Piers.chambers

We’re keeping track of the latest news regarding the coronavirus in South Florida and around the state. Check back for updates throughout the day. DOH_quick_facts DeSantis downplays COVID surge, suggests … Click to Continue »

Ryan Cohen, CEO of Chewy.com, and his poodle Tylee at the company’s photo studio in Dania Beach in 2016. Photo by C.M. GUERRERO. cmguerrero@elnuevoherald.com

PetSmart announced today that Ryan Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of Chewy.com, is stepping down.

In six years, the 32-year-old Cohen grew Chewy to a homegrown success story, selling it to PetSmart for about $3.35 billion last year, the largest e-commerce acquisition in history.

Chewy, headquartered in Dania Beach, will be led by Sumit Singh, current chief operating officer of Chewy, who joined the company in August 2017 from his role as director of Amazon Fresh Worldwide, the company said.

It’s a familiar story in corporate acquisitions -- that is, the founding CEO steps down to pursue other passions or is replaced at the top -- and it gives Cohen the opportunity to start or fund something anew in South Florida, which is what ecosystems are all about.

Cohen has quite a story of his own. Growing Chewy.com from zero revenues to a multi-billion company was an incredible ride, Cohen said in a keynote appearance at the Florida Venture Capital Conference early this month (see a post here). The pet supplies retailer now has about 7,000 employees nationwide.

Cohen, who has always been entrepreneurial and has no college degree, said he started Chewy to replicate the same “amazing” customer experience of his neighborhood pet store (he is pet parent of a poodle, Tylee), but online. He used Zappos, the massive shoe e-tailer, as a model and inspiration. When he needed capital to grow, he approached more than 100 investors – and they all passed. “But I thought there’s a chance … we were on to something genius. I felt with scale we will prove them wrong,” Cohen told the audience of investors and entrepreneurs at the conference.

When the sale to PetSmart was announced, some longtime customers worried their beloved brand would change, and this news will not make them feel better. Still, the hyper-growth continued after the acquisition. In February, Chewy opened a 100,000-square-foot facility for its customer service team, which had outgrown its space in the Dania Beach headquarters. In total, Chewy employs 1,500 in South Florida, with 1,000 in Hollywood, out of its 7,000 worldwide. Chewy plans to hire 400 more customer service employees for Chewy Hollywood this year, Cohen said earlier this year.

For its part, PetSmart said in a news release announcing the CEO change that the company will continue to operate largely as an independent subsidiary of PetSmart, focusing on its current business strategy.

“Ryan is an amazing leader who has built a unique and powerful ecommerce business with a strong culture that is laser-focused on serving the needs of customers and their pets. I have full confidence that this will continue under the leadership of Sumit, a seasoned ecommerce leader who is well equipped to carry Chewy’s strategy forward and grow the company,” said Raymond Svider, a managing partner at BC Partners and executive chairman of PetSmart.  “We have enjoyed a great relationship with Ryan and respect his desire to step back from running the company after the relentless pace of the last seven years; he has our unwavering support and we wish him well.”

Said Singh: “We will remain focused on Chewy’s founding vision, core values, operating principles and goals. Our business momentum remains strong as we continue to scale while improving our customers’ experience and lowering our costs. We will stay focused, keep moving forward and continue with our vision of making Chewy the best pet retailer on the planet.”

Singh has served as the chief operating officer of Chewy.com since November 2017. Prior to Chewy, Singh served as the Director of Amazon Fresh, and before that he worked for Dell. He received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and an M.S. in Operations and Logistics from the University of Texas at Austin.

In a statement Thursday, Cohen said: “The past 7 years have been a tremendous journey and the learning experience of a lifetime. In a short time span, Chewy has gone from a concept to disrupting and redefining an entire industry. I feel the time is right for me to pass on the torch so I can pursue personal goals and spend time with my family. I’m confident in Sumit and believe he will continue to carry on the vision of making Chewy the best and biggest pet retailer on the planet.”

What’s next for Cohen? He’s not saying yet, but no doubt it will be entrepreneurial. He also has the means to support other startups, should he want to go the investor route. But to be sure, entrepreneurship is in his DNA, he told the audience at his most recent appearance in South Florida.

