Posts Tagged "uniFriend"

Paul Spain:
Greetings. I’m your host Paul Spain, futurist and chief Executive at Gorilla Technology. I love seeing individuals and their organizations thrive. The New Zealand Business Podcast is all about this, through sharing the business, leadership and innovation learnings of our most incredible people to educate and inspire each of us so we can do better in New Zealand and and on the global stage. In this episode, I’m speaking with Bowen Pan, an advisor and investor for companies across New Zealand, Australia and the us. Whilst Bowen is perhaps most well known for founding Facebook’s Marketplace Features, one of the world’s most popular e commerce platforms, Bowen’s journey actually began in Dalian, China, and he walks us through his early experience in New Zealand, where his family started over. Building a new life from scratch.

Paul Spain:
Bowen shares insights and hard won lessons about building products at New Zealand tech giant Trade Me before heading to Silicon Valley and landing at Facebook, where he created Facebook Marketplace, a platform that now reaches over a billion monthly users. He takes us behind the scenes of what it took to pitch bold ideas, assemble teams and navigate the very real challenges of scaling products for a global audience. He also dives into his experiences at Stripe and Common Room, offering practical lessons on everything from pivoting software as a service business to understanding what drives successful tech exports. And finally, he shares why he and his family decided to return to New Zealand convinced of the incredible potential and future of our local tech and innovation ecosystems. The New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by One New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Before we jump into the interview, a quick question. How confident are you in your business’s cybersecurity? A cyber attack costs a typical New Zealand small to medium business or over $180,000. And I certainly don’t want that to happen to you.

Paul Spain:
So I’m offering New Zealand Business Podcast listeners a free cyber risk reduction review call valued at $250. You’ll get a personalised action plan to lower your cyber risk. Seriously high value, no strings attached. If you’re interested, tap the link in the show notes or on the episode page to, to reserve your session. Bowen Pan, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here in the studio.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Paul Spain:
Now, I always like to sort of start at the beginning, so tell us a little bit about, you know, where you were born and what the first years of your life kind of look like.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So I was born in Dalian, China, which is a coastal city in northern China. And I lived there for the first nine years of my life. So did two years of primary school. And then my parents decided to immigrate to New Zealand in the mid-90s. And at the time I think we were one of the first wave of skilled migrants who moved to New Zealand on the basis of essentially a merit point system of if you meet the different requirements that the immigration New Zealand has set in terms of the degrees you have and your language proficiency, et cetera. And so my parents applied and passed the interviews and.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic.

Bowen Pan:
And just got a permanent residency and came over.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So at that stage, did you speak English as a family or.

Bowen Pan:
I didn’t speak a word of English. I didn’t even know the Alphabet.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
My parents could speak English. I don’t think they would have passed the interview, but no. So it was a very new environment for sure. And it was kind of a pretty typical immigrant experience where we moved over, we didn’t have a lot of money. The three of us shared kind of one small room. That’s how we started. Yeah. And there was one single bed.

Bowen Pan:
And so we shared, we rotated around who could sleep on that bed depending on what was on the next day. And so, yeah, so it was definitely quite eye opening for me as a nine year old coming to see. Oh, wow, like all the things that my parents has to go through. Right. To really pave the way and make them something of themselves. One of the stories I remember was during, I think we moved in like towards the end of the year, so it was getting close to the holidays and so someone had told my mom that it’s illegal to leave a nine year old at home by themselves. And she’s like, oh, I guess I have to take them around. And my parents were looking for jobs then.

Bowen Pan:
So my, my parents would go around like door knocking just to hand in the resume to say, hey, like, you know, and the New Zealand economy wasn’t doing so well then, kind of the mid-90s and. And I remembered asking later, I was like, hey, you know, like, why, why do we, why do we, like just, why couldn’t we just take the Bus like why, why do we like walk so far? And it turned out that the money that they were saving for, for the bus was going to be like later on used as like lunch money for me like that day because he wanted to like make that outing a bit more fun for me. So.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, so, so that, that was a start like of how my family started here for sure and, and they gave up really respectable jobs. My dad was a senior engineer working on those big ships, on the container ships. My, my, my mom was an associate professor at university and you know, when they came over they had to throw that away, start from scratch. Mom waited tables as her first job here. Dad worked on, worked in furniture factory to start and yeah, worked their way up and now they’re very happy, very happily retired, built their own house and you know, mom ended up working at the University of Auckland for over three decades. Fantastic. But yeah, the beginning was not easy.

Paul Spain:
And what was the early drive for the family to come to New Zealand?

