 Welcome to start up the storefront presented by Orabora. All right. Welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Quaid from Bezel. Thanks for joining for people who don't know, what is Bezel? What do you, what's your company do? Bezel is a marketplace for authenticated watches. The way it works, we have 400 million plus dollars in watches available on the platform. You go on the platform, whether you're on the site or you're on the app, you can find anything that you want. We also have concierge available for every user so they can kind of check out any watch and get support in that whole process. Once you find what you want, the watch is overnighted to us where everything is thoroughly authenticated in-house by our team of experts. It goes through multiple hands, whether it's an authentication specialist or it's a watchmaker. We're doing everything from diagnostic checks, time loss, pressure tests. And they're also making sure everything was never reported stolen and then ultimately overnighting it to you. So the goal is scaling the fact that you can find everything you want possible, but making sure it's super trusted and you're getting everything you want. So many questions I have because I love the space. I wouldn't say a big watch guy, but I would say mediocre. Just wearing a whoop like you. I love whoops because it's, I'm a little bit more of a whoop than like an Apple watch because it still lets you still wear the watch. And the data is better and everything. 100%. And so when it comes to this market and so obviously fake watches, fake anything or a thing, fake bags, fake watches. And so when you came into the market, what problem were you first looking at? Or what did you see? Were you like a collector? Would you have watches and maybe something bad happened? Or what was the problem you were seeing in the space? I think buying a watch because for most people, it's the most expensive thing they're going to buy. It's a really intimidating process. So my specific story, I was at Google before starting in the company, the first bonus I ever received, I, which maybe wasn't the rational decision at the time, bought a Rolex with it. And I just as a kid grew up loving watches. It was like this thing that I've always wanted to do. And then finally I got this tech job and I got the ability to afford it. And so as soon as that first bonus hit in January, I went and bought a watch. And I think my naivete at the time was I could walk into a Rolex boutique with the money that I looked up online for how much that watch cost and pay for the watch. In reality, there's like massive wait lists for these things. So you get pushed to the secondary market. And in the secondary market, it's kind of like, you have to know a guy or you have to know someone or you're pushed to kind of these more generalist market places or massive marketplaces. And it's up to you to shop the sellers and figure out what's real and fake and the only protection you got as a buyer was, you know, you could receive the watch and you could get it independently inspected and then you return it. And I just felt really nervous and scared. So I also am a sneaker collector and my expectation going into it was like, there should be like a goat or a stock X equivalent. There's going to be some managed marketplace that's going to handle all the authenticity of it and it's going to feel really modern and thoughtful and trusted. And I just didn't really exist. And so as a new watch collector, it took me a really long time to feel comfortable making my first purchase. Yeah. Cause you have to trust a secondary market. It's a whole. Exactly. It's like, I think the watch market tends to orient itself a little bit towards the existing collector. Like all these businesses and it makes like economic sense to optimize for these whales. Like if someone's spending millions of dollars a year buying watches, like I'm going to cater to them before I were the first time buyer. I think the, our bet as a business is like, there's a huge TAM expansion of opportunity if we're able to build a product that the first time watch buyer feels comfortable with, I think kind of are also building a better product for the existing watch buyer. If we serve the first time watch buyer as well. But I think our longer bet is just if you build a better product for the first time watch buyer, they are going to stay loyal and you are essentially like, you know, establishing your security in the long term so that you are, you know, they're going to buy your first watch, their second watch, their watch, for the watch. So how did you first go about, I mean, even the concept of authenticating these watches, is it, is it easy? Is it hard? I'm, I'm being told today in the marketplace, there's so many fake watches and they're really, they're really good, which is, I guess harder. And then I watched a YouTube video where there's literally like a jeweler guy. Yeah. And he's got all the tools. Totally. And I think on one, he couldn't really tell if it was real or fake, which I was like, that's kind of, maybe that's just a video for effect. But how did this the problem? It's a massive problem. The amount of counterfeits that are happening every single year is, is super staggering. We released a report around a month ago, 23% of the watches that are attempted to be sold through our platform. And to pause for a second, like those are really, really top sellers. Some of the best professional dealers in the U.S. 23% of those watches are