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SM:
So we’ve got 20 minutes and I thought we’d start with just, kick it off with 10 minutes
worth of questions then open it to Q and A and then maybe we can close with some additionalquestions. I thought probably starting with your background on how you started the company I
think people are always very interested in that especially now that it’s a billion dollars after three
and a half years.AW:
Sure so, well first of all it’s great to see that some of you are familiar with the site so
always encouraging. We started, we launched our site November 2007 and we were a smallteam, I started with one of my best friends Alexis Maybank, who really wished she could have
 been here today but she’s actually in Alaska, and we started with two engineers, and with a man
named Kevin Ryan who today is our CEO who provided us with our seed funding. And Alexisand I were very much inspired by a love of shopping and a love of the sample sale, so finding adesigner item for a perceived value that was sort of our secret guilty pleasure so to speak. Andwe were I think a well suited pair for launching this company, I had been working at LuisVuitton and Bulgari and had grown up in New York City and had a lot of contacts in the fashionindustry and Alexis had spent the early part of her career at eBay, so she had been there for 5years from 40 employees to 5000, she had launched several businesses for them and knew a lotabout the ecommerce world and certainly the gilt concept from a customer perspective, and twobrilliant engineers who built the site for us.Fantastic, now
you and I met primarily because we have the same investor and that’s Matrix
partners and at the time I was at the partner meeting because I did a short stint at Matrix and Iheard you guys do the pitch on Gilt. And I think seed was Kevin and Matrix ended up funding
 
the company, it was always interesting to me because I was I think the only woman in the room.What was the challenge to get the attention and focus of men specifically around the fashionbusiness?Wel
l to be honest I wasn’t that involved in a lot of the early meetings with VCs and the reason
for that was that was I only met the sort of three finalist most interested VC firms because Ireally needed to get the business started and focus on that, so my job functionally from day oneand continues to be today focusing on our customers. A
nd by customers it’s not only people such
as yourselves shoppers, potentially for the site but very much our brand partners as well. So Iwas out there on the street convincing brands to work with us. So when I did meet with some of 
the VCs and certainly from the stories Alexis shared with me it was it wasn’t very easy to
convince men to even understand this concept I mean many men just you know what womanwould ever pay $500 for shoes?
That’s
 
absurd, that doesn’t exist it’s such a small percentage of  people it’s not scalable, you know why don’t you go mass market? Let me talk to my wife and
see what she thinks about the idea and of course that was frustrating because I think there areinvestors who might invest in concepts that are intangible but for some reason there were many
men who just didn’t get it and didn’t understand that initially our business was targeting womenalthough today we’ve certainly expanded it and have a
great business for men. But I think thatwas frustrating and thank goodness for Nick Beim
who really could, didn’t have a wife to ask atthe time but could understand that the business, he’s married now, we just went to his wedding,
could understand that the business was certainly scalable and I remember when I had a dinnerwith him before he decided to invest and I you know he has such a great way about him and heasked you know, do you, I knew he wanted to hear me say it that has mass market potential so he
 
was asking like do you think that you might ever sell lower priced goods or you know why areyou only focused on little brands like little brands like Zac Posen? And my answer was sort of 
rest assured I think it’ so important to start as high end as possible, it’
s much easier to go down
market it’s very hard in my opinion to start at low price, low price points and more mass marketand climb up although it is possible but you don’t see that as often and I said you know imagine
a place like a Woodbury Commons if we could, if we can translate a Woodbury Commons in anonline capacity where somewhere in this online mall we could have brands like Chanel andValentino and Gucci and Prada and Bottega Veneta and then in another part of the mall there areplaces l
ike Old Navy and Claire’s
Accessories and yet they coexist so nicely. You know thatwould be my dream for this company, so he was happy with that answer and thank goodness heinvested.And a billion dollars latter, it
’s pretty cool. So you weren’t in the
room if I recall but I and so youwere focused on running the business, signing all the big big deals and obviously one of the
things I’ve always said to you is this secret sauce buying Gilt Alexandra and obviously Alexisisn’t here too but the merchandizi
ng, how do you attract and keep talent of great merchandisers
 because at the end of the day that’s what makes Gilt so unique?It’s a great question and I’ve It’s been interesting and I’ve been here through the morning
listening to different approaches but our culture obviously keeps changing we started we were ateam of five today we have 710 employees over 100 job reqs out there. So our culture keepschanging as we continue to double the size of our workforce and I think one of the commonthreads through all of the different functional areas in our company is that we tend to attract
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