Gadgetory

I'm Alexis Ohanian I started startups invested in them and met amazing people using the internet to change the world our generation has an opportunity unlike any other we can create small empires without anyone's permission we're back in Soho now there are three ways to make a website either you code it yourself you hire someone else or you use one of the many platforms available to get some help now Squarespace has spent nearly the last decade focusing obsessively on making it as easy as possible to make a beautiful website so that you can spend your time doing what you love oh hello I'm Alexis hey Anthony howdy so this is Squarespace welcome Wow I can already tell how much you guys care about design Squarespace is a content management system that helps people make websites blogs and post them online so you go to the website I pick one of our designs and you can manage the site yourself why did you want to go into the CMS space so it was 2003 and I was in my dorm room University of Maryland and I want to make a website for myself and really at the time everything seemed to be this $2.99 race to the bottom like bargain bin you know kind of service and that really didn't appeal to me it didn't fit with my personality I you know I saw the website as sort of like you know my online clothing it was like this this is gonna be the thing that everyone sees when they when they look for you online not very many people we're thinking about bringing a game design to the Internet yeah CSS was there rounded corners were not a part of it back then I remember that rap shit' yeah yeah you too round a rectangle was you know for image little things in the a stick you ugly heck completely ridiculous but like why what what there was no one else doing this right so why why you why were you the one in o3 thinking you know what design is gonna matter I just I really wanted it for myself started in my dorm room you know built the software by myself in 2003 designed it launched it in January 2004 I actually ran the company almost alone for the next three years I was doing everything from customer support I would answer all the tickets at a certain time every night and wake up and answer some in the morning and I just have that as a routine for years to the server infrastructure to design to everything writing all of it I was as can be expected completely and totally stressed out like out of my mind like problem stressed out but good problems kinda I mean like this is his level of stress where I'm walking down the street and a voice in my head that voice in your head that's supposed to tell you like the good thing to do is telling me you can't do this anymore your own voice in your head saying that and I push the voice off until I've always like shut up voice I got this I got this you can find yourself in a position where it almost feels like you don't know how to get out of it oh you don't know the the step you need to take to kind of bring to the next level and that step actually was hiring what I did in those early years kind of to a fault and maybe ten years could have been eight or seven if I would have gotten some of this stuff right is I really I really tried to do too much alone and I was always really good at you know the engineering stuff and the creating stuff and I could write and do all these different things and so I would fall back on those skills but what I what I did what didn't come naturally to me is you know recruiting people to the company and figuring out how to determine if they're a good fit and if the relationship was gonna work and so I waited too long to do some of my initial hiring and then after I waited all that time um the hiring supposed to unstress you not stress you more and I actually made a lot of mistakes in my initial hiring because I was hiring the wrong people yeah I was hiring I hired some of the right people too but I mean not such a good ratio let's say you know it's very very dangerous when you get yourself into a position where you start to have a need right like I'm falling apart I'm stressed out I really want to hire you I really want help you start to make compromises and see the positives over the negatives and you're not balanced and how you're evaluating things during that phase I I think I I could have done a better job there so I stressed out I stressed out the infrastructure I I didn't use the right litmus test when when bringing certain people on frankly I had never really worked in another company besides this one startup before us I didn't really even know what things look like I don't know what a manager looked like I didn't know how much stress was supposed to be removed for me when hiring certain kinds of roles it was just like I'm just used to stress at level 10 so I guess if it goes down a level 9 that's pretty good uh-huh and yeah is it was hard what is what is your stress level number at right now with it right now maybe like a 6.5 and then if we like shard the database properly like five main floor big bookshelf I love ladders on bookshelves cool right I don't know if that's not that's not a load-bearing ladder is it should I try to you could try it this is one of those offices it's like they're certain apartments I walk into and you're like where I know I'm like you're so much cooler than a raised platform yes so it's actually the same cost to rip up the floors put all the wiring in the floor as it is to build this platform and so we kind of used it as like a little bit of a design element to segment off the workspace and he came out quite nicely Alexis Alexis I'm Derek so Elias pleasure to meet you pleasure pleasure so would you marketing so Derek and I work on the podcast radio team so if you guys hear some Spotify you guys hear some Pandora if you guys hear us on this American life that's our team so this is definitely one of the best looking offices we have been in do you work with someone on this is there there some interior designers some professional cool person who picks all the stuff out of it no so actually all the stuff on the shelves is from us and employees and you know our designers and things like that or old things I have Squarespace started out as one college students vlogging solution and over time it came to be a platform for online portfolios and eventually in-engine for e-commerce we're here in Tribeca to meet with a design agency that is doing all of the above our backgrounds are really both really strange and weird I used to be a ballet dancer in a former life what has been really