Entrepreneurial Analysis - Csn and Wayfair

Shah and Conine have been business partners since 1995, when they co-founded an internet consulting business called Spinners. The company was a success, but their second venture with Simplify Mobile failed and the company folded. Still, they maintained their partnership and positive attitudes and founded what would go on to become Wayfair, which has become a very successful business. Despite neither Shah nor Conine having any background in retail or merchandising, their online shopping site has done very well. This can be partially linked back to their backgrounds in engineering and computer science, which allowed them to create an efficient algorithm for use in e-commerce. With the system they’ve developed, suppliers email or upload their current in stock data to Wayfair’s servers, and Shah and Conine’s algorithm sifts and sorts through the data, flagging notifications for the suppliers when an order is placed by a customer. The system even decides how best to ship the item – via UPS or FedEx, or a contracted delivery company. No other Internet company has done something like this, and it’s evident how much impact Shah and Conine’s engineering and computer science knowledge has had on their business ventures.

Individually, Shah has been noted as being more business-oriented whereas Conine is more hands-on, having actually built furniture himself. The combination of these two characteristics was also a positive when it came to CSN Stores, and now Wayfair. Having started as business partners together right out of college, Shah and Conine have been together for almost twenty years. There have admittedly been bumps along the road, but both have noted that they were able to learn how to deal with each other pretty early on. This also allowed both men to learn the other’s strengths, which is how they decided Shah was a much better CEO because of his personality. Conine, being more of an action-oriented, hands-on problem solver wasn’t quite suited for the position,...