Bowen Pan:
I think it was, I think a lot of it was trying to create a better future for their kid, that is me at the time. And it wasn’t like the future felt bleak per se. I think China at the time mid-90s was just in the very early stages of beginning to kind of embark on its capitalism experiment that eventually became what it is today. But I think Mum, I remember Mum saw me when I started primary school in China. I think back then you started primary school when you were seven, so it’s like two years later than what’s here. But I think after six months attending a primary school I had already had these really worn skin on my hands just from the amount of writing I had to do for a seven year old. And she’s like, oh man, like that’s, it’s not going to get any easier. Like kind of really want Bowen to have a more holistic and one where, you know, it didn’t feel like you had to compete every single step of the way.

Bowen Pan:
And so I think that was a really big driver which is really amazing and really admirable because to throw away everything to throw away, you know, like everything you own, like your, the house, a house and a career and everything. To do that in your mid-30s is really, really memorable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not even sure if I could do it. Like, like it’s really amazing. So, so I always, I do think back whenever there are difficult moments and hard things, just remind myself that hey, it’s not, not so bad. Yeah. And my grandparents before Them even, even tougher, you know, they had to.

Bowen Pan:
They had to go through war too. Yeah. And that’s even harder. Right? That’s like not getting bombed. Yeah, it’s a different level of survival. So, yeah, we have it pretty good. And then when I got to uni, it was really being introduced to this group called Velocity, which you may have heard of from University of Auckland. It was called Spark back then, but they had to change the name because.

Bowen Pan:
Well, because of the telco. But that was a really, really amazing group of folks who. I think that was the first time I was exposed to essentially uncapped ambition where there were just these people who are students who used to study at University of Auckland who then went on to found companies. I remember Fatty was a few years before me, who then founded power proxy Priv Bradu, who was the inaugural CEO of Velocity, who then went on to Harvard Business School and ended up founding Blue Oak, which was one of the early pioneers of E waste recycling. And so seeing these people just completely opened up my world of saying, wow, there’s all this possibility out there that you didn’t have to just get good grades and then go and work at a graduate role at a bank, which is. I’m not. Ding. That.

Bowen Pan:
That’s fine. That’s totally a legitimate career. But that’s not the only choice. There’s a lot more choices in the world that’s possible. Yeah. And found a lot of really great mentors. So you may have heard names like Jeff Witcher. He’s a mentor to a lot of young folks, including myself.

Bowen Pan:
And even to this day we’re still very close.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. And so what was your first real entrepreneurial endeavor? Was that something that you did while you were studying or was that post. Post study?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So I founded my first startup at the end of my first year at university and it was a venture called Uni Friend. As the name suggests, it’s a social networking site for university students.

Paul Spain:
What year was this?

Bowen Pan:
That was in 05.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
It was very early, very early. We didn’t know what Facebook was. It was. I think Facebook had. May have been just founded or very early in a few Ivy League universities. And the idea of. I think at the time there was this whole wave of kind of niche social networks where you focus on particular Networks. So like R1 was like, oh cool.

Bowen Pan:
Like you just get a university email address to validate and then that will university specific networks. And so that was. That gained some level of traction and I decided to essentially take a One year leave from school, where I reduced my workload to, I think, only like one or two papers for the whole year. And because I don’t think at the time, University of Auckland has an official policy of allowing to pause your degree. But I was able to essentially promise University. My final year I did a conjoint degree. So my final year I actually did double the course load in the end to finish it within the same. But.

Bowen Pan:
But I took one year leave to see, like, okay, let me really give this a crack. And at my first year, when I founded Uni Friend, we ended up being runners up for Velocity. And that kind of opened up a whole different set of opportunities around mentors. And that was when I was first introduced to the Ice House. And I remember Andy Hamilton was the CEO then of the entrepreneurial ecosystem here. That was a really great first. My first kind of lesson in how to build a company, how to build products or how not to build a product, and did all kinds of scrappy things because obviously there was very little funding. So we had to develop our website.

Bowen Pan:
So how do we get. How do I convince engineering students to work on it? And then I realized that the engineering school at Auckland had a practical work hours requirement where you had to work something like over 200 hours in order to graduate. And I remember at the time that a lot of my classmates were having trouble finding internships.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s convenient.

Bowen Pan:
In software engineering. I was like, well, what a waste. You shouldn’t be working at a petrol station. Why don’t you just come to Uni Friend? I’ll sign off your work reports. And I checked with the professors. They’re like, yeah, that seems legit. Yeah, it’s a real company. So we had a ragtag team of engineering students just come in and out every semester.

Bowen Pan:
Master. And that’s how we built the thing.

