NYU’s non-stop energy toward entrepreneurship this spring continued with its Startup Week that was held from April 6ththru April 13th. This follows on the heels of their NYU Entrepreneurs Festival held in March that featured Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Dan Porter of Zynga and two days of educational programs.
Keynoting Startup Week was the interview of Fab.com co-founder Jason Goldberg by Adam Penenberg, NYU journalism professor. Fab.com is an ecommerce business bringing “design into consumers’ everyday lives”. Fab.com is a phenomenal story of the rapid scaling of an ecommerce business that was launched in June 2011, booked $65,000 in revenue on its launch day, $1 million within 20 days and is now on target to reach $100 million this year. The company has 12 million members worldwide and over 600 employees. Originally started as a social network, a switch of business model was made to become a design focused ecommerce site, while incorporating some social media tools such as a friends sign up incentive program and Inspiration Wall on the Fab site.
While his company is experiencing skyrocketing growth, Jason calmly shared with the NYU audience the path that led him and his partner, Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Design Officer) to success that began with their chance meeting at a nightclub. Jason began his career by joining the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton in 1991-92 which led to a position on the National Economic Council upon President Clinton taking office. He went to Stanford Business School, but dropped out to work for a startup. Later he ran Jobster.com from 2004-2007 which Jason described as “a great idea before its time” and attributed its end to “we did not execute”. All this served as his learning ground to start Fab, but a key strategic decision was made that Jason strongly attributes to their success which was to “build the business around Bradford’s taste”. Jason’s feels that “the taste experience can be very hard to copy”and much attention was paid to creating a great user experience. Their goal now is to be the “world’s greatest design store”.
Jason shared a lot of his learning curve throughout the interview.
“Four stages of a venture: 1. Will it work? 2. Gain Traction 3. Can it be scaled up? and 4. How big will it get?”
“Something I learned from vc Josh Koppelman: “Gain traction in a year or move on.”
“Don’t just keep adding features.”
“Hardest part of growing a company is people.”
“One thing concept-find it and do it.”
Startup Week was a full program of hacking and networking, while providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn alongside “the best and brightest in NYC tech”