flagged and they, and they get stopped by our authentication team. So you think of that perspective, like we are filtering down. That's crazy. That's a lot. The supply set already, picking great dealers. And then what do you do? So let's, let's just let someone gives you a watch, a fake watch. They go, Hey, authenticate it. Are they now banned or what's this? It depends on the severity of it and kind of a lot of the sellers like have no idea that happened. A lot of them, you know, it's not, I like to think it's like not, it's typically not a malicious thing. And it's a spectrum, right? Where it could be on the far side of the spectrum, like the watch is not real at all. Like all aspects are fake. It could be that, you know, the dial had been swapped and the dealer was completely unknown to that. It could be that, you know, the watch is just like not performing the way it should, where it's like, if you bought a dive watch, for example, like a Rolex Submariner, but it comes into our pressure testing and it's not able to go in the water. Like it's, that's not a watch that you'd like to own. It's not really living up to the expectation of the watch that you were buying. Interesting. Okay. It kind of falls everywhere on that. Yeah. And we get crazy stories. Like we, we've had watches that were reported stolen in like high profile samurai sword heists in London. And obviously like you don't want to own a watch that ultimately was stolen because you have no recourse if someone, you know, claims that that is their watch. Ultimately the insurance company can just take that from you. Did they lose a hand? I don't think hands are lost. I think it was just a threat of a samurai sword. But the way that we think about building our team is just getting the best folks that have kind of, you know, years and years of experience around this and having it go through multiple hands. So is there any technology associated with it? Yeah. It's so the way that we think about authentication is top of funnel and bottom of funnel. The top of funnel is basically at point of list. If you were a seller saying, I want to list the watch on my wrist, you have to enter all the information about the watch, a number of photos, things like that. Someone on our team digitally reviews all of that. So the goal is that at the top of funnel, we should be filtering out the things that are blatantly fake with relative confidence interval so that as a buyer, I'm not even browsing on things that seem wrong. Right now, that's super manual. Yeah, like that is literally a human looking that makes sense. You can imagine, though, at that stage, like a lot of interesting technology, computer vision and things like that, like we're modeling all of that to make that more efficient. The second step is once the watch is sold, we overnight it to us. And so that is forever going to manual. The goal is to like get very good at the top part so it makes the bottom part easier in the sense that like there's less things to check. But there's just such a tactile requirement associated with authenticating these things. We've our authenticators, I'd say we, I'm not on the audition team. Our authenticators have blocked things because they didn't smell right. Like the papers didn't smell old enough, for example. So it has to come with paper. So it doesn't have to come with papers. I think we have watches that are that are kind of a complete set, if you would call that, like watch box papers. We have watches that just come with the box. We have watches that are naked, just watch only. And obviously that fluctuates the value dependent on the watch. But the papers are just one aspect of it. We're looking at all touch points of the watch, you know, taking a loop out, looking at all aspects of it. How does it weigh? How does it feel? Things like that. And then they're running against the diagnostic checks, making sure it's performing the way it should and everything. So so 23% of them are caught and they go away. That's awesome. What are like the one or two things that it sniffs out? Like these are the two things. These are the two traps. So is it is it the movement? Is it the way like, what's the thing that the people creating these fake watches get wrong more often than not? I wish it was super simple. And I think it used to be different. Like it used to be more like you never see a movement that is the caliber of a real movement. However, like these fakes are getting so good that like the finishing on the movement and things like that is getting really close. I will say the level of precision associated with the finishing of these watches. The reason these brands make so few of these things and they're in such high demand is is not just artificial scarcity. Like there's a lot of craft associated with the industry and making these goods. So like when you get things under a loop or like multiple degrees of magnification, you can kind of notice the slight differences in things like that. Does your company ever buy watches or is it mostly? We'll market makes selectively, right? Like we have a trade in platform and things like that. But for the most part, we are asset like, which we first raised capital in 2021. OK. And after during COVID, I guess. Yes, right. But that was a period of time when macro was kind of ripping and not even kind of certainly ripping and the collectible environment was like very excitable. And I think the feedback that we got from a lot of folks at that stage in the business was you should be