like you can’t restart it. You have to do something else.

Okay, I definitely—I think—I mean, I don't want to speak for you. I feel like we're both at a place where I don’t see us ever going back to like a normal job or like working for someone else again.

I don't know what I would do though. Like, I feel like this is just—I think I would love to do—I mean, for me, the most fun part about what we do is like the store design and like bringing life to these kind of weird old New York stories, as weird as that sounds.

So I think something with that I could like—I can be happy doing.

Okay, maybe, yeah, just designing.

Others?

So basically, Bulletins. I don't know. I would definitely be writing. I write a lot for Bulletin across like our email and our social and like the editorial site that we once had.

It definitely comes very naturally to me, and it’s one of those feelings. I know like coders get this way when they code; it makes me high. When I'm writing something, so I don't know, maybe I'd write a book or become a tech journalist or I don't know, work for a good cause—like a non-profit of some kind and handle their communications. I think that would be really fun.

What was the most meaningful thing you learned out in YC?

I would say I would say working when—so Michael Seibel was our group partner, and I just feel like he was always so good about getting us to focus on like the one thing that we should be focusing on.

So part of that was just like him being brilliant and picking the thing we should be working on. But I think getting into that mindset of like really identifying like what your actual one issue is.

Not that we're like, I don't know. I think YC is a crazy busy time, and there are so many things to be worrying about, like as it always says when you're running a company.

I think just always going back to that and being like, okay, like what is the one thing that you need to be working on in solving? And like the thing that can actually affect your business and not getting bogged down with like the millions of other things you could possibly be doing.

He's so good about justice on, yeah, that one issue.

I think something that we learned in both YC fellowship and YC core—in both instances, we were working in isolation.

I mean, during YC fellowship, we didn't have a team. And then during YC core, our team was mostly based here, and we would go back and forth but work together in San Francisco.

I think I definitely learned, especially since it was such a pivotal time for us, and we were growing and figuring out like what the one thing was. Like the ability to listen, I think in group office hours, just the way that that's structured where you literally go around the room and listen to every single founder talk about the problems that they're facing.

You know, you give suggestions if you have any stake in what they're doing or if you have any expertise on ways that you can help.

I think just listening to each other—like when you're together all the time in that very pressure cooker environment, you have to make very quick decisions. You know you have demo day coming up. What are you gonna present? What business are you building? What is going to be the thing that helps investors understand this is the future?

I think they really shouldn’t be missing out on this opportunity.

I think, yeah, it was one of the best times for us—like bouncing ideas off of each other and just amongst a group of really intelligent people that were doing such different things.

So yeah, I think it made me a much stronger listener overall.

Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting experience thinking back. Were you—I don't know, it's like the one time where everything else in your life really stopped completely.

You did, yeah. It's so crazy.

I mean, I guess it always feels that way in a sense when you're running a company, but I think this was like the one time where we had, you know, moved out of New York—like moved out of our apartments and everything.

Yeah, it’s just such an interesting kind of experiment to move through working. What happens when I literally don't do anything else, and when I'm living in like a studio—like a 500 square foot studio with my co-founder, eating every meal together?

It’s just all you do, and all you think about, and so, yeah, I think like that level of intensity is just—it was really cool to do that.

I think coming back here and kind of like returning to normal life, like that obviously stuck with us, but I don't know. It’s just like a cool thing to go through.

Also, pick a good co-founder.

Yeah, because if you end up doing YC, and even if not, like your stuff seems like things are going okay.

Yeah, no, I feel I think— I don’t know, I feel very lucky.

Alright, thanks, guys.

Thank you.