Evite: Selina Tobaccowala

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2019

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the height of the first dot-com boom, Selina Tobaccowala and college friend Al Lieb were determined to start a tech company. After a few false starts, they landed on the idea for Evite—an on-line invitation business that within its first year, attracted a million followers and $37 million in investment. When the tech bubble burst, Selina and Al were forced to lay off dozens of employees before selling Evite in 2001. But the company has survived to this day, and Selina remains a role model for women in tech. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," Jamia Ramsey describes how her frustration with pink ballerina tights led her to create Blendz, apparel for dancers that matches darker skin tones. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	The way that the dotcom was at the time was, you know, eyeballs, it was like everything was about like growth and the traffic, and there was no discussion or talk about revenue.
0:43.0	And then the bubble burst, and all of a sudden it went from spend, spend, spend to, oh my gosh, we need to fire the team.
0:51.0	So you guys had to lay off more than half of the people who worked at the company.
0:56.0	We went down from 73 to 28.
0:59.0	That was one of the toughest days in my career, even to this point.
1:05.0	Ramen PR gets how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:20.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on the show today, I have two friends from college pioneered the idea for online invitations and then rode the ups and downs of the dotcom bubble with their company, Ebite.
1:40.0	If you were already a business idea in high coup form, it would go something like this.
1:46.0	It solves a problem, super easy to explain, people will use it.
1:52.0	And back in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were a lot of problems that were right for solving, including paper, or rather how to use less of it.
2:01.0	Think about the last time you wrote a letter on paper, or filled out a registration form with a pen, or filed a physical document into a metal filing cabinet, right?
2:12.0	For the most part, email and electronic documents have replaced paper.
2:17.0	Same with invitations, most of the invites I get, and I'm pretty sure you get, common in email.
2:23.0	And for that simple convenience, you can thank Selena Tabacoala.
2:28.0	Because back in the late 1990s, Selena and her friend Al Leed wrote the code that would power the first online invitation business, Ebite.
2:37.0	And for a time, Ebite was a darling of the dotcom bubble.
	...

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