taking on inventory. Like you're missing out on margin. You're going to make more money if you take on the inventory. You can charge folks more things like that. Like everything's up into the right. I appreciate our bet from the beginning was. No, let's get really good at being asset light, but still operationalizing the excellence of being able to get your watch within three to five days, like making the process feel very, you know, hand-holdy, high touch. But we just don't want to take the inventory risk. And then the market just took a big swing. Watch market along with macro was down 30, 40 percent. So a lot of the businesses that were caught holding a bunch of inventory had to write that off. And we felt, you know, pretty good in that position. Yeah, that was smart. Let's talk about your cap table. You got a lot of amazing people on your cap table. Likes the Kevin Hart. You got Michael Rubin. Yep. I'm sure I'm not naming a bunch. Kyle Kuzma, who's on your website also with the Tiffany Blue. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, we got Steve Aoki. We got Mike Lovitz. Entrepreneurs on this pod will want to know simple stuff. How do you get access to these people? Yeah. How do you meet them? How do you get them to invest? What's your advice to them? How did you do it? Yeah, it's a great question. I think the way that it started was and I was talking to you about this before the pod, like, I'm a first-time founder. My background is in tech. My co-founder's background is in finance and also tech. It's like, so the way that we started this whole process was kind of a snowball effect. And I made a call out to some of the individuals that I knew that started businesses in the past or were angels. I knew like three folks. One of them was Steve from Modern Animal that was on this pod and is like a personal savior for me in many founder moments. But it started there. We talked to kind of some angels that we knew a network. We got our first initial checks. Like a lot of those guys believed in us because we had stayed close to them. And then they segwayed into like the venture process that we had run. We got the first initial leads for our round. So Box Group wrote the kind of first big check in the round followed by a court side of an abstract ventures. And then from there, it was kind of the fun segwaying out and making these introductions. So I think John Legend was the first celebrity check that came in, which was like the biggest freak out moment I've ever had. I'm a huge John Legend man. And then Kevin Hart came in and a bunch of Steve Aoki and much of these cool people came in. I think the nicety that we have is just like we are selling watches like we're not a particularly complicated business. I would never profess that we are like doing anything that is particularly like nuanced and specialized and crazy. Right. Like we're not an NFT business. A lot of people like uniquely love watches. Yeah. Watches are a super popular category. And I think it's a insurance for them in some way to be sort of aligned with the technology or exactly that does. And I think like I don't regardless of who you are, I think all these watch collectors feel the shit. Am I going to get something fake? Like am I going to get? How do I trust this? Like and we have investors and buyers that are in locker rooms and the NFL and the NBA and things like that. And they're they're still like they don't have like a watch guy. And I think my thought always with a lot of these like high profile individuals like had a person that just looked out for them. And and that just doesn't totally exist. So I think they resonated with the problem and it kind of accelerated from there. I love that. You're kind of solving the problem that you felt as a sort of when you when you first entered the market. Yeah, you had to trust somebody and I feel good. And I think also like I've never started adventure and had celebrity investors other than this. But yeah, I think what a lot of really awesome investors ask when you get them on the cap table in the beginning is how can I be helpful? Mm hmm. So like Kevin Hart says, how can I be helpful or John Legend? I think the easy answer is always like do promotions for us, like get on social media and talk about us, right? And like these guys know their value. They recognize it like, you know, when a lot of these guys came in, we had raised like three and a half million dollars. We're not going to go pay that. That's how much it costs for any of these guys to do anything normally, right? Like so the cool thing about our business is we didn't have to ask for that. The value add for these individuals for us is like talk to your friends that love to buy watches about why we're great. And I'd rather grow slowly because we're getting a lot of buyers like genuinely interested from other buyers because our average order value is $12,000. Like we sell very expensive thing to be very low and allows us to kind of grow very organically that way, right? And so in the beginning, it was a lot of storytelling on getting a lot of these like nodes to cool collector networks in and certainly like Kevin Hart and John Legend are. And it's easy, right? Cause it's like, oh, if you're a watch person or you're a friend of yours, as you can just say, hey, check out this. Yeah. And like we, a lot of our earliest partnerships, like we have, we're in the Equinox circle and we partnership with Equinox. We did a ton of events with Soho house. Like a lot of these cool brands