Paul Spain:
Wow. Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So that was really fun. But thanks to Facebook, I had to go back and graduate because obviously it didn’t reach a level of success after Facebook entered New Zealand. But we learned a lot of really, really great stuff there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, definitely those sort of early things that you get involved and you certainly learn a few lessons. I launched a social network in a similar sort of window to 2003. Maybe we. We launched, but it was. It was focused on a different, different audience. It was world dj dot com. So.

Bowen Pan:
Oh, okay. Whole nother all DJs in the world. Yeah, yeah. Now they’re just in Facebook groups.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Everything moved to Facebook.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Wow, that’s great. So after you Graduated. What did you decide to do?

Bowen Pan:
So I graduated in 08, which is not the best time to graduate, and I think, yeah. So in the end, the only interesting role I could take was the offer that I got from my internship, which was at Deloitte. And so I did just over a year there. And it was actually pretty interesting because it gave me a view of what corporations are like, what government entities are like, and how change happens. I remember at the time, one of the projects that I worked on was Auckland Council. I don’t even remember who the mayor was back then. And the project there was the Auckland Council trying to figure out how to make citizens like us more like an nps. How do we increase NPS with Auckland citizens? Yeah, yeah, like, not quite put that way, but you what I mean.

Bowen Pan:
And then I remember, like digging in, like, okay, well, one of the obvious pieces is like, well, it’s how they interact with you. Right. Like there’s key interaction points where you actually think about the council because normally you don’t think about the council. Right, sure. And it’s. Well, like, customer service is an obvious one. Like, it’s when you interact. And so I remember going in and like digging in and I found this one customer interaction where this one customer called the council like 13 times.

Bowen Pan:
But every time they called in, the council thought he was a different person.

Paul Spain:
It all started from scratch every time.

Bowen Pan:
And he was complaining that his rubbish was not being picked up. And you can just see there was a misspelling for every single one. An address was spelled wrong, like a date of birth was wrong. And I remember presenting that to say, yeah, you want to know why people don’t like you that much right now, this is the example. And so it gave me a real appreciation of scale tech systems and just more crucially, how much it really impacts people day to day. So I spent a year there and then after that decided to fulfill my dreams of working at a tech company. And in New Zealand, the dream then there was only one company and that was Trade me. There was no other scale company at the time and that was really, really interesting.

Bowen Pan:
So I think that gave me a really good grounding in an intuition in marketplaces, in how consumer products work. And I had just enough scale, even in New Zealand was small, but just enough scale. And TradeMe had over 80% of domestic traffic in New Zealand at the time. And enough kind of, it wasn’t a public company. So I had a lot of freedom to try things and do stuff and also help them to launch a few New businesses as well. So back then it was the deals, the daily deals craze. Daily deals, yeah. So we launched one for Trade Me as well that eventually got spun off and yeah, so I really enjoyed my time there and I left a few months after they refloated on the stock exchange.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Okay.

Paul Spain:
So when you look back at that time, I’m sure there were some really good learnings and some lessons that you kind of took with you. Maybe first of all, to the point of working inside a tech company that had been acquired. Obviously acquisitions sometimes go, you know, really, really wrong and sometimes they actually work out quite well. What were the lessons that you were. You. You picked up from. From that perspective in terms of, you know, Fairfax’s approach of help to trade me, you know, go. Go forwards rather than backwards.

Bowen Pan:
I think Fairfax literally just left trade me alone.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Like they didn’t do anything. Yeah, yeah. Which is better than effing up the acquisition like. Like, because. Because that happens quite a bit. Right. But also, you know, could there have been other synergies in terms of what they could have leveraged to build a bigger business because it was now owned by Fairfax? That wasn’t quite realized either. I think you can argue maybe it had a bit more capital, but TRADMI was never needed more capital.

Bowen Pan:
It was actually highly profitable. Fearfax never really leveraged the trading platform to try to enter the classifieds market in Australia itself when that was nascent. So as a result, like Ren Domain owns the real estate portals, you have Autotrader that owns the cars. So you never really have an equivalent of Trade Me in Australia. So you can argue that that was a missed opportunity.

Paul Spain:
Right. Because ebay had sort of succeeded to some degree in the Australian market, but they didn’t have the breed of.

Bowen Pan:
Only in the general goods area, but they didn’t really have classifieds and classifies as where the money is, which Trade Me later realized after Facebook Marketplace was launched in. That became a very unattractive, essentially declining business. But really the high margin is the three verticals. You have the cars, the real estate and the jobs verticals. And that’s always been true for newspapers. Those used to be called three rivers of gold for newspapers. And it’s never changed. And so I think they didn’t quite capitalize on that either.

