How I Built Resilience: Niraj Shah and Steve Conine of Wayfair

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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Hey everyone and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're thinking creatively during this disruptive time. And today we're gonna hear from the co-founders of Wayfair, Niraj Shah and Steve Conine. We first featured Niraj and Steve on the show in April of 2018 and we just republished that episode so it's near the top of your podcast queue. You should check it out. They have an amazing story. Anyway, since we talked to them in 2018, Wayfair has become profitable.
And despite anticipating huge challenges during this economic crisis, Wayfair has actually done pretty well as people start to beef up their home offices. I spoke with Niraj and Steve about Wayfair's unexpected success during this economic crisis and how that's changed their business practices. Let's start by taking us back to sort of March.
How did you begin to plan for presumably the worst at that point? What were some of the steps you took, Niraj?

**Niraj Shah** (2:47)
Yeah, so obviously when COVID started, there was a whole lot of uncertainty. We kind of decided a few things. One was how do we keep our supply chain up and running so we can take care of our customers? And so we implemented a lot of safety protocols and that actually worked out very well because we were able to keep running and keep everyone healthy and safe.
Second thing is from a liquidity standpoint, we didn't know what was going to happen next. So we actually decided to raise money. So we raised $535 million in hindsight we didn't need, but at the time you don't exactly know what's going to happen. So we did that and we did that very quickly over a two-week period. And so I think that put us in a great position. And then we had a big scramble to get everyone productively working from home who was involved with the supply chain. And so all of our 3,000 people in customer service and our whole corporate team.
And so there was kind of like a bit of a kind of mad dash in the beginning to get everything well situated. But we have a great team and they really rallied and did a fantastic job.

**Guy Raz** (3:40)
It sounds like you had anticipated that you were going to face a serious slowdown, and that's why you raised the cash to presumably to help you through what you anticipated was going to be a slowdown.

**Niraj Shah** (3:51)
Well, our worry was actually, you know, we didn't even know what the governmental regulations were going to be like. Perhaps we would be shut down. You know, we didn't actually know. Government was saying what was essential, what was not essential.
There is a question at some points about perhaps the carrier networks will only carry certain types of packages, not other types of packages. And we said we didn't have an answer, but we had uncertainty. And so we reacted to that. And then the notion of a slowdown certainly was on our minds. Obviously, what's happened is quite different. It's been more of a boom, but we didn't know that at the time.

**Guy Raz** (4:19)
Before we talk about what's happened, what were you able to do to keep warehouse employees safe? Because you've got warehouses all over the country.