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DTC POD Roy Rubin, Magento - From UCLA Dorm Room to $200+ BILLION in GMV
Transcript
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Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:42
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Blaine Bolus 00:00:42 - 00:00:58
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Ramon Berrios 00:01:02 - 00:01:33
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Blaine Bolus 00:01:36 - 00:02:06
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Blaine Bolus 00:02:10 - 00:02:11
What's up, Dtcpod?
Blaine Bolus 00:02:11 - 00:02:28
Today we're joined by Roy Rubin, who is the co founder and CEO of Magento, as well as a founding partner of R Squared Ventures. So, Roy, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, what you built with Magento, and then maybe we can get into some other questions about some of the projects you're working on now.
Roy Rubin 00:02:28 - 00:03:03
Awesome. Thanks, guys. Ramon and Blaine really happy to be here. So, yeah, Magento, you know, the story is that I was a student at UCLA and I had no money and I had some programming skills. So I started to do some freelance work focusing on open source ecommerce. This is pre magento. And the market was really evolving. This is like 2001, 2002, and I was focusing on what was then expected to be a growing ecommerce industry.
Roy Rubin 00:03:03 - 00:04:10
Right. It's kind of funny to think 20 years back, but stores were just coming online and folks are trying to figure how to do that. And there were really two alternatives, right? One was open source and the other was these million dollar software products brought to you by Oracle and Microsoft and some other big companies. And as a freelancer, I only had access to the open source, obviously and I felt very comfortable in servicing that world. So started really doing freelance build up a small consultancy which actually grew fairly quickly because demand for bringing stores online was something that was pretty clear. Right? And these were the early days of Google ads. I'd place an ad for open source e commerce services and I would generate enough business for six months within like a day or two and I would shut down the ad, right. Because I'm like, I can't take more work, it's just impossible for me to do that.