We first met him in 2012 he was en route to Disney World with his family and agreed to make a quick stop at our office. Larry Cheng at Volition Capital was one of the people we pitched our company to. We approached dozens of VC firms-I even flew out to Silicon Valley from our South Florida headquarters and went door-to-door on Sand Hill Road explaining how Chewy would succeed by delighting customers and running an ultra-efficient operation. I had launched Chewy two years earlier with Michael Day, using our own cash and small loans, but my vision was to build a large business, and I knew that significant capital would be required to finance the growth. But believe it or not, another handshake-another deal-mattered even more to me. It represented the culmination of a dream and a tremendous amount of work. Most people assume that the high point of my professional career came on April 18, 2017, when the owners of PetSmart paid $3.35 billion for, the pet retailer I had cofounded six years earlier. “Those investors put their trust in me and my vision,” Cohen writes, “and I repaid them with returns.” Its early-stage investors made huge gains, and later-stage ones made significant money. “I was even more committed to making Chewy an industry leader because it was no longer just our own money on the line….I felt that responsibility.” The financing allowed him and his team to scale up the operation rapidly and plan for an IPO, but before that happened, they sold Chewy to PetSmart for $3.35 billion. “From that point on, the mission was larger,” he writes. Cohen describes that first round of funding as a major watershed. He went door-to-door in Silicon Valley looking for funding, but not until Chewy had beaten sales projections did the company find a significant backer, at Volition Capital. Clearly, the opportunity was huge-and he cared much more about pet food than about jewelry. As Ryan Cohen was on the verge of launching an online jewelry business with his friend Michael Day, he had a revelation: He was standing in a local pet store with his toy poodle, Tylee, discussing her food with the proprietor, when he realized that millions of other pet owners were equally concerned about their animals’ well-being.

Chewy my orders