GOAT Group

Origins

Daishin and I met while we were both studying at UC Berkeley. With my computer science background and his design acumen, we began programming iphone apps and making a living off of that for some time. After a series of iphone apps and businesses, we learned that we worked really well together and both had the passion and resilience to eventually build a successful business.Prior to GOAT, we had launched a few projects one of them being a social dining app called Grubwithus. The idea behind the app was to break social norms and bring people together through food at a restaurant. The app gained a good amount of attention at first, but there were a lot of friction points with coordinating people, dates, food and restaurants, and we eventually realized it was a hard business to scale and decided to shut it down.In 2014 Daishin, a huge sneakerhead since he was a kid, unwittingly bought a fake pair of Jordans off of another platform. The process was difficult - Daishin had to look through many photos of the same shoes, then look to see how trustworthy a seller was, how much the price would be with shipping and when he would receive them by. There was no standardization. When the shoes arrived, he realized they were fake and we both understood that the fake sneaker industry was a big threat. We knew there was a need for a platform to regulate the system and there wasn’t a solid tool out there to do so. We created GOAT to bring trust and safety to the sneaker market.