“I have never been a clear cut career path kind of person. I started my first business when I was 14 or 15 building websites… My father was a business owner so I saw what it was. It was very clear early on that I would be my own boss,” he said at the appearance in January.

In the recent talk, he discussed the challenges along the way and shared war stories about Chewy, including the difficulty finding funding. He said he moved forward and never changed his business strategy, even after a hundred investor doors were shut on him.

“I spoke to over 100 investors and they all passed for one reason or another. At one point I got so desperate … we took a trip to Sand Hill Road [in Silicon Valley]. I literally went door to door -- that didn’t work. But one of those 100 investors that passed made a visit later and I remember it like yesterday.  I was 25 at the time, and looked like 15 years old. He followed up with us, was impressed with all of our numbers and ultimately he invested.”

Cohen, who describes himself as obsessive, relentless and contrarian, said the biggest challenge was managing the hyper-growth. He  talked about the transformative decision to bring fulfillment in house in 2014, rather than relying on a third party. “It was three or four months of pain. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We worked through those problems and … in order for us to scale a billion dollar company we needed to go through that.”

Cohen also had some advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

“You need to make sure you are in a place in the world that you are ready for this. Scaling a business is going to test you physically and emotionally, it’s not for everyone. I have an 11 month old now, and scaling a startup from inception to reality is like taking a human being from infancy to adulthood in a very short period of time. It’s going to get sick in the middle of night and you are going to be up all night taking care of it. It’s going to make mistakes and you will learn from it. It is a huge act of selflessness and dedication and if you are ready for it, it is going to be a crazy, crazy, crazy roller-coaster and it will be the journey of a lifetime.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter.

Your team just came up with a great new idea for a feature, product, Airbnb for dogs, whatever it is….it’s amazing (naturally) and you’re ready to get started. But often building a product feels like chaos with so many spreadsheets, emails, chats, bugs, features, releases, and more. Keeping track of it all seems impossible. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had one place where your whole team could plan requirements, assign tasks, start coding, collaborate, and deploy to your customers? If you didn’t have to fumble around deciding where you’re going to document user stories and requirement details? And what if you could bring your designers and marketers into the conversation instead of having to collaborate with them through a separate medium?

Well, now you can! With Trello boards in Bitbucket Cloud, spin up a Trello board and get your entire team on the same page, instantly. 

If you haven’t heard of Trello, well, get ready to get work done, fast. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards let you organize and prioritize projects in a fast, flexible way. Trello is one of the worlds most popular project planning and collaboration tools, and it’s now a core part of Bitbucket’s experience. Already, 14% of Bitbucket customers use Trello for planning their software projects, and we’ve made it even easier for teams to plan and track in the tool they already know and love. Give your team a shared workspace that takes you from planning to deploying with hackathon speed – for free.

Why use Trello boards in Bitbucket?

Everything in one place

With boards in Bitbucket, you now have one place for planning, tracking, collaborating on code, testing and deploying. Developers save time by never bouncing between multiple applications and losing context to find their next piece of work. You don’t have to add and configure user permissions in a separate tool because access to Trello boards can be set based on Bitbucket’s repository permissions. Keep work moving fast by having everything and everyone organized in one tool.

Simplify your workflow – create branches directly from cards

Plan projects on a Trello board and get to coding quickly by creating a branch straight from a Trello card. Create a pull request in Bitbucket and attach it to a card to keep everyone in the loop on the status. Pick your next card from a prioritized backlog on the board and move cards through your workflow to ensure all work is complete.

Get project status at a glance

Quickly understand the status of the team’s work in a simple, digestible view without navigating around Bitbucket to find related work. Gain total traceability with branches, commits, and pull requests all associated with cards on the board. Even see build and pull request status from the front of the card with color-coded card badges that help you recognize if there are any issues. Daily stand-ups are a breeze with information like status updates, code reviewers, and more all within the details of the card.

Collaborate with your team – no coding skills necessary! 

PMs, engineers, designers, and marketers and many more contribute to the success of your product team. Extended teams now have a common language and workspace to collaborate on projects without needing to understand Bitbucket. Everyone can have one view of all their work without switching between multiple applications. Product teams can prioritize tasks and get perspective on the work getting done, and non-technical teams, like marketing, can see what’s shipping and share it with customers.