even in the earliest stages of our growth, which allowed us to kind of be aligned with those brands and kind of grow our brand alongside. We had these cool watches and a lot of people regardless of their status and their economics and what they're able to afford, they love watches and it's super cool to be able to go up to it, show up to an event or host a dinner or whatever and have a few million dollars in watches that you've never been able to see before. And so that's been kind of like our unfair advantage in growing the business from like a cool factor perspective. Do people ever just give you your watches like just on the K on the outside of the business? Is that something you guys do? We do that for like select clients. We don't have like a product oriented around that. But I think, you know, like I mentioned at the beginning we have a concierge model and our whole thing is like really delighting customers by the fact that like you have a human in the office that knows your name, that like is advocating for your collection. And so we just love to do things that surprise people. So if someone asks for some authentication or things like that, like we love to help out with that. And are you considered like a, when it went to the valuation, what, how are you sort of, is it a SaaS company? What is it that you're modeling after? We're a marketplace. Yeah, yeah. So we just take a commission on from the seller side. So the buyer's not charged anything. Yeah. And then the seller, we take a commission out of the sale. And on the seller side, is it a person? Is it a jewelry store? Like how, what's the range of the people on that side of it? It's kind of everything. The industry itself is like 90% professional. So most of the inventory is professional deals, which makes sense. We're a bit less than that. It was obviously like to get the marketplace wheel spinning. It was easier for us to go to professional dealers, pitched on a more transparent process, better payouts, things like that. A lot of the largest dealers in the US came on as investors in the cap table in the early days, which was awesome because, as you know, in building a business, like you're not, what you're promising to do is not what you do on day one. So we needed a lot of sellers to work with us there. Now we're at a place where we are benefiting the business and we're selling a lot of their watches. So more sellers organically come on from there. We spent $0 on a seller side acquisition. So that's been all super organic and we just broke 400 million in inventory, which is super awesome. And so yeah, it's kind of in the way that we worked. And then once we had the watches and the buyers kind of come on board, right? Like, ultimately it allows us to be really effective with how we use our spend from a paid marketing perspective because if you're querying Google saying I won a Royal Oak 15300, our results should show up because we are one of the largest inventory sources now. When you think about this, so you started with watches, you brought up sneakers also. Do you see a world where you guys transition into different products? I don't think so. I think like our bet from the beginning is we're a big fan of kind of these verticalized marketplaces and specifically in watches, like I wouldn't profess to say, like I think there's obviously a lot of crossover between like fashion and street wear and sneakers. I think like StockX is a great example. They tried watches, they played in watches. I think they're really good at selling like the Supreme collab G-Shock kind of things like that are a comparable purchase to, you know, I wanted to buy a pair of sneakers that are supreme, so I'm gonna buy this and it's gonna be one big order. I think with watches like you wanna buy from an expert, you wanna buy from a specialist and that presents itself in two ways. One, like I think from a customer perspective, it allows the customer to feel like these guys are the real deal, like they really care about this. And then I think from a product offering perspective, it allows us to build all of like, or obsess rather of like all of the details you'd need to make an informed purchase decision. Like the product is entirely custom from the ground up to sell watches and like our databases, we have 70,000 plus watches available from an inventory perspective, from a mapping perspective, from a data perspective. Like the goal is making sure it's very, very clear to a consumer that this product is obsessed about watches. And I think the watch market, which is probably similar to a lot of high value collectible categories, like cars and art and things like that, the watch market particularly is very good at sniffing out something that feels disingenuine. And these collectors are obsessed with watches and I think it would be doing us a disservice if we didn't project back that same degree of obsession with it. So for now, like, you know, we're super, super verticalized and focused on that. There's a lot of interest in kind of ancillary products around that. Like, you can imagine like insurance offerings and other cool things that we can build around the product of watches. But I think for the rest of the business, we'll be watches. I remember, so we bought this building used to be a pawn shop. And so I was going through it. We left all the stuff inside and we bought it. Yeah. And so we're going through the whole thing and there was clearly like a huge vault in there where they had the watches and they left all the