Thank you everyone who helped on our journey to Nasdaq: SFT
On October 15, 2020, Shift, the company I started in 2013, becomes a public company. For me as an entrepreneur, this is seminal achievement, and a pretty surreal one. Of course, becoming public is only the beginning — as Toby Russell and I wrote in this company blog post, it is just Day One. A lot of work lies ahead to continue to grow the business.
I’ve tried to take some time in the last few days to reflect about what made this possible, besides a combination of grit and luck. I owe debt to many people over the years, and I wanted to to publicly thank some of them. There are too many people to thank, and I could never do everyone justice, so I hope that those I do not mention do not take offense.
I have been fortunate to have a lot of great mentors and teachers. Murray Dry, Paul Nelson, and the late Eve Adler at Middlebury College taught me how to think, how to take a lot of information, keep track of it all, distill it into the things that matter most, and then use the insights to make decisions. I’ve found that there is incredible value to learning the liberal arts for an entrepreneur, and I am so fortunate to have been taught the great books in college. Much of my initial professional grounding happened in politics. I learned so much about both policy and elections, but more importantly, human relations from Mike Murphy, Charles Fairbanks, and David Gambkrelidze, while working on and in Georgian politics. I am a much better entrepreneur, with a hell of a lot more compassion and understanding of how to relate to people, because of their coaching and broader set of experiences I had in politics. Neil Houghton, one of my project leaders at BCG, taught me how to use data to look at business problems, while Tom DePasquale, our senior co-founder at Taxi Magic (Curb), helped me gain incredible insight into how to solve problems through technology and how to get what you need and want in negotiations.
The last 24 years of my life have been shaped at every turn by Toby Russell, who has been my best friend since college, without whom Shift may have never happened, and without whose leadership we would have failed many times. I do not have the words to describe the level of influence that he has had on me, or the extent to which I trust him. When we work effectively together, each of us is far far more capable than we ever could be alone, and that has played an invaluable part in our ability to get to today. Over the years, I’ve been told by many that starting or running a business with close friends is tough, and is a bad idea. Shift’s ups and downs have not been easy for our friendship — mostly on my account; like most founders, I have a lot of quirks and am not always an easy guy to work with. Toby has had to live and work with these, and for that I thank him. To say that I am grateful to have a friend like Toby is such an understatement — though I do hope everyone has a chance to experience a friendship like this in their lives. For each of us to be able to say that we built a public company with our best friend is something fantastically special and rewarding.
Before Shift formally existed, my co-founder Joel Washington came up with the concept of a test drive delivered to your front door. His father was refusing to go to a dealer for a test drive, so Joel asked if he’d be willing to do a test drive at his house. Joel’s dad loved the idea so much that we started to talk to customers and potential investors about it, and the usual response was “oh wow,” which led to our “wow moment.” One of the first people to invest in Shift was Minnie Ingersoll, who a couple of months later came onboard as a co-founder running operations. Christian Ohler joined as a co-founder and CTO. I had spent the better part of a year trying to recruit him, but turned out, what convinced him was that I was truly going to do Shift regardless of what he did. Without them, getting Shift going would have been far harder. I am so grateful that they trusted me in those early days.
Startups are all about bringing together a group of great, smart, dedicated people, aligning them around a common vision, and setting up an environment in which everyone can learn from one another and execute toward a common goal. You hit a lot of rough patches along the way. It’s the strength, passion, commitment, and ingenuity of the team that takes you to the promised land. We’ve worked hard to make this happen at Shift, and while we have not always succeeded, the incredible people who have worked with us over the years are a source of a very powerful motivation to succeed.
Besides recruiting, the other main job of a startup CEO is to raise money. In 2013 I had no clue how to do this. We were spending Toby’s and my savings on testing the idea, but that was going to run out, so by Q4 I was getting nervous. I remember where I was in October 2013 when Joel said “you know, you should raise a convertible note, and I can help you.” I had no idea what a “convertible note” was. I remember doing my very first pitch alone, to my friend Angela Zäh, and how terrified I was that I was not explaining the business well (Angela can ask tough questions!). Oh and how gratified I was when we did the first close on our seed round in December 2013, in part thanks to Reed Bennett-Eisen writing a check from AmTrust, our first institutional investor. To all our seed investors, thank you for trusting us!