Bowen Pan:
But hey, at least he got a return on the investment and it wasn’t value destructive.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any other big lessons that you walked away with?

Bowen Pan:
I think I really enjoyed how much latitude and autonomy that was given to like a Relatively inexperienced, essentially one year out of school to go in and to propose some really bold ideas and big things to try. And also, like, tolerance for failure. I remember I worked on this massive pricing change for Trade Me. That was a really big deal back then. And we had. I had spent like a month or two modeling every. Every possibility out with all the different elasticity of, like, where the pricing might be with these changes. And we rolled it out and it was a huge failure.

Bowen Pan:
It was a massive failure. Like, it did not work at all. That was. I mean, I was mortified. Obviously, as a new grad, that did not hurt my career at all. In fact, everyone’s just like, well, you know, we learned some stuff. Let’s keep going. All right.

Bowen Pan:
Let’s make sure we don’t make the same mistake again. But there was no kind of stopping or slowing down of the intensity of which we moved.

Paul Spain:
Walk us through what that looked like, to come to the conclusion that this was the wrong decision and then to roll it back. How quickly did all of that happen? And were you kept plugged in right through that whole process?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. And also there was a lot of qualitative feedback that I remember that I was looking at. But I think we rolled it back after a couple of months. And it’s, you know, after the initial. Oh, yeah, it’s just a spike. Then what will people actually do and observe what they actually do. And then you look at the numbers and you compare that to the models of what you think might have happened. Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Just never recovered. And the tough thing was these pricing things for consumer products is that it’s really hard to a B test. Like, once the price is out, it’s out. You can’t charge someone a different price from. It’s very hard to keep a secret. And so I was monitoring it daily and feeding Report back and eventually just, you know, made a recommendation. Say, actually we should reverse what I recommended.

Paul Spain:
That came from your guidance and recommendation.

Bowen Pan:
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Because it was clear that it was. That it just wasn’t. It was clear that there was a net revenue loss and customers were not happy. Like, it’s like the worst of both worlds. Like, you actually not ended up achieving any of the goals that you were trying to do. And so that was a big learning.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And then you moved on from Trade Me. Were there any other things that really sort of stood out within. Within Trade Me, you launched. Was it Treat Me?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, Treat Me was a. Was a daily deal site that was. That was fun. It was a. I mean, the Daily deal sites were really just a sales business in disguise as a, as a tech business. It’s really just using email lists, but it was fun to work and talk to so many local businesses. I think that was probably my first intro to Smeath and really like, I mean this is, I think I closed the first 30 deals personally, so I was literally driving up to like massage spas and golf courses and like trying to work out the deals with them and getting assigned and, and then we hired real salespeople after that.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So it gave me an appreciation for just what SMEs cared about, like how, how, how hard it is for their margins and, and then, and then subsequently like building out that the deals business was pretty interesting because that was also my first time working with a scaled sales team that, that was also new to me, which is proved to be like quite useful later.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
And, but, but ultimately, yeah, the launch of that business was pretty fun. We launched, I remember with like a $1 burger fuel deal as a way to like acquire customers onto, onto the TreatMe platform.

Paul Spain:
What was it?

Bowen Pan:
A $1 burger fuel.

Paul Spain:
Burger fuel.

Bowen Pan:
Burger fuel. Yeah. It’s a good deal. Yeah, yeah. And I think we put aside something like 100 and I can’t remember the exact amount, like maybe tens of thousands of dollars for the launch day to subsidize the deals. And it was launched and we had a live counter on a number of vouchers being bought and it was just moving like that the whole time. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
And did you have a limit on how many you were selling?

Bowen Pan:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We sold out after a few hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and then it’s like, oh, you can like put your email in next time so you don’t miss out. And so that was pretty effective in acquiring lots of customers. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay, what happened from there?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, so after I finished up at Trade Me, I looked around and really felt like unlike now, there really wasn’t much in the tech scene for New Zealand. Right. Like this is like as we just talked about before, like very early zero pre rocket Lab and otherwise not that many software business I think like Orion Health and like Data like Datacom, like it was those kind of companies but no real kind of global venture scale businesses and no venture capital industry either. And so it’s always been a dream of mine to work in Silicon Valley. I used to always read TechCrunch even back then on what’s Happening and I really wanted to give it a crack because of all the examples that were set before me by all the folks that I met at Auckland Uni. And so I decided to say, well, what’s the easiest way to go? So my first path is I applied to various roles, and obviously they’re like, who is this random Kiwi? I’ve never heard it. Trade me. And so that didn’t work.

