Founder Dialogues featuring Niraj Shah & Steven Conine of Wayfair [video]

Tuesday Dec 6, 2011 by Keith Cline - Founder, VentureFizz

Wayfair is easily one of the greatest success stories in the Boston area over the past ten years.  Niraj Shah & Steven Conine actually met during high school and as a founding team, they have achieved success multiple times.  They started their first company together at Cornell, which grew and was later acquired by iXL during the dot com boom.  Their second company was a great learning experience in terms of experimenting with new business ideas in the telecom/mobile industry.  Their third and latest company was started in 2002 and was originally branded as CSN Stores (rebranded as Wayfair in September).  Today, Wayfair employs over 770 people, has over 6.2M customers, and revenue projected in excess of $500M for 2012.

Wayfair is listed as #51 on Internet Retailer's list of the largest retail / eCommerce websites - four notches above Crate & Barrel.  

Oh yeah.... and the company was bootstrapped by Niraj & Steven and did not take any outside funding until they announced a $165M round of funding this year.  This is a swing for the fences round of funding that puts Wayfair in a strong position to go public, when the timing is right.

Eric Paley covers a lot of ground with Niraj & Steven in his usual fireside chat format at Founder Dialogues.  All entrepreneurs should watch this video as there are lots & lots of lessons learned here!!!

So, let's show off this great success story in Boston by sharing this blog post to all of your networks.  There is a handy social sharing bar above to help you get the message out there!

Thanks to Eric Paley & Nathalie Bishop from Founder Collective for allowing us to capture these amazing events and publish them on VentureFizz!  You can see all the events (Andy Ory, Andy Palmer, Diane Hessan, Mick Mountz, & Tim Healy) by clicking here.  Also, thanks to Tyler Magnin for his video production & editing talents and VisibleGains for their hosting and online video support!

Enjoy!!!!

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