Carlos Cashman – Lessons from the Amazon Ecosystems – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.15]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:46)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:11)
My guest today is Carlos Cashman, co-founder and co-CEO of Thrasio and acquirer of third-party Amazon sellers. In a surprising departure for a high-growth company, Thrasio has been profitable since its founding in 2018 and was most recently valued at more than a billion dollars. In our conversation, we discussed the full spectrum of the Amazon third-party seller ecosystem, the effects of globally commoditized manufacturing and the terms of Thrasio's acquisitions of Amazon businesses. I hope you enjoyed this great conversation with Carlos Cashman.
Thrasio, tell me how you and Josh conceived of this idea, the very first conversation that ultimately led to this business.

**Carlos Cashman** (2:55)
So I had this fantastic Facebook marketing agency called Orion CKD.
My team was really good at customer acquisition marketing on Facebook, Instagram, all that. We started in 2013, 2014, and we're growing from there. Because we were so good at customer acquisition, so we had a lot of e-commerce businesses and great ones that I was watching them all grow and they were largely growing on what we were doing.
And they're like super happy going out and getting 50 million, 100 million dollar valuations. And we were getting paid our monthly check, which in some cases was nice and sizable, but it was still just a monthly check. And I'm an entrepreneur, I'm always looking for that lever. So I started thinking about more can we do? And I think everyone loves to sell stuff. I've always loved e-commerce. And we were starting to mess around with Amazon, potentially for some of our clients as another performance marketing medium, let's say in 2016 or so, 2017 And Josh had been a friend for years.
He had done some deal work for us. He's one of the most amazing financial deal minds I've ever seen. So he and I were talking about what we could do, what opportunities might be out there. And again, I had a great team at Orion so that I had no day-to-day responsibility. So I had time to focus on stuff. I was getting these leads literally every single day, a lead would come into Orion of a $2 million DTC site running on Shopify or WooCommerce, probably 20%, 25% margins that wanted to advertise. And our clients, we would only take a client that was spending $50,000 a month and above commit. So we couldn't take them on. They weren't gonna spend that. They were like, well, we wanna try Facebook, but we only have 10 grand. And I'm like, well, that's not gonna be enough to test it and know if it works. First off, we can't take that as a client. But I was getting these all the time. So Josh and I were talking about it. I said, you know, look, I got 10 of these. And I look at five of them and I know we could turn them from 2 million into 10 million, maybe 20 million, maybe more. I knew we could do that. And the other ones I said, you know what? We might spend 100 grand, maybe we lose it. They're making 400 grand. If we could spend that 100 grand, they're afraid to, right? They need to pay their bills, whatever taxes.