related to this, a very interesting podcast ep on "How I built This" w/ Guy Raz - the interview with Wayfair founders: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/

related to this, a very interesting podcast ep on "How I built This" w/ Guy Raz - the interview with Wayfair founders: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=601985854 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... There was an interesting discussion of when and why they took investment for the new Wayfair brand vs not taking it for the other businesses they built. As I was listening it occurred to me they had stumbled upon a good recipe for bootstrapping and/vs VC: <snip snip> RAZ: Yeah. In 2011, I guess, was when you decided that you needed to scale this even bigger. And this was the first time you actually took in outside investment. Why did you allow venture capitalists to get involved in this company? SHAH: We're definitely ones who would rather just fund it ourselves or self-fund the business and have it fund itself. The challenge became - in 2011, we believed the big opportunity - to continue the trajectory and to really capture the big opportunity, we needed to build a brand. And the amount of capital we thought to go through that migration and to build a brand that it would take was not an amount we could self-fund. RAZ: Because you did not have a brand. CSN was not enough of a brand. SHAH: Right. You know, consumers didn't know that brand. It wasn't - you want a brand that when, you know, you think, hey, I need to shop; I want to redo my living room - you want someone to think, oh, I go to Wayfair. You want it to be a top-of-mind brand for a category, right? And that is not - that's not easy to do. And even if you figure out how to do it, it's not inexpensive by any stretch, right? So there - we wanted to be able to do that. </snip snip>