In just two years, deal site Fab.com has reached $150 million in annual sales. But CEO Jason Goldberg tries to keep his team focused on why the company "sucks."
Mark Peterson
Full Transparency: Jason Goldberg's door is always open--the better to shout at his co-founder, Bradford Shellhammer.
In 2010, entrepreneurs Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shane Shellhammer had to face hard facts: Their gay social network, Fabulis.com, had flatlined at just 130,000 members. Rather than throw in the towel, they refocused the business on their shared love of great design and relaunched the company as Fab.com, a flash-sale site that offers a spectrum of chic items, including handcrafted furniture and avant-garde jewelry. In less than two years, Fab has grown to six million members, adding one million--a 20 percent bump--in July alone. The company is on track to finish 2012 with about $150 million in sales. As CEO, Goldberg oversees more than 400 employees spread among Fab's New York City headquarters and international offices. Goldberg spends a lot of his time refining the website, interviewing job candidates, and strategizing about how to make Fab a $1 billion company. He spoke with Liz Welch.
My co-founder, Bradford, and I decided from the beginning that we'd never make a single decision about what goes on the website based on how much money we'll make on a particular product. Instead, we ask, Will it make customers smile? Excite them? Make them tell their friends about it? The biggest realization I've had is that if you really want to build a successful business, it's not about how much money you're making. It's emotional. For us, it's how do we make our customers smile? Every single decision we make comes down to that.
The two of us split our responsibilities--he chooses every item that goes for sale on the site, and I focus on the user experience. Currently, Bradford has 50 design scouts who look for products worldwide. I spend all day thinking about how to make our Web and mobile design better for our customers.
I start my day at 6 every morning, and the first thing I do is check overnight emails. Our technology team is based in India, so they're ahead of us. After I respond to any urgent emails, I do my morning run on the treadmill at a full steep incline for 30 minutes. I try not to think about work. Instead, I watch TV shows on my iPad. Currently, I'm watching Curb Your Enthusiasm--I'm up to Season Six. My other favorite shows are Top Chef, Dexter, and Mad Men.
When I get to the office a little before 8 a.m., I have a Skype call with the India team and several New York-based managers, which often lasts until 10. We discuss conceptual ideas that we might want to work on as well as the nitty-gritty details of what we want to accomplish that day. We'll look at mockups and see how certain features are coming along. I'm very hands on in the design process: I'll literally measure pixels on the screen. I really believe that for Web and mobile design, less is more, so I spend a lot of time asking, "Do we really need that? Can we find a way to do without it?"
I carry a Behance notebook everywhere, in which I keep my to-do lists and ideas. I use a Lamy pen, which I bought on Fab---I've bought a lot of things on Fab, including my desk. I start every single day by taking my to-do list from the day before and copying the things that I didn't get to. During the day, I'm constantly sketching out ideas for the site about how to improve the browsing experience. Then, I use Keynote on my laptop to make quick mockups that I can share with my team. I fill up about a notebook a month. I label them so I can look back and see what I did the previous month.
Bradford and I probably talk to each other more than 100 times a day. Our offices are joined by a small shared conference room that has glass walls and sliding glass doors. The doors are always open so that Bradford and I can call over to each other while sitting at our desks. He is louder than I am. We designed the entire office space to be open--all the walls are glass. There is no hiding.
Bradford and I share an assistant, Tom Trocola. I'm pretty self-sufficient, but I travel so much these days that it's great to have Tom help with scheduling. He's also very good at making sure I remember to do things. My schedule's on my phone and my computer, but Tom reminds me when I need to be somewhere or if someone is waiting to meet or talk with me.
Once a week, we have an executive-management meeting with the heads of all the departments to talk at a high level about the business. Then, throughout the rest of the week, I have deep-dive meetings with each of the department heads to discuss details about specific projects.
I have an old HP 12C calculator, which I bring with me to every meeting. I'm a numbers geek. If numbers come up, I want to be able to calculate, say, the conversion rates or percentage of products sold.
As CEO, I see my job as setting the direction of the company and then figuring out how to get where we need to go. I hire smart people and give them the freedom to do what they need to do. But I've seen businesses fail when there's a lot of talk at the top but no action below that--so I like to do regular meetings to hear how people are doing at reaching the goals we set together.
We have a saying at Fab: We focus more on why we suck than why we're doing great. The goal of those meetings is to find out what is working and what's not in each department. For instance, we have great products, but we are not getting them to customers fast enough. I'm on a mission to change that. Currently, 75 percent of products are shipped through an outsourced warehouse partner, which takes an average of 12 days to get products to customers. We can do it in one to four days from our own warehouse, so we're building a new one in New Jersey now. My COO, Beth Ferreira, and I have regular meetings about this. She currently has 80 people on her team and is hiring 150 people to work at our new warehouse.
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