Advice Line with Niraj Shah of Wayfair

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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Hello, and welcome to the Advice Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show, who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call, and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. All right, let's get to it. Joining me today is Niraj Shah, CEO and co-founder of Wayfair. Niraj, welcome back to the show.

**Niraj Shah** (3:24)
Guy, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Guy Raz** (3:26)
You were first on the show back in 2018, a long time ago, and it's an amazing story. You told us about how you and your college roommate, Steve, co-founded like all these businesses together out of college when you guys are in your 20s. And then you came up with the idea of launching hundreds of separate websites. You had dinnerplates.com, you had racks and stands.com, you had just shagrugs.com. You even told us about a website that you had where you sold bird houses, only bird houses, and then grandfather clocks. Amazing, just all these different businesses selling just those things.

**Niraj Shah** (4:01)
Exactly. That's kind of what led to creating Wayfair. We sort of ended up working our way through all of home goods, one category at a time. We ended up with, as you said, over 200 websites. And then we thought the big opportunity would be to be known as a destination for all those categories, rather than having them in separate sites.

**Guy Raz** (4:16)
Yeah.

**Niraj Shah** (4:17)
And that's when, 10 years into the business, in 2011, we launched wayfair.com.

**Guy Raz** (4:22)
And if you guys haven't heard that episode, we will put a link to it, the original episode from 2018, in the show notes. It's really, really an awesome episode. Niraj, we have not talked, I don't think we've talked to you since, or checked in with you in a bunch of years. You are still with Wayfair, you're still the CEO. Steve, your co-founder, is also with the company's co-chairman.
How do you guys make it work? 27 years of working together. I think you first met each other like a summer high school program, right? Like a long time ago.

**Niraj Shah** (4:52)
Yes. It was a program actually at Cornell where we went to college between junior and senior years of high school.