Bowen Pan:
And the second path was, well, maybe I could try to go through via school. That would give me a visa. And that’s what I did. So I was very fortunate. Mentors like Jeff, who introduced me to other people and other people at the school who talked with me. I remember there was a lady, Melinda Lehman, who worked at Stanford. I think she was either in the development office or the admissions office. And she loves New Zealand.

Bowen Pan:
Just happens to love New Zealand. And she has, like, her kids went to university here, and she was visiting Wellington at the time. And I remember meeting her at a cafe and she looked at my profile and she said, you know, I think Stanford GSP would love your profile, actually. And I was like, really? Like, I never thought about that. Seems such a big thing to such a big leap. Right? And so that gave me some confidence, and I really decided to give it a crack. And so in the end, ended up at Stanford doing the MBA program. And.

Bowen Pan:
And that was my. My way to land in Silicon Valley. And. And a related story to that is that my. When that happened, I met my wife Maya, a few months before I moved over to the US and so I had to try every conceivable way to get her over, try to convince her. So in the end, I convinced her to quit a job for Marcel Mac, because she had talked to me about how unhappy she was as a lawyer and got her to crash in my dorm for a year, which was technically not allowed. And she ended up saying, oh, maybe I should give this a try. And then she applied, and she ended up also getting into the law program.

Bowen Pan:
And so we ended up graduating together.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Which was great. Yeah, yeah. And graduating there. Then give you an additional 18 month, essentially, like a grace period to work while you apply for the work visa in the US and then so I ended up at Facebook.

Paul Spain:
And so walk us through your journey at Facebook, because, you know, I think there’s probably a fair bit packed in there. And, you know, tell us about how you pitched the idea for Facebook Marketplace.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, yeah. So my time at Facebook is divided up into roughly, like, three episodes. So there’s the first four years. So I was there for six and a half years. The first four years was marketplace so we can talk about that. And then the second episode was a relatively more unknown, but actually a pretty interesting piece, which is short form videos. So that’s, that’s a whole story about TikTok and, and, and launching the first version of Facebook short form video experience that eventually got rolled up into reels. Facebook and Instagram reels.

Bowen Pan:
And then the last, the last part of my experience there was building out the live gaming experience, building out live streaming and like a Twitch competitor where people watch other people play games. Sounds strange for folks who are not in the space, but it is a very popular, very popular kind of entertainment category. So that’s how I spent my six and a half years. The first four years, Marketplace was the most formative and it was just a really special time at Facebook. I would say it was a time when the level of reach that the company has, but to the number of employees it had was unprecedented. I think for every one engineer at the time, there were something like 2 million users or something like the ratio was crazy. And they were growing so fast that it was. I remember that when I signed my contract with them to, when I started, which is about a semester, they had doubled in size.

Paul Spain:
What?

Bowen Pan:
Like, in that time it was just, it was just nice. Like it was just growing like crazy. And even after doubling in size, when I went to their campus, like the campus was half full.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Like, I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the Facebook campus.

Paul Spain:
I think I have, actually.

Bowen Pan:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like Disneyland because it’s designed by Disney.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Like, so it’s a very fantastical. And now they have like massive buildings everywhere. But like the original buildings, it was, it used to be the Sun Microsystem campus. So they bought that off. But anyway, even that was half. So they were reasonably early stage, but they had massive scale already. And I think in my first week they had just hit a billion users. And they were terrified of losing the culture, of moving fast and learning quickly.

Bowen Pan:
And so they produced this really famous Little Red book. It’s like a little cultural book that really try to instill how Facebook should be operating and how important it was that everyone stays humble that no one uses Facebook because it’s Facebook. People use Facebook because of their friends and other people on there and all these kind of cultural values. So that was the first part is Facebook was in a really interesting time and I would say one of the real golden times of the company. I had a very strong personal interest in commerce, social networking sites, probably because of uni Friend and trade me. And just through me, trying to find every nook and crevice of where could there be a spark of something. Because surely there’s something when there’s a billion people on a platform. And that’s when I came across a piece, like a little nugget of research that suggested that one third of people in Indonesia, which is where these researchers went for that particular report, was treated Facebook as their primary e commerce site.

Paul Spain:
So this was an internal Facebook report?

Bowen Pan:
This is a research report. Yeah. So Facebook did do these research reports all the time. It was. The report was for something completely unrelated. But this is one of the random, surprising things that they filed away in the appendix. And that kind of sparked a. Yeah, just a curiosity of like, where could that be happening? Like, that seems pretty anomalous.

Bowen Pan:
And so decided to just use my time during onboarding to really do some research and very quickly honed in on Facebook groups. And Facebook groups was the only place where people could buy and sell stuff that was not like your friends. And so did that. Ran a few queries, realized that, oh, my God, there were tens of millions of people, but fragmented across hundreds of thousands of groups that people were just organically creating. But there’s definitely a way to think about how do you aggregate all this together and really create a centralized marketplace. And so that was a start.

