Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha and Poshmark’s founder and CEO, Manish Chandra, met in 2003, well before Poshmark was a glimpse in his eyes. They have remained connected over the years, through the sale of Chandra from his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left.
One morning at breakfast, Chandra told Chaddha that he would try to do everything on his iPhone for the next six months.
Over that time, the Poshmark idea began to seep into something more concrete. Chandra, following Kaboodle, knew that he wanted to do several things differently. The first was to create a symbiotic engagement and revenue model, instead of starting with engagement and having to build a business model later. He also knew that he wanted to start with people first and build a founding team with deep DNA in the fashion world to match his technical background.
He met Tracy Sun, summoned her and started work.
That was in 2011, and Chandra was absolutely convinced that he wanted Poshmark to be an app, not a website. So inflexible, in fact, that during the beta he provided video iPods to 100 users. (He recalled that he only recovered 20% of them.)
“Lead with love, and the money will come.” It is one of Poshmark’s core values. The company practiced this in the beginning, holding IRL parties, and then virtual parties, allowing users to show each other their products and create an engagement cycle that offered instant gratification. The user base has grown from 100 to 150 to 1,000 and so on.
“We still use a similar type of strategy today in a much shorter period of time as we go to different countries,” said Chandra. “We focus on building the community first and then expanding that community.
Chaddha and Mayfield led the company’s Serie A business a decade ago. In the last episode of Extra Crunch Live, Chandra and Chaddha sat with us and accompanied us on that original Series A deck (which you can check out below). They also participated in the Pitch Deck Teardown, giving their expert feedback on the decks sent by the public. If you would like your deck to be featured in a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, click on this link.
Poshmark A Series Deck
Time stamp – 11:00
Poshmark was built on some fundamental premises. The first was that the iPhone would transform the way we do almost everything. The second was more punctual: that fashion, at the time poorly served by technology, was a process of discovery instead of a process of direct search. A decade ago, Chandra envisioned a fashion market that would mimic shopping in the real world – walk into a store and let the natural attraction act – without holding any stock.