boxes there. So like empty Rolex, box empty, whatever. And then there was like almost a list. They had a list that they had print out of like this watch and the serial codes that were made that year. And I was like, oh my God, that's how they used to authenticate this whole process was the serial code. That's all they had, which was nuts. And the paper was obviously like yellow. And so it was almost probably from like the 70s it felt like, you know, this antiquated thing. And I was like, that was it. Like that was the science. I mean like, and obviously it looks and feel and stuff. But I was like, it was crazy to me that it could be that simple. The tech, I mean, like the technology hasn't changed that much, right? Like it's still a serial driven world. Like that is how you identify uniquely that this watch is this watch and that's how you match the papers to this watch. And the methodology that's used to authenticate is still largely the same, right? It's like getting it in front of people who have seen thousands of these watches, getting it in their hands, allowing them the tools they need to look at everything in detail, like spend an ordered amount of time with these things. And then like the technology, sure there's like pressure tests and time loss tests and those get better and more efficient, but it's fun because we were a technology business. My background is building technology at Google and like having that background. And so half of our business is engineers that work at Google and Amazon and all these big companies in the same room with like people that are first hires is Ryan Chong. He was director of private sales at Sotheby's, the auction house and he kind of built out our whole authentication team. We have folks from Sotheby's and Christie's and all the watch world and watchmakers and like true craftsmen. And that's the fun juxtaposition of the world that we're playing in, where we're building these technology products and they should feel modern and thoughtful. It should feel when you're checking out, like it feels similar to buying any other modern product you would on any other modern app. But then we also have to have this very, like not dated, but like we have to pay homage to the history that exists horologically to the industry. Like it's, there's some things that just cannot be replaced by technology and that is getting the hands of an expert on these watches. So let me ask you a question. So I remember six months ago I was getting probably a deck every day around like web three, NFT, all of this stuff. And so in part of these decks, a part of it was going into the luxury fashion world. And so the point being the secondary reseller market is massive. They had a dollar figure, it's huge, not trillions but definitely several billions. And in that world, they were saying, you know, what if you were an LVMH house or one of these houses and you could just barcode or web three or NFT essentially like a purse. And then that way you knew for its entirety that this thing and when it's sold and then the goal there being like a residual so like a royalty would go back to the big company every time it resold. And it was as I was looking at it, like that makes sense. It's an interesting in my head anyway, very logically it feels like that could be, it's interesting. Do I think fashion houses are gonna end up doing this? I don't know. When it comes to watches, is that a threat at all? Is there is like web three or them putting like a, I don't know a tracker. I don't even know what they could do. But is this happening? Is it not happening? It's still not a threat. I think like anything that changes how these watches are traded is just like a new facet to our business and it's interesting. I'm happy you're talking about it at the manufacturers level or like the watch houses level. I think like to what you're saying I think watches are always going to be behind fashion. Like it's much easier I think, given like the fast fashion nature of these things like try this stuff, right? Like Rolex moves so incrementally slow and that's intentional. Like they're so good at these things but they make new drops every year. And for someone that came from like a sneaker or a fashion world, they'd be like, wait, that's this, that's the same watch just as like a new movement. Like why am I, why is everyone freaking out? Everything moves so intentionally slow because I think the culture of watches is that like we've done it right. It's so craft nothing moves fast and like that's by design and I think that's some of the allure and like the magic around it, right? So I was pitched similarly very like when we started this business so many of these web three businesses even probably some of the tech people that you hired were like, hey, we should, you know yeah, no, I think it's like super interesting. And I think like if it's not from the manufacturer level you still have this inability to tie a physical good to like the digital instance to it or like the on chain instance of it, right? And it just becomes a replacement to a piece of paper that is like sexier and like more like now feeling but it doesn't really solve a problem, right? Like you would still need some intermediate body to physically be like this watch. I looked at the cereal, I opened up the movement it actually does match this thing that's on chain. Like it doesn't solve the problem. We still have to exist, right? And in a world where the manufacturers start like placing these things in the