Paul Spain:
Did you think there was an openness to some sort of marketplace, e commerce type of platform within Facebook at that point?

Bowen Pan:
Not at the leadership level, no. The leadership level was very, very focused on killing Snapchat. That was like the era then. It was like, Facebook is going to get killed by Snapchat. All the teens are banning Facebook. Kind of, I guess, similar themes to now. And I think, yeah, because of that kind of singular focus, there wasn’t really much headroom for that. But.

Bowen Pan:
But there were a few senior, more senior people at the company who had personal interest in this. So. So one of them is this lady called Deb Liu, who used to be. Ran the homepage of ebay. Like that was her job. So it’s a pretty big job.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
And then she actually like, took a. Almost, you know, externally be viewed as a demotion of working as a. As a product marketing manager at Facebook. And because, you know, and she joined a few years earlier, Facebook was right. Growing really quickly, but she had a dream of building out a marketplace, but it was really hard to find the angle. Right. Like she. She had tried to do.

Bowen Pan:
Do it through pages, where you can allow a page to sell stuff that kind of like logical, right? But really hard to get scale. Like, how do you just get millions of merchants who suddenly would just upload everything? And if they, even if they do, like, how is that better than Amazon? Or maybe E commerce ads and you can make the ads buyable, maybe, but then that’s like super fragmented. It’s just like feed ads. It’s not really an E commerce experience. So I knew that she would be probably interested and so I ended up pitching this idea to her and it turned out that she actually had some thoughts around some of this stuff, but it never really all came together. And so I said, oh cool, I have to work on this. This is really rare. It’s really rare to have tens of millions of people who are organically doing something and you can really leverage the supply and demand to build a centralized marketplace.

Bowen Pan:
It just doesn’t happen very often because marketplaces are very hard to build. And she’s like, oh, this no headcount. Like there’s no, doesn’t matter. Like, it’s just really, this is really, really special. Just, just, just give me whatever, weeks, months, like, and just see if we can figure something out. And then I think, yeah, she, she probably looked at me like some kind of crazy person and then she said, oh, you should meet this other person. And, and Vijay is a really, really special engineering leader. He’s actually now the CTO of OpenAI.

Bowen Pan:
CTO of OpenAI.

Paul Spain:
Oh, okay.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, yeah, no big deal. But Vijay was one of Deb’s engineering partners. There’s a whole other side story where Deb and Vijay actually built a separate really important business for Facebook, which was the mobile app ads. Some would argue that that was the ad product that saved Facebook because before those ads, the general consensus is that Facebook cannot make money for mobile. And that was the first billion dollar ad production already. So they had some respect in the company. And anyway, so I met Vijay and then he’s like, oh man, we really connected. I think Wal was like a 15 minute chat turned into a 45 minute an hour conversation.

Bowen Pan:
And Vijay became my first volunteer to essentially code out and build out a prototype, initially in groups, and then we recruited other volunteers who used their weekends and evenings. And so we built the prototype. One of the folks to be able to present this to Zuck because Zuck at the time would review like top 10, like demos. And Zuck saw, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s pretty cool when we’re shipping.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, we’re like, oh, we don’t have a team. And so we Pulled forward some headcount from next year. And it was like very small teams, like three or four people. And that formed the core engineering team. And I was the first product person to then form that, to then build out the first version, which was essentially detecting whether you’re buying and selling something in a group and then turning that group into a full sale group. And that was a building block of a marketplace, which then later on about. I think it was about just over a year later, then led the launch of the Marketplace tab itself. And we launched it to all English speaking countries to about 350 million like monthly active users.

Bowen Pan:
And then scaled it later to other verticals like cars and rentals. And when I left Marketplace, it was at about 850 million monthly actives. And then I think now it’s got about a billion monthly actives, which is. Yeah. So surreal. It’s still surreal. It’s real for me, like, because those, those numbers are. Even for Facebook, they are big numbers.

Bowen Pan:
To fast forward that, to see this just become a thing that people just. Yeah, of course, you buy and sell on Marketplace for certain stuff is very satisfying.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
And there were many pivots. I remember after the launch of Marketplace, I wrote some. They were historians at Facebook, by the way. I didn’t know this until towards my end of my tenure where they were documenting what was happening in its corporate history. And so they were using all these internal blogs that I wrote on how did Marketplace come to be. Which was really fun. But I remember having this diagram of showing all the different screenshots of how Marketplace evolved and how it came to be. There was a lot of nuance in building it out.