Over the years, I became better at pitching, and started to enjoy spending time with investors. Two investors who have been instrumental to me and to Shift are Emily Melton from Threshold Ventures and Manish Patel from Highland Capital, who co-led our Series A in 2014. Every investor can be your friend when things are going well; great investors are your friends when things are really bad. Emily and Manish have been the two people I go to on my worst days, and instead of having to explain what happened, or who is to blame, they focus on making me feel better, ensuring that we can figure out a way to get through it together. Shift would have died sometime along the way had we not had Emily on our board. Manish has been instrumental in helping us keep the team engaged and focused on the crucial things when it mattered most. I am so lucky to have had them as my Series A backers, and to have their counsel and support still, and I hope every founder can be so lucky.
Christian Noske, then of BMW iVentures, convinced his partnership to invest when the decision was a hard one. We had a lot of promise, but had made mistakes, were overvalued, and needed to go through a restructuring. Most investors are not up for that type of work — Christian was. He helped convince Brook Porter of G2VP to join him, and doubled-down on Shift when he joined Alliance Ventures. Christian was invaluable in helping us get through the tough time and come out much stronger on the other side. Jason Krikorian and Kyle Lui from DCM, who had been supporters from the Series A onward, also made a substantial investment during that tough time.
When I moved to the US, friends often took the role of family for me, and I’ve always been very close to a large cohort from college and my early jobs. Working on Shift has definitely taken a toll on many of these relationships, since founding and growing a company can be so all-consuming. I hope folks will forgive me for being more absent than I would have liked over the years. Ishan Bhabha, Miriam Lanskoy, David Bowman, and my monthly dinner PM group (now half are founders) have always been there with me along the Shift journey.
My story, and the story of Shift, would not be possible but for the utterly exceptional experiment that is America. For that I, like every American, owe immense gratitude to the constitutional genius and political skill of James Madison, the other American Founders, and Abraham Lincoln. I say this as an American by choice, and by luck, for whom being an American is a gift I treasure every day. I say this also as a gay man who was not always comfortable admitting that I was gay, but one who has has watched, over the last two decades, the incredible promise and blessing of America extend to gay people through the power of our constitutional order. America is a place where impossible thing are possible, and the idea that a gay immigrant from the Soviet Union could start a company and see it go public seven short years later is one such impossibility that is now reality.
Me ending up in America was first and foremost the work of my parents. My dad had this crazy and utterly illogical notion that the Soviet Union would fall apart, so his kids needed to learn English, so that they’d end up in the US. Turned out, he was right on both accounts. To make sure that we had a path out, education was the only thing that mattered to my parents, and my mom would chauffeur my little brother and me to tutors all day. Neither of us had much of a childhood, but my brother and I left Georgia, alone, for the US at 12 and 14, respectively. Now that I am a dad, I have no idea how my parents let us go — especially back then, before there was email, messaging, and video-calling. Their sacrifice was worth it, and allowed my brother and I to build a life that would never have been possible in the Soviet Union or Georgia. I would have never gotten to the US without my American family, who’ve treated me like a son ever since I arrived and whose love and support has been so critical to my success over the years.
I was so busy working on Shift that I had all but given up on dating when Robert and I met in May 2015. We spent our first date talking about our desire to have kids, and he asked me to move-in on our third date, saying “when you know, you know.” On the one hand I thought he was crazy, but on the other, things seemed so right, it made sense. I accepted that moving-in was two months alter when he stuck with me through the super intense June and July when we raised Shift’s Series B. I did not know what true love was until I met Robert. We’ve never had a fight, and his devotion to supporting me, and Shift, has been unlike anything I ever thought possible. In 2019, thanks to Robert, our greatest accomplishment in life, our children, were born. During the IVF and surrogacy period, I called them “Robert’s startup,” because he managed this process like I managed the creation of Shift. Now that our children are with us, it has brought a new meaning to work, and to success. I am so inspired by Emilia’s adventurousness and Luka’s inquisitiveness, and can’t wait to see how they help shape our world for the better.
This has been an incredible journey — thank you everyone who has stuck with me and supported Shift along the way! Of course, going public is not the end — this is just a beginning. This gives us the capital and the profile to scale our business to new heights, and I am so excited about the value we will create for our shareholders and the experience we will continue to nurture for more and more customers.
