Willingness to Adapt

I read something very interesting about you. Over breakfast one morning, more than a decade ago, you told a VC friend of yours that you were going to try to do everything from your iPhone for six months. This is when the iPhone was still relatively new. Why did you decide to do that? And what role did that play in your strategic planning for Poshmark?

Yeah, that was a very pivotal decision. So, I knew that mobile had come of age, thinking about the technology trends. I was 40 plus years old at that time, which tells you that I’m a 50 plus year old now, certainly not your typical teen mobile user, and all of that. You could see the kids already starting to use the mobile phone at a very deep level. And I said, “In order for me to truly commit to this technology as the future of my career, my business, I have to see that this can really, really work.”
And so I said, “If I’m using my laptop, and I’m not using my phone, then how can I bet on the mobile phone?” And the bet that Poshmark made day one, was we’re going to only build for the iPhone, we can only build a social experience. We’re not even going to have a website, it was sort of very contrarian back in 2010. Today, it feels like, “Duh, you know, why would you do anything else?”
But at that time, it was very, very hard. In fact, many investors were like, “You have to have a website.” I said, “No, we’re not going to have a website, we’re only going to have an app.” And we can only transact with the app, you can only sell to that, you can only buy through the app. And to do that, I had to sort of prove to myself that everything could be done through an iPhone in that time.
And I was able to do it. iPhone, plus iPad. I had an iPad. I was able to do banking, I was able to do PowerPoints, Word Documents. What I couldn’t do was Excel spreadsheets at that time in 2010, but everything else, I was able to do. Painful? It was, but I just didn’t go to the laptop for six months and it proved to me that you could do it and allowed me to bet fully, in terms of strategic planning on mobile, as the future of everything.