Bowen Pan:
There was a nuance around, okay, how do you bootstrap supply? How do you get enough listings? Clearly there were enough listings in the groups, but the groups were private. They’re mostly private groups. And the group admins did not view these group surfaces to be Facebook’s property. They viewed it as their own space. So how do you. An experience that doesn’t destroy the privacy and the ownership of these group admins, but also respect, but also allow this supply to be pooled into this public space? How do you think about ratings and reviews when it’s attached to your real profile, do you allow people to. If they post something on Marketplace, should their friends see it? And it turned out the answer was no, because a lot of people feel judged. And actually there’s all kinds of really interesting social dynamics where if you are a parent, often there’s kind of this weird shame attached to buying used baby items, even though it’s completely normal.

Bowen Pan:
But it’s kind of a weird, oh, I’m getting my kid, not the best thing. So there’s a lot of social stuff to figure out, and they’re on the demand side. How do you direct people to this marketplace as opposed to groups to bootstrap this experience? And the behavior of how people bought was also very novel. Because before Facebook Marketplace, the consensus of how e commerce works is through search. Like 90%, 90% plus of all transactions on ebay and Amazon is through a search. Right. But on Marketplace, it’s completely flipped. It’s 90% browse and 10% search.

Bowen Pan:
Because that’s just people. What people do on Facebook. Right, Right.

Paul Spain:
Is that because you’re showing products that are local to them or you have enough data about them to know what things they might be interested in?

Bowen Pan:
I think eventually we could do like we did that. But initially people just went to Marketplace because he ran out of stuff on newsfeed. Right. It’s a very different behavior. And then you are probably just like on the train for, like, 10 minutes, and you’re just killing some time just, like, looking at that. So it needs time to cultivate. So over time, they were high. Then people ended up searching over time, but that took years.

Bowen Pan:
But initially, how do you design experience that just completely feels different from every other e commerce experience that you would know of, which is people browsing for local things for sale, for entertainment. Like, it’s just a very different, very different experience.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
But there were also a lot of other things of, like, we had a small team, and I think it was like the fourth pivot or something we didn’t have. I think we were like, running out of time in terms of the deadline that was set, and we had to move fast, and we couldn’t afford building the experience out on iOS and Android natively. This just takes too long, requires too many people. And so we threw a hail Mary and we said, let’s try this experimental technology called react native. And react native team at Facebook at the time was in. They were in the crevices of Facebook settings and stuff. It was very small. And so we talked to the team and we’re like, hey, this is your time to shine.

Bowen Pan:
Do you want to be exposed to 350 million people? And so I think overnight, they doubled their team, and we worked hand in hand with them. And so react native was basically plugged out of security, and Facebook marketplace became the first true scaled react native product. And that’s how we were. We built like the initial launch version on Marketplace in 10 weeks, and it was largely because of react native.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So there were lots of stories there.

Paul Spain:
Well, we probably could sort of delve in a lot more. We definitely want to cover some other stuff. What would you say would be the kind of the. The biggest challenge that you had to deal with during that journey?

Bowen Pan:
I think the biggest challenge is. I think there were definitely different challenges, but I think in terms of starting Marketplace itself, it was really to sell the dream and reframe Marketplace in a way that is unique to Facebook and make it and create the right for this product to exist in the minds of the consumers, as opposed to fitting that into the dreams of what different execs might want. I think that’s often a very common tension in large corporate. When you try to build corporate venture, and that was not easy. And it’s easy to. For folks to dream of building an Amazon competitor because that’s really sexy and that seems like a lot of money and everything else. But really what drove Marketplace success is local commerce. And on the surface of it, it doesn’t look that sexy.

Bowen Pan:
It’s like, oh, it’s just people selling to each other locally. But that was Facebook’s secret sauce because that was the core of how those group communities worked. And it’s also gave Facebook some core advantages in terms of where local trust and safety matters a lot more. Therefore, Facebook’s real identity profile actually had a real unfair advantage. And Local also gave us unusual level of entertainment that you can see just stuff, what people are selling around you, which is really interesting. And you can even change your location to see what different areas are selling. Yeah. So uniquely, like, fit Facebook and then painting out a vision of how that can become such an instrumental product for Facebook beyond just local item selling with other verticals and stuff.

Bowen Pan:
I think that was probably the hardest thing. That definitely took longer than what I naively originally thought. But ultimately we got there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So much packed in. We could probably go a lot deeper there. But keen to hear a little bit more about what else you did before you came back to New Zealand. You had a period as head of product at Stripe and also after that you were at Common Room.

Paul Spain:
So maybe you can tell us a little bit.