watch I think it becomes more interesting. I still think like transactionally when the watch changes hands like you still need a third party to confirm like nothing has been modified in this watch. This watch is still original. The movement hasn't been swapped out because if it has some chip on the dial that says it came originally from AP doesn't mean that I didn't swap the class out and it's now something out. I didn't swap everything else out, right? So you still need this kind of body to do that. But some people do anyway they'll swap something out just for personalization. They totally will and the whole thing for us. But just for fun, I mean like yeah. If you own a watch and you want to do what you want to do with that watch I think that is super exciting for you and that is everything you want to do. Our whole thing is we only sell watches that have like truly genuine parts from the manufacturer and we just want to make sure that everyone understands what they are buying. It is not fundamentally wrong. It's a personal choice. If you want to like bust down your watch with diamonds, right? The problem is when that gets listed on a competitive marketplace and they don't mark that that's happening and someone buys it thinking it's factory diamonds and pays a premium for that they just kind of got robbed in that transaction. So that's our whole thing that we care about. It's just we only sell things that are factory and come from the production. You know engraving nothing. Interesting. We'll sell things that have engravings into that but like it needs to be blatantly clear. We've had full cases where. They haven't touched the dial or the movement. Precisely. Multiple cases where a watch is sold through our platform it gets to us. There was no engraving mentioned. It has an engraving. I think they're delightful. I think it's like a cool like someone else owned this and now I get to write my own story but we will cancel that sale at that point because the buyer doesn't want the engraving and they didn't know that, right? Yeah. What keeps you up at night when it comes to your business? What's the hard part? I think every part is hard. Yeah. Like you're in this fun stage. But you have a two-sided market. Totally. You have growing inventory. That's cool. I mean, it seems like things are. Yeah. Yeah. You have knowns. We're in a great point in the sense that like this year has been certainly the latter half of this year has been like an amazing growth year for us and the wheel started and now it's spinning really fast and getting there was very challenging and because it's just every single thing goes wrong and like I'm really happy we do everything in house but every single day there's a fire drill where we want the sellers to be happy because the sellers are a huge part of our business but our ultimate goal is protecting the buyers and we'll get a watch in and the watch will have more wear than we expected the watch to have and so we'll call that we'll like we don't want to pass it on to the buyer so we have to contact with the buyer and like the seller's like, what do you mean? Like. Of course, yeah. It does, it's on. It worked perfectly. We're always like going back and forth and our goal is to try to like make sure everyone is happy and in the beginning it's like the whole. Will you guys fix them? If something needs. We have a whole watchmaker and staff and things like that, right? But like that isn't totally always scale. Totally, totally. So we're at the stage of the business where like we're doing the kind of Paul Graham style do things that don't scale. Like just delight everyone. And I think now we're starting to figure out the stage of growth that we are at. It's like, how do you make that super scalable and kind of continuable? So. Paul Graham had a great prediction for this year. He says, wokeness will start to fade away. Yes. That's one of his tweets. I retweeted that one. I was like, I fucking hope so. Yeah, yes. But yeah, so let's get me up. I think like. That's interesting. At least starting the business. What I didn't realize is how hard it is. And I think not enough founders talk about that. Like I think it is like the grind mentality is something that like I thought is really cool. And I love that. And that's just kind of person that I am. But like it doesn't stop. There's not a moment where I don't wake up and immediately think about this business. And it's like there's not a single day where it's not the last thing I do when I go to sleep is think about the business. And it's all aspects from like, how is the culture feeling internally? Like how is the team feeling? Is everyone feeling motivated to how are our buyers feeling? How are our sellers feeling? What's macro like? Like what's our runway like? How are we feeling about the next fundraise? When should we start courting investors or start doing that? Like it's such a dance. And I think it's been such a fun process and a learning process that we launched the business in June of 2022. We first raised capital in August of 2021. We announced like an extension kind of we did an extension and fused it with our initial round. We announced like an eight million dollar collective seed in January of last year. And so like we raised that like a peak. We had to survive like a pretty serious downturn. The goalposts kind of always keep getting pushed out. So it's like a weird way. It went from like an environment where you're raising for 18 months of runway to then an environment where it's