interested in technology my father is a photographer so at a certain point I got injured and those interests kind of came together in a new way I went to school for computer science and art my career has been in marketing and web design and all that kind of stuff but we really found our sort of energy in terms of working with outside clients was making films about brands and telling their stories and that's really like what we really like to do using a documentary style to tell stories Squarespace is a CMS built around helping people create beautiful things and tell their stories on the Internet but what does it do for your business we found Squarespace working on a project we were commissioned by wylie dufresne to design his new restaurant brand and website and we decided to use Squarespace for that and it was right around the time when they started to offer Commerce and we as a small design studio is just us and we have a couple people helping us we're looking for something that allowed us to create really quickly and and really beautifully and we created photography and a logo and a simple type treatment and very quickly we were able to get our clients assets into the site and make it beautiful we have a store that we work on now which is called general store which is our old studio which was a storefront and people started coming in and asking us if they could buy things from our conference room which was really weird yeah good son you're probably on to something well it was kind of yeah it was weird so we had like I don't know if you guys can see that but that's Paul Francis our White Buffalo he has his own website also Paul Francis calm he's prolific easy eyes like all-knowing all-seeing but he was on our wall in our storefront and people would come by and say like hey how much how much for this thing and we're like it's just ours we're not really selling it um Paul was not for sale yeah yeah wind up happening there was we started to have a desire to curate things people could actually buy which I think is a really strange way to start any commerce slash retail business our hope is to sort of help help reduce the choices that you need to make to find really great things to surround yourself with first off how old are you I heard a rumor that you were like 15 and a prodigy I'm not 15 um it's one of those is true I know I'm 21 recently I joined this company when I was like 18 you joined the company or 18 and shouldn't you have been in school yeah that's maybe why were you in school um so I went to art school for six months and that was a lot of fun okay so I left and then I was running an agency with the Rena mine for like two years and LLC's and signing them when you're 16 doesn't really work too well so that was that was a little icky but I turned 18 and I was like alright I'm going to finally sign my LLC papers and then we ran an agency and then squarespace hired us for some contract work and then I spent more time here than my own office and so I was like well I'm going to join this company what uh what are your friends think about what you guys do for a living they think that being in stir it means that I'm naive things that I'm inexperienced that I'm just chasing a what's it called what's that a dream yeah just a dream and I don't want to just through in their perception of it or tell them because I'm ahead of the curve yeah and we're doing things that are very exciting we're growing at rapid paces for the company ourselves and we're just learning new advertising techniques that are not used by any other company what if professori shows up day one first message and says all right hmm you guys need to start a web design consulting agency yeah report back to me in a year and have at least three clients yeah you think that is perhaps a future for how one might look at education yeah I mean you you learn more about relationships between people right because like you're working with this client it's like you have to sustain a relationship with them and and like that was like how do you email clients like you can't say certain things and I got first I would just beg ya with man like check this stuff out like like you can't say that and you can't just just like drop a link on them and be like just give me some feedback you got to be the constructive about it so there's stuff like that that you really learn on like how to communicate with people and then figure out what people need want all that other stuff that like really teaches you something that I don't think you get to learn in or out there seems to be a kind of more mainstream appreciation for design and what do you think that means in the future if more products are being thought of more thoughtfully with how their design better lives I think people's lives would be better if all of the products that we use every day so what do you mean by that I'll give an example there was an older gentleman that came into our store and he saw that we have a toothpaste that's $10 which when you think about toothpaste ten dollars kind of seems like a lot of money he was kind of hemming and hawing about who who in their right mind would pay ten dollars for a tube of toothpaste and the toothpaste happens to be it's made by this company Marvis and they have these really awesome flavors and it's actually kind of more of an experience and if you think about it you know you're brushing your teeth hopefully at least two times a day and if that experience could be something that's really special and great as opposed to you just this thing that you have to do wouldn't that extra a little bit be really nice just in your general life and so I I told him that and he came back and he bought it and he was like okay you know what I'll take you up on this let's try this toothpaste and he came back the next morning and was so excited it's like the toothpaste is amazing he brought his wife back with him he was really excited about it immediately you got to try this tooth he did it in old man boys to his like no tooth peach is great you got a shine is cane and just Billy's incredible Birds I really need to see what this toothpaste is all about looks like normal toothpaste that's so portable Wow I could brush all day am i love to swallow this you're not the boss of me but some are more random more or just interesting stuff that you've seen Google you Squarespace for the sites that get traffic are never the ones you expect like the big name-brand sites that are using Squarespace right now highest traffic site for a while and it's looks like