Bowen Pan:
So afterwards I went to. After Facebook, I went to Stripe, which is a fintech company that does payments. And I went there because I wanted to really see and test to myself on how much of the skills I learned at Facebook is actually like real product leadership and not Just me getting good at how to do Facebook stuff. And it’s as different as you can get because I worked it’s a fintech company and I was working in developer experiences. So I did just under two years here and it was fun, but also it was a good grounding in payments. But I also felt like two years in payments was good for me. Yeah, it was good. And then I really wanted to build out and experience B2B SaaS.

Bowen Pan:
Like that was the one piece of the puzzle that I just did not have like really solid experience in. And so that’s where I went to Common Room. And Common Room was is a B2B SaaS platform for sales and marketing, specifically helping you to build pipeline for sales teams and an account based marketing for marketing teams. And there was a really fun time. Like it’s come. I can’t say like good enough things about the folks at Common Room. If I was in the us I would have been there for a very long time. And the.

Bowen Pan:
But the time I was there was quite a pivotal time for the company because when I joined the company that wasn’t what Common Room was doing. Common Room was a community management platform.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
For social media managers and community managers. But I had like the core pieces of technology that was very useful for go to market. So I went in and I worked with founders to essentially execute a complete pivot of the company and essentially gave out. The company had about a million ARR us in community management which we basically completely gave up.

Paul Spain:
So you destroyed your existing revenue?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, we didn’t completely destroy it per se, but we basically had to pivot the entire company away from it. Now it’s a very small proportion of the total revenue and built that out to be essentially the poster child for AI go to market startups. And now Common room serves about 60% plus of Cloud 100 companies and a lot of the AI companies you might know as well. So companies like Atlassian Notion, Zapier, their sales team all use Common Room to build their pipeline, which is really fun because that gave me also a grounding in building out go to market.

Paul Spain:
That’s great.

Bowen Pan:
And then after that, my wife and I had always planned to come back to New Zealand. We actually decided that we probably want to seriously think about New Zealand with the birth of our first kid in 2020. And we started really looking. And so we initially did that by getting involved with a few of the early VC funds that were just starting in 2020 in New Zealand. And over that time we just really started getting increasing conviction that the startup ecosystem is real in New Zealand now. And there’s a real thing, a really amazing, fantastic thing happening here that’s really, really encouraging. And there are also some companies that are, I think, the best you will find anywhere in the world with a level of ambition that matches any company in Silicon Valley. I think we need more of them, but the fact that there are a few that meets that bar is really, really amazing.

Bowen Pan:
And that ecosystem that we had talked about during my time at Velocity in undergrad is starting to become true, which is just really amazing. And I’m of the firm belief that the growth for the New Zealand economy is highly dependent on the success of our tech sector, because it is one of those sectors that has uncapped growth like nearly every single other part of the economy, which is. Which are all very important. But there are some kind of a limitation to how much you can grow because there’s physics limitations, but tech is not one of them. And the fact that it’s already become the third largest export industry for New Zealand and I think it will overtake tourism in a few years. And there’s no doubt in my mind that this is our ticket to ensuring that we can afford the future that we all want in New Zealand. So one of the big reasons why my wife and I came back to New Zealand is to do what we can to really accelerate and make the future happen faster. That’s fantastic.

Bowen Pan:
And we’ve had so much fun. What a great place it is to raise our kids. But not only that, it really did not feel like a trade off for us at all in that not only are we doing interesting work here, but we’re also hopefully helping companies to be successful to then plug back into the local community that we love.

Paul Spain:
All right, well, we’re out of time, so thank you very much, Bo and Pan, for joining us on the show.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, appreciate it. Look forward to the next one.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you.

Paul Spain:
Cheers. I trust you enjoyed hearing from Bowen Pan in this episode. Of course, the New Zealand Business podcast is brought to you by One New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Be sure to listen in to our other episodes featuring many of New Zealand’s most successful leaders, including founders such as the newly knighted Sir Rod Drury of Zero Cecilia and James Robinson, My food bag, Sir Peter Beck of Rocket Lab, Brooke Roberts of Sharesies, Sir Michael Hill and many more. And because a rising tide lifts all boats, be sure to contribute to lifting New Zealand’s success by sharing a favorite New Zealand Business podcast episode with a friend. Thanks for listening in. This is Paul Spain signing out. I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Paul Spain:
Oh, and quickly, before I go, if you haven’t already, grab your Cyber Risk reduction review. Normally $250, but free for a limited number of New Zealand Business Podcast listeners this month. It’s a fast way to get a personalised plan to lower your cyber risk. Just hit the link in the show notes to book your session.