Billionaire Peter Szulczewski earned his fortune by building something customers wanted, not what Silicon Valley thought they should want
data scientists and engineers, pool tables and DJ equipment. Large windows give way to a stunning view of the city. But most of Szulczewski’s customers don’t work in offices like this or live in Northern California coastal enclaves. In fact, most of them don’t have much money at all. Wish’s customers are typically working-class Americans from places like the Florida Panhandle or East Texas, Dollar Store shoppers who find Amazon Prime’s $120 annual membership too rich for their blood.
Szulczewski focused on building something its customers wanted, not what Silicon Valley thought they should want. A more existential problem: Lots of the stuff on Wish is trashy, shoddy, even fraudulent. There are hundreds of negative reviews for Wish on review sites like Trustpilot and HighYa. Customers are unhappy about unresponsive customer service, merchants who don’t send their orders and poor-quality goods. Szulczewski has hired Connie Chang, a former community manager at Facebook, to fix the problem.
Szulczewski left Google in 2009 with enough savings to see him through the next two years. He spent six months at his home computer writing code for software that could predict someone’s interests, such as running or gardening, based on their browsing behavior and match that to a potential product or advertisement, calling the system ContextLogic.
Then things almost ended. In 2011 Facebook got wind of Szulczewski’s recommendation engine and offered $20 million to integrate ContextLogic into its own ad system or, potentially, the software that ranked stories and posts on Facebook’s news feed. When Szulczewski didn’t take the money, one of his investors stormed into the startup’s new office on Pine Street to chew him out. “Go work for someone that’s good at business,” the investor told him.
Wish’s open-door policy meant that sales were taking off, but so were quality-control problems—which is somewhat inevitable when you have one million registered merchants, of whom 125,000 are active on Wish each month. By way of context, Amazon hosts an estimated 2.5 million active third-party merchants, while Walmart has roughly 21,000, according to Marketplace Pulse, a New York-based e-commerce intelligence firm. “I underestimated how challenging [quality control] is,” says Szulczewski.
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