Interview with Sachin Agarwal of Dawdle

Sachin Agarwal is the co-founder and CEO of Dawdle, an online marketplace for both new and used video games, systems, and accessories. After working in VC and ibanking he started Dawdle.

Find Sachin
Twitter: @sachinag
Blog: http://blog.dawdle.com

knowist: Tell me a little about your work

Sachin: My job is to do everything I can to give interesting projects to the technology team and to leave them alone to do their jobs. I consider myself both the stage manager and the producer of the play that is Dawdle. The technology guys are the actors - the stars of the show. I strike partnerships with other companies, try to identify and recruit high value professional sellers to the site, do our media outreach, and handle some of the customer service.

knowist: What kind of tensions exist between technology decisions and strategic thinking?

Sachin: Well, we have our internal roadmap of stuff we want to build to make the site better/cheaper/faster/whatever-er. Partnerships often require us to write some specifications for our partners and usually require some technology to be built on our end. In addition to that, we always get feedback on new features from our professional sellers that we need to incorporate. Sometimes it feels like we're zigzagging between 800 different things, but that happens when I'm not doing my job and setting strong priorities. I make the final decisions about what takes priority, based on external feedback and internal development time estimates, and the technology team whips it up.

knowist: How has the concept of Dawdle evolved?

Sachin: The initial vision of the site worked much more like Priceline for video games - although I hated that comparison, in retrospect, it was the right one. We did a complete 180 on that and now Dawdle is much more of a fixed price marketplace, although we retain the Priceline style user-experience under our "StandingOffer" technology. It was a big deal to make that change, but thankfully, we were able to retain our transaction engine (we call it our Intelligent Matching Engine) by coming up with some clever ways to hack it (in the good sense). If we hadn't made good strategic decisions about how the technology would have worked from Day One, we never could have retained the engine and may have just puttered around forever. Since we made that change, sales have skyrocketed and it's been easier for me to recruit new sellers to the site.

knowist: what else you got for me?

Sachin: I think it's really important for every startup to have at least two people: one focused on technology, and one focused on everything else. Even if two technologists start a company, someone is going to have to step up and own the business aspects of the company. I initially tried to do Dawdle myself with some outside consultants (here in Chicago) building the technology. That just didn't work because Dawdle was just one of many clients. Similarly, a single technologist with no business partner is going to have a devil of a time getting good outside feedback from potential customers, partners, and press. The separation of roles is key.

Comments

[Matt]

Thanks for the info on Dawdle. Looks like an interesting site.