like, you're raising for less than 24 months of runway. You're crazy. And we were like, no one told us that. So it was a lot of like learning process and things like that. But luckily the business is humming now and we're in a place where we're feeling really strong. So that's great. I'm glad you touched on that. So true. I mean, even for me as a developer, it's like, if you build anything in like a community you live in or you spend a lot of time and you'll realize like half the people hate you because you're just building, you're making something better, right? And so even though renovating a building that is basically an eyesore. Totally. We'll get killed. We'll go to the council meetings. I'll get killed. And it's just like me taking abuse for two hours. And it just feels odd. You're like just, the only thing you expect from people is to be professional and they're not. And so you're just constantly dealing with that. And some of those people matter. You know, sometimes they have a voice or a microphone and you want them to speak well of your project and when they don't, people read those news but people read those articles. Oh, I am on trust pilot every single morning. Like I wake up, I look at trust pilot and if it does, if we don't have like stunning reviews from the day before, like all that I'm doing that day is working with the team to make sure whatever anyone talks about, even if it's like a four star, it can't happen, right? Like, and especially at this stage in the business, our differentiators trust and our brand is trust and like high execution and quality. We are in, we are, I mentioned this, like our AOV is $12,000. We sell any watch from $2,000 to seven figures. Like we sold our first seven figure watch a month ago. What was it? It was a Tiffany Nautilus. Okay, let's go for seven figures. They do. Yeah. Like the expectation is in rightfully so. That's why I started this business is I'm going to buy the most expensive thing ever. I'm going to buy it on the secondary market. It should still feel like you're popping champagne and you're getting all the trust and you're getting everything there. But you're dealing with customers where they're apprehensive already. Like they're nervous. And that gives you an opportunity to either like knock it out of the park and make them a customer for life or like be cavalier about it and treat it like it's a normal exchange and let them down. And I forget like whose quote this was, but the way that our team tends to live by it is there are two reactions when something goes wrong. It's either like the end of the world's or it's totally fine. You get to pick one and the customer gets to pick the other. So we always pick the, this is the biggest deal ever. It's so important. I can't imagine not solving this for you. And that's been the way forward right now. And we're just at the stage now where like, you know, we're starting to figure out how to really, really scale that as we're getting bigger and bigger. So what are you guys raising soon this year? Yeah, probably. You'll have to, right? We're in a good place from like a capital perspective and like we're selling a lot of watches, which is awesome. So, but yeah, I think we've intentionally timed the market so that we weren't raising last year. Yeah. And then I think this is a plan to come and go out and do that larger A that we've been delaying. So what are your favorite pieces? What are your favorite watches? What's on your bucket list? It's so funny and I love this question because it changes so much. Like we started this. When you see them? Exactly, that's the thing, right? Once you see them it changes. We like started this business and I think my superpower in starting this business was that I added such an appreciation for watches, but like I wasn't like working in watches prior to this. And I think it allows me to empathize with the actual consumers we have. Like we're not, we're selling to some people that are in the watch world, but like for the most part our consumer like works in banking or they work in tech or they whatever it is and like they like watches, right? So it allows me to empathize with them in a very visceral way while still having the team that is like harder watch knowledge experts. I get to see these things every day though it's like a kid in a candy store. And it's so fun like I went from being at my old job and having a monitor that just like looked at watch information all day and like nerding out about it to our authentication team sits next to kind of our main team. And so we're having a ton of these watches coming through every single day. And these are crazy pieces that like I've never I couldn't imagine seeing and like we're talking six figures, seven figure like crazy items that I didn't exist in my world prior to this. So it changes all the time. And the fun part about kind of what we've built is our goal with building the platform is making it really easy to buy and sell. So it like promotes almost like peer to peer liquidity. So it allowed me to kind of live the watch world I want also as a founder, right? Like I get to see all these cool things but I'm also living a founder's lifestyle. Like I'm not living this lavish life. Like we're grinding and we're building the business but I can buy a couple watches a year and then I can sell those watches that year and I can trade it into something else. And it allows me to feel like my collection is quite large despite only, you know, keeping five of these things at a