Harry Zhang with Kevin Hale on Building Lob to Automate the Offline World

Harry Zhang is the cofounder of Lob. Lob makes it possible for enterprises to programmatically send physical mail. They were in the Summer 2013 batch of YC.

https://twitter.com/harryzhang
https://lob.com

Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC.

https://twitter.com/ilikevests

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

***

Topics

00:00 – Harry’s intro

00:10 – What did Lob have when they applied to YC?

1:30 – Documentation as an API company

2:45 – Where did the insight to create Lob come from?

3:55 – Lob’s first version and first customer

6:55 – Closing their first big customer then signing others

12:00 – Did Harry always know Lob would be an API company?

13:30 – How long did it take to work up to enterprise customers?

14:00 – Pricing

19:15 – Creating a product roadmap

20:55 – Tradeoffs when building product

21:50 – Competing for top engineers as an API company

24:00 – Options vs RSUs

27:30 – Sales mistakes

31:50 – Building out features for enterprise clients

33:45 – Why did Lob choose to not vertically integrate?

39:00 – How has Harry had to change as a founder over the life of Lob?