MAY 2017 FORBES ASIA | 65vue. The son of a Boeing-engineer father
and a physical-therapist mother, he was
born and raised in Washington. While
attending Washington State University,
he became obsessed with the computers
his Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers
used to play videogames like Quake and
Duke Nukem, so he bought his own with
a $2,200 student loan.
Having picked up some coding skills,
Huzar landed a job at a frat brother’s start-
up before bouncing into product man-
agement roles at Microsoft and T-Mobile.
By 2006, he had become tired of life as a
middle manager and started a profession-
al networking website called Konnects. He
spent four years constantly raising money
to survive, while watching a rising startup
called LinkedIn eat his lunch.
By 2010, Huzar threw in the towel,
and he and his wife were expecting their
first child, Ava. As the couple went into
“nesting mode,” Huzar ran into a predic-
ament while clearing out space for his in-
coming daughter’s nursery: He had plen-
ty of valuable stuff to get rid of, but no
time to list it on Craigslist. Instead, he
unloaded his stuff at Goodwill, where the
parking lot always seemed full. “I asked
the people handling the stuff, ‘When do
the cars stop?’ ” Huzar says. “The work-
ers said, ‘They don’t.’ ”
From that Goodwill parking lot,
Huzar wrote the first lines of code for
what would become OfferUp. Cofound-
er Arean van Veelen, a former Konnects
employee who no longer works at Of-
ferUp day to day, calls this period their
“chicken and egg” phase as they strug-
gled to create a two-sided marketplace
with a critical mass of buyers and sellers.
The company greased the wheels by
buying products from other users and
relisting them on the app. On Huzar’s
36th birthday, he and Van Veelen filled
a truck with balloons to canvass sub-
urbs, but the outing was cut short when
one of the hired hands was accidentally
thrown off the truck. Huzar paid a minor
hospital bill and dodged a potential law-
suit that could have ended the compa-
ny. The efforts started to pay off, gradu-
ally, as users outside of their immediate
network began listing and buying items.
Two and a half years in, on his 15th trip
down to the Bay Area in search of fund-
ing, Huzar could finally show that his
marketplace was on its way to sustain-
ability and secured a $2.8 million invest-
ment led by Jackson Square Ventures.
The days of worrying about grocery
money were over.TOGETHER, OFFERUP AND Letgo have now
raised nearly $600 million, but there
is still a real possibility that Craigs list,
which never took VC money, will simply
refuse to die. The vast majority of peo-
ple who visit Craigslist don’t think about
online classified ads until it’s time to
sell their old bike or tattered couch. But
they know it’s there and will likely meet
their buying or selling needs—dusty text
links and all. Do you need a slick app for
something that isn’t part of your daily
routine?
OfferUp may be changing habits. In
her annual Internet Trends report last
June, Mary Meeker, the famous Wall
Street analyst turned venture capital-
ist, said the average OfferUp user spends
about 25 minutes a day on the app, usu-
ally browsing, on par with the likes of
Snapchat and Instagram. Apparent-
ly having a digital swap meet at your fin-
gers can be habit-forming. Last year,
when OfferUp’s total volume hit $14 bil-
lion after five years, Meeker noted it took
eBay three years longer to pass
that mark.
Those numbers come with a few ca-
veats, namely that OfferUp, which cur-
rently charges nothing to either buyers
or sellers, makes no money. This year the
company has begun experimenting with
monetization strategies like in-app pay-
ments, ads and promoted posts, but its
executives know that meaningful rev-
enue can come only when it cements
mindshare. That may be impossible as
long as Letgo persists.
While OfferUp employs more than
180 people in an expansive Belle vue of-
fice decorated exclusively with items
from the service, Oxenford’s app is
run by teams split between Barcelo-
na and New York. With a sugar daddy
in Naspers, a publicly listed company
that last year posted more than $12 bil-
lion in revenues, and a television-centricmarketing strategy that has worked for
Naspers-owned OLX, a sister company
whose classifieds sites serve Brazil, India
and 43 other countries, Letgo has a plan
to flood the American consciousness.
In 2016, Letgo spent an estimated
$100 million on TV ads in the U.S.—
compared with less than $1 million by
OfferUp—according to the advertising
analytics firm iSpot. This year, as Huzar
went on the defensive and bought
$5.5 million worth of TV ads in the
first quarter, Letgo spent $32 million.
“Our competitors by now should prob-
ably know that we will do whatever it
takes to win,” Oxenford says. “It’s not
like we’re operating under disguise.
We’re completely visible, and it’s work-
ing, no?”
It depends on whom you ask. App
Annie says Letgo had 7.3 million month-
ly active users in February, compared
with OfferUp’s 6.3 million. But the stat
can be juiced by high download rates af-
fected by ad spending, and both compa-
nies report much higher usage. Offer-
Up says it had 14 million monthly active
users on mobile in the U.S. in March;
Letgo says it had 13.4 million. The back-
and-forth trash talk from the two entre-
preneurs suggests the race is close. Huzar
dismisses his free-spending competitor
as a company that’s “just trying to get us
to the table.” Oxenford counters: “Mo-
mentum is on our side, and growth is on
our side.”
Neither can discount Facebook,
which has largely blundered in com-
merce efforts but needs to engage only a
fraction of its 1.86 billion users to make a
dent in the market. “Our strength is that
we know what people are interested in
and we can tailor Marketplace to show
your interests,” says Mary Ku, Facebook’s
head of commerce products.
While he keeps an eye on Facebook and
Letgo, Huzar knows the biggest obstacle on
his path to classifieds riches is 22-year-old
Craigslist. Can someone finally topple one
of the last true mammoths of the dot-com
era? His answer is classic entrepreneurial
bravado: “I don’t lose much sleep at night
over it.” He’s counting on OfferUp being
around in a decade, when it’s time to buy
Ava her first car. F