time kind of thing. So what are your top five? Or what's on your list? What's on your list that's coming? What would you, what's a stretch goal? Oh man. Well, not the not the Tiffany Nautilus. I can't imagine. By the way, I was at a wedding, sent New Year's and a guy had it. Yeah. Well, he could have got a retail too. And Tiffany is a collector. This was like his third Nautilus. Yeah, but still like so the retail on it is like, you know, like sub six figures. The Jay-Z approved one is a million. They're all, well, they're just like they're, if they trade in the secondary market, right? That's how these watches work, right? Like even just a normal Nautilus, like the 57 of the 1A, like the one you see all the time with the blue dial discontinued, but like that watch trades at an insane premium for what it used to trade in retail or like a Rolex Daytona, for example, it's a $15,000 watch at retail trades at 30, right? So they just, a lot of them do this. As far as like my watches that I love right now, I like Rolex a lot, wearing a Rolex right now. I'm a big Rolex guy. The watch that got me hooked in this whole process was I was buying a, it's called the Hulk. It's just the green Submariner was like the first watch that I ever bought. And it was like the coolest thing ever. What I really want, I probably- Everybody loves that watch. People talk about that watch a lot. The Hulk? Yeah. Yeah, it was, it's just like- It's a cool watch. It's a, yeah. It just doesn't take itself seriously. I was like, if I'm going to buy my first watch, it needs to like be cool, but it needs to like, I don't know, be like, I'm not like- I think Dio or Dio from Ventum Racing wore that watch on our podcast. Got it. Yeah. It was like a, yeah, he was like eyeing it for a while. Yeah. Very, very cool. And he totally embodies everything you just said. Yeah, exactly. It's like a, it's a fun approach to, it doesn't take itself seriously. It's great. It plays if you're in a resort on the beach, you know, I like to be at the beach and surfing and like running to the beach every morning and things like that. So I also like to wear my watches. We have a photographer on staff and he came into the office to shoot everyone's watches and all the watches we had going through to like create content. And he looked at my Hulk and got it under like a ton of magnification and took photos. And he was like, this is the most disgusting watch I have ever seen. And I was like, hell yeah. Cause I like take, I like go to the beach with it and I like wear it. And these are like, there are tool watches and they're made for that. And it's prohibitive now because like they go up in value and you start to be like, holy shit. Like I shouldn't, I shouldn't jump in the ocean anymore. Right. But then you like, you swapping out. So I tended to bias towards watches that like I can wear every single day. I have like a, I think my next watch that I purchased in the next month or two will probably be the white gold Daytona on Oysterflex. I think it's like a super cool one. I really love the palm dial Datejust right now just cause it's like very playful and fun and doesn't take as well seriously. I don't have a Patek in my collection. So I think that's probably one of the next ones. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, can you tell people what's on the horizon? How are you going to close out 2024? Just start with, here we go. Big year for everybody. 2023, I forgot what year we're in. 2023 was a big growth year for us. I think we just announced we seven X year over year in Q4, which is super exciting. We had very similar growth in Q3. So we're in a really awesome place from that. I think about the last year from us as really like foundation building, like we had to play the watch game, figure out how to, you know, find the buy side, the sell side, connect the two, how can it be really efficient about that. I think we're in a really good place where like we kind of established that we are the best place to buy and sell that way. And now it's like, what are the crazy things we can do to really innovate the space? So we have auctions dropping this month. I'm not even, I haven't talked to PR about dropping that, but here we are. That's a marketplace point. I mean, that makes sense. Exactly. So we're very excited about that. We're announcing J Balvin as a strategic investor, which is super exciting, just embodies like the cool fact of watches and fashion and the crossover. Our whole ambition always was like, how do we build out the modern brand and the secondary watch market? How do we build out a brand that like you'd want to wear on your hat that's the same way that like a goat exists in the world today. And so having folks like that around the cap table and jumping on is super, super exciting. Yeah, that's awesome. But yeah, a lot of growth. We're US only right now. So next year, I think, you know, international is a particularly interesting conversation. Yeah. And yeah, a lot of really exciting stuff, but it's, you know, it's super fun. Is it bezel.com? Get bezel.com. Get bezel.com. Yeah, it's get bezel everywhere. Get bezel. Yeah. Kway, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much, man. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, share with your friends, your family, or anyone you might think might benefit from the conversation we've had today. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. We'd greatly appreciate it. 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