You Should Genuinely Care About the Problem You’re Solving: Interview with Quaid Walker, Co-Founder and CEO of Bezel
I recently went one-on-one with Quaid Walker, co-founder and CEO of Bezel.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Quaid: I was born and raised in Los Angeles and have always been fascinated with design and technology. I have a passion for building digital products and spent most of my career as a design lead at Google. I worked on several different projects at Google, but most notably, I was a founding team member on Google TV, helping it move from an idea on a whiteboard to a product in hundreds of millions of homes.
Both during and prior to my tenure at Google, I had the opportunity to advise a number of startups. I have always been fascinated and energized by taking something 0 to 1, so the founder track has always been something I’ve been drawn to.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Quaid: I bought my “big” watch with my first bonus from Google. I was expecting a high-end, celebratory experience, but was instead put on a waitlist and kicked to the secondary market. There, I was forced to “shop the seller”, authenticate my own watch after receiving it in the mail, and blindly trust that the watch I was buying was the watch I was receiving.
I figured there had to be a platform like Stockx – a modern, trusted marketplace for watches using technology and a seamless customer experience - but over time, realized there wasn’t. It was about a year-long process of asking myself and my co-founders, are we the right team to tackle this? As collectors, we already felt the pain points we wanted to solve on a personal level, but repeatedly heard similar sentiments speaking with other collectors and understanding the gaps in the market. We raised our initial round of funding and launched the business in June 2022.
Today, with more than $600M worth of listings in Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Cartier, we’re seeing millions in monthly sales, 30% of it coming from repeat buyers, and 70% of our revenue coming from Gen Z and Millennials (Gen Z having the highest AOV).
One piece of advice is that you should genuinely care about the problem you're solving. I’ve talked to founders who are drawn to the financial opportunity but are not personally invested in the issue itself. You can logically create a business around a challenge you're indifferent to, but if you're dedicating a decade or more of your life to this, you have to ask yourself if you’ll remain passionate when times get tough. As a founder, that personal connection is what will keep you going. Founders tend to underestimate how long of a journey this really is.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Quaid: My co-founders and I spent about a year researching the market and talking to watch buyers to validate our assumptions, but ultimately we just built the business around the needs we had as collectors. My advice is to focus on a problem that you’re excited to solve for the next 10 years, make sure there’s an opportunity to actually provide value to customers, and I tend to be a fan of businesses with incredibly simple/immediate monetization strategies.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Quaid: This is entirely contingent on what type of business you’re building. We built a marketplace, so a lot of our growth was driven by strategically hacking one side of the market. We realized we couldn’t grow demand efficiently unless we had watches in stock, so we spent the early days laser-focused on supply. We obsessed over building the best product for our sellers and did everything we could to make the inventory upload process painless, even if it meant manually doing all the work for our early partners. This allowed us to scale inventory quickly (and without any paid spend) and then leverage that inventory as a mechanism to drive demand growth.
In the early days, with a small team and limited resources, you can’t do everything at 100% so being intentional about what the team focuses on is important.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Quaid: We just try to tell a story that feels genuine to our ambitions for the business. We are collectors too. We wanted a better watch-buying experience built on trust, and we spend every day trying to make our buyers and sellers happy.
We’ve found that you can make short-term gains with marketing messages, but longevity in the luxury space is about walking the walk. If you say you’re a platform built on trust, where does that show up? For such a considered purchase like a luxury watch, it meant every member receives a dedicated concierge to address any questions or concerns before a transaction. It meant running every watch through a multi-point, industry-leading authentication process by our in-house team of experts to ensure authenticity, period correctness, and full functionality. Everyone’s going to claim they’re the solution to the industry’s big problems, but few will actually show their work.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Quaid: Great leaders are always learning, they’re able to surround themselves with incredible people, and they’re decisive when they need to be.
As a first-time CEO, I aim to constantly grow my leadership skills. The best growth hack for me has been building a network of mentors with much more leadership experience than I have. And I found those people by simply asking friends and professional connections if they know someone. I even found some of our earliest supporters through cold LinkedIn outreach. You’d be surprised at how willing people are to help.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Quaid: Ultimately it comes down to hiring great people and empowering them to be their best at work. I’ve found the oversimplified way to do that is to be transparent about what you expect during the hiring process and then always create a clear understanding of the impact their work has once they’re onboarded.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Quaid:
Work on something you’re excited to work on for 10 years, this isn’t a quick journey.
Don’t compromise on who you work with. Having great partners is everything, especially co-founders and early employees.
Every business is different. Not every business should raise money. Not every business needs to launch the same way. There is no one-size-fits-all playbook. Make sure you’re doing what’s right for your business strategically because no one knows your business better than you do.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Quaid: This is very customer experience oriented, less philosophical but if something goes wrong in the customer experience flow, there are two choices:
“This isn’t a problem”
“This is a huge problem”
You get to pick one and the customer picks the other.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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