Larry Cheng

Like tell it after the fact.

And so that's a really a trust-building posture that I think my best CEOs adopt.

Sure.

So for those who don't know, Chewy is a pet food e-commerce company.

And we invested in the company in 2013.

We found the company, we have analysts, folks recently out of college who were calling companies and one of the analysts called Chewy and I hopped on a call with them and they said they were trying to sell pet food online.

If you don't know, back in the dot-com era, the biggest bust of all the dot-com companies in 2000 was this company called Pets.com.

It had a sock puppet as its kind of mascot, and it was just a huge debacle of, like, how can you send 50-pound bags of dog food over the mail and make any money?

Like, it's stupid.

And that persisted in the venture and growth equity mindset.

So I spent some time meeting with them.

And what I realized is that the world had kind of changed.

And at the highest level, this is a great area to invest, and it's sort of contrarian, is look for big failures.

let time pass and see if those models might work today.

And what had changed with Chewy is, number one, there's this whole humanization of pets movement, where people wanted to buy organic, grass-fed, like, all the best stuff, whereas we used to buy, like, Purina kibble in the grocery store, and we don't do that anymore.

So, basically, that bag of dog food got more expensive, which made it more affordable to ship.

And then just the proliferation of online shoppers, more pets, like more than half of households have pets.

And so the market just got a lot bigger for online pet food e-commerce.

And I remember literally this is what happened.

I was in a PetSmart and I was getting pet food for my dog and I had met with Chewy.