We launched Bitbucket’s Trello Power-Up back in March. If you haven’t already, make sure to install it to take advantage of the full integration.

Using Bitbucket? Here’s how to get started

Trello boards are now available on all repositories in Bitbucket. Just navigate to a repo, click on the board menu item in the sidebar, and get started. If you already have a Trello account, you can select an existing board from the drop down or create a new board. If you want to have more than one board, go to the repository settings and attach a second or third board.

Need some inspiration? Use a Trello board for agile development, bug tracking, a product roadmap, sprint retrospectives and more. Check out some of Trello’s engineering use cases.

Using GitHub? 

This is a great reason to try Bitbucket.

1. We have Trello integrated – obviously! Marketers and Designers don’t want to learn how to use GitHub issues.
2. Bitbucket has integrated CI/CD with Pipelines, so developers don’t spend time doing maintenance on Jenkins servers and GitHub integrations. With built-in Pipelines, see the status of your builds right in your repo. Take your code from testing to deploying in seconds.
3. Bitbucket offers free unlimited private repositories. Nice!
4. And, best of all, get all of this for around 25% of the cost of GitHub.
5. Try it all for free (even premium features) for 30 days. No credit card required. Import your repo here.

Get started, it’s free

Have more specific questions about this post? Reach out to us on Twitter to get the information you need.

The post Say Trello to boards in Bitbucket Cloud appeared first on Bitbucket.

Social Media Induced Depression? Is that a real thing?

Good question. Let me Google that for you. Yes, yes it is. I think most of us have experienced it in some form or another. It has to do with the anxiety people feel while being away from social media or general feelings of despair brought on while using social media.

The problem I have with social media is that it isn’t enriching. I feel responsibility to wish people happy birthdays, like their posts, and attend their events. And, of course, it can inspire feelings of jealousy. I could live with those side effects if social media also enriched my life in some way. But it’s rare that Facebook turns me on to a great article that is relevant to my interests or leads to any inspiration.

For me and a lot of people I know, there’s a much better way to fill your empty moments than to hop on a social media app. It’s reading. I don’t always have the time or energy to open up a book. The great thing about RSS feeds is that they take up little time, much like social media, but are endless sources of enriching and inspirational information. You can get smarter and better informed even if you only have 5 minutes to spare. With The Old Reader, there are social elements too. But instead of Happy Birthdays or photos of myself at the beach, we’re sharing posts that enrich our lives. 

So the best way I know to defeat social media-induced depression is to forego that visit to Facebook and spend a few minutes with your favorite blogger. Mine is probably Kottke, or Daring Fireball. Who’s yours?

We’ve all been to pitching events where startups present their solutions to gain investor interest or win prizes. How about an event where big companies present actual project needs to an audience of startups who can help them?

SwitchPitch, an event that invites established companies to pitch their technology needs to vetted startups in a role reversal, will hold its first Miami event on Feb. 20, 2013, from 1:30pm-6:30pm at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse. Following the event, the startups can bid on projects through SwitchPitch’s online submission platform. SwitchPitch team members will then help review the bids and connect large companies with startup partners for their projects.

The Weather Channel, Young & Rubicam, Mobifusion and Celebrity Cruise Lines are among the confirmed presenting companies for the event, which is supported by $20,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Michael Goldstein, SwitchPitch’s CEO (pictured here), says it’s more than just networking – this event is about  deal-making. “SwitchPitch creates revenue-producing deals to bolster the growth of the local startup community. Large corporations will be able to complete projects in a more efficient, entrepreneurial time frame and build relationships with future technology leaders, while startups will have the chance to ramp up their customer acquisition base, building long-term lasting relationships and bring in revenue-generating business,” he said in the press release.

For example, at SwitchPitch DC, companies presented more than $200,000 in projects to more than 350 startups, and at SwitchPitch NYC companies presented more than $500,000 in projects to more than 450 startups. Founded in 2012, SwitchPitch plans to hold annual events in  Washington, D.C., New York City, Miami,  San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, London and others. 

Early-bird tickets are available at $49 until Feb. 12, or $79 thereafter. To become a presenting company or sponsor, or attend the event as a qualified startup, visit www.switchpitch.com.