"Modern Entrepreneurship: We noticed kind of two ways that someone can start a business. We found on one end, there were these super mega creators that were big enough for operating partners to essentially come to them and say, hey, look, we're going to give you a bunch of money and we want to start a business with you...The other end of the spectrum is this other industry that was built out over the last ten years or so, which is this made to order ecosystem where it wasn't the top mega celebs that were designing really cool product lines like George Clooney and his alcohol brand or the Rock or whatever it was infrastructure around."

"E-commerce Simplified through Pietra: Doesn't matter if you're a mega Celeb or you have ten followers, we have a platform where you can work with the world's best manufacturers in the world to create a custom product. So you, as a business owner, went from having to master this supply chain and understand all these pointless things like warehousing and labor and importing and exporting and whatever, to I have a website. I have a place to sell my product."

"Advantages of Technology in Business Creation: 'In a week, you could take an idea and start building that company... You didn't have to go spend six months building a data center, because in a couple of clicks, amazon just set up your data center for you. You didn't have to go figure out a commercial lease, because in a couple of clicks, WeWork gave you office space. And that discrepancy, I think, just like in the tech sector, allowed all of these amazing developers to make apps and start companies.'"

"Jet-setting Creators and Business Support: Could we actually build a system that is strong enough and flexible enough to support these types of businesses?"

"Empowering Creators in Business: 'We knew that creators wanted to be entrepreneurs. That was not something that we really had a question about. You talk to any creator over the last three years? They are business people already. So launching our product lines, it's a natural extension for them.'"

"Empowering Lesser-Known Creators: The opportunity lies in what about the other 650,000,000 creators just on Instagram that have over 10,000 followers? These people are trying to build an audience online or have an audience online or it's big enough to support a small business and they don't have access to the tools to essentially push their craft forward and monetize in a different way."

"Building a Successful Marketplace: We built it up brick by brick, I like to say, with our bare hands. And then we got a little bit of luck from the pandemic. So what happened was we knew that we had to get the world's top thousand factories on the platform, and we had to negotiate with them to bring the lowest minimums for the marketplace to even have a chance of working on this demand side."

"Business Strategy Lessons from Uber: 'If you go into an industry and build your company such that money can steal your supply base away, then you're probably going to be in a very bad position long term.'"

"Digital Entrepreneurship Opportunities": "Do creators want to start their own businesses in general in the physical product space? Do suppliers want to power these businesses in some form? And can we build a platform that can cater to lots and lots of people at scale, where it works as an automated system by itself?"

"Growth and Scale in Business: 'If we become the fastest, most affordable, easiest way to do something, it becomes the default way to do that thing... What does $100 million look like? What does a billion dollars look like? How do you support millions of merchants through these services? And how do you scale it up in a balanced way that doesn't crush the company and make money while doing it and all that fun stuff?'"