four or five years ago was a it was a Knitting site it was actually a yarn store in SoHo called Probie and she's got this like great following of people that love the store and love what she's doing and that's the most high traffic site on the system that's crazy what's this what is the coolest thing you've seen someone do using Squarespace it's cool to say I mean there's tons of nice web sites which is like amazing there's like tons of amazing stuff that come out of developer platform then I'm just like people did that in no way someone figured out how to use that thing and it's like I only thought that would like be in my debt box and never appear in production and then there's like beautiful artwork that goes up like I'm just we like go through like all the sites that we have and it's just amazing to see like the different types of people that are on the platform like amazing artists and then these huge bloggers and then you know someone like selling some weird junk on us I'm there a store and all that other stuff it's like where did all these people come from you must know that hearing all of this stuff sounds like a just total success parade like like from inception to present it has just been amazing and I think in a lot of ways it probably has been yeah but you got it you got to give some of us out here yeah just a taste of the worst moments of yeah sure moment is terror and panic yet is it there's a lot along the way um here's the here's the quick version of the hurricane sandy thing our data center is on Wall Street we know Sandy's coming and the data center flips over to backup power yet 24 hours before they've got enough fuel for a week they've gone through multi-day blackouts before it's totally fine usually I think like the cell towers and stuff weren't completely dead at this point I somehow get like one email through to my phone and it's from our head of systems and it says something along the lines of massive problem basement of the data center is flooded the fuel tanks gone we have 12 hours of electricity left essentially what comes out there's fuel headed for the building that's going to run out of fuel but we at the data center have this separate fuel tank that has like a couple hours worth of fuel in it and it's determined that we can carry fuel to the fuel tank 17 flights of stairs up the skyscraper and if we do that at you we can keep the thing online and we do that for three days and it's stayed online the entire time it did not go down and I mean they were like barrels of like diesel fuel in the roof and we set up systems and people would like be it every stairwell and carry it up and all this stuff and it is one of the worst experiences of my entire life and I cannot believe that we actually made it through that like that but it was just just crazy thing where I'm like walking down there with my backpack on in the morning and I'm like really really after nine years after 10 years really I'm walking to the data center I'm walking to this and what are some of the values that you share with Anthony a passion for universal building blocks the idea of creating structures that are reusable that you can build upon I do think that also you know he has tried in his product to create something that is simple and elegant and beautiful and he's trying to make something that everyone can enjoy and share it's almost like you you don't have to focus so much on on the design of your website but more so on the content of your website it's awesome to know guess that there are humans behind the product it's a technology product but knowing their dedication to it is is really awesome there's humans behind the behind the code they're making it happen there are a lot of people who watch this yeah we're either thinking about starting their own company or are running one right now yeah you want to know like here's someone who's clearly had a ton of success how did he get there I think there's always this feeling early on where people like like there's almost this expectation that you have to have in your mind this this sort of I'm gonna change the world sort of make a dent in the universe kind of kind of ambition right but it's actually okay early on to just kind of solve small problems in layers until you actually get to a point where you have the capacity to do that I was having a conversation with one of my friends recently I was like you know if I went back and explain to myself when I was 13 years old you know you're not gonna be a fighter pilot you're not coming Star Wars but instead you kind of have this passion for a content management system it's really weird but somehow I just fell in love with it code is the electricity of the 21st century like back in the day like people were like electricity we can do something wondrous things of these don't have to worry about steam and you know wearing my pressure differences to get things to move code is like the new platform to really invent things and making things with and so it's like if you really do love creating things in this in this century it's like code is the way to do that I think to be a creator and an inventor of this the century it's like you got an axehead let's be real here yeah there are smarter less stressful ways to make money it was making a look at right so why why stay why go through that like what was Reagan longer finally like um I love programming right so I got to do that and I got to make things which was always something I had done since I was since I was younger I felt like the thing was having an impact you know people loved it when they when they used it and that's a really really cool feeling to give somebody a platform where they use it they didn't think they could get that thing done before it makes them look really good and they put their ideas on this thing and sometimes it changes their life and you get those stories sometimes and and it sounds cheesy but it it really is a great it is a great feeling it's a good like honest thing I made this thing give it to you spend a little bit of money and you're winning - it's it's cool one person alone cannot build an empire and it took Anthony three years to realize that he needed help and when he finally got it even things kept going well they were extremely stressful so it seems only fitting that Squarespace has grown to be a really impressive company now building a platform that makes it easy trivial really for countless entrepreneurs to make beautiful websites so they can focus on what really matters Westone the friend Thanks