Max Rhodes
He runs the back office for Main Street - the boring plumbing the corner shop never had, finally pretty enough to use.
Max Rhodes
He runs the back office for Main Street - the boring plumbing the corner shop never had, finally pretty enough to use.
Walk into a candle store in Asheville, a paper goods shop in Toronto, a gift boutique in Manchester. Pull a card off the shelf and turn it over. There is a fair chance the order that put it there ran through a website built by a 39-year-old from Norman, Oklahoma who studied history at Yale and used to import umbrellas.
Max Rhodes is co-founder and CEO of Faire, the wholesale marketplace that lets a one-person retail shop browse 100,000-plus indie brands, place orders with 60-day terms, and send back what does not sell. Faire raised somewhere around $1.6 billion in venture money on the bet that Main Street did not need a savior. It needed software it could actually use.
The conventional reading of Faire is "Shopify for wholesale" or "Amazon for indie brands." Both are tidy. Both are wrong in interesting ways. The Amazon comparison flatters the wrong half of the equation. Amazon is built for the buyer who knows exactly what they want at 2 a.m. The Faire customer is a 47-year-old shop owner who can tell you why bone-colored linen sells in October but not November, and who will throw your laptop across the showroom if you suggest a computer should make her buying decisions.
That is, in fact, what happened to Rhodes in the early days. The first pitch for Faire was an algorithm: machine learning could predict what would sell in your store. Retailers were "viscerally offended," in his words. So he scrapped it. The product reframed itself around taste and play - free returns, try-before-you-buy, browse for hours - which is to say, Faire stopped trying to win the argument and started building the thing the buyer was already doing in her sleep.
That is the move. It is the entire Rhodes operating philosophy compressed into one anecdote. He has a Michael Moritz line he likes to repeat: "constant application of force." He has a tattoo line he likes to push on product managers: "talk to customers." He picks co-founders with one question - would I want to work with this person for the next ten years? - and reports for soccer practice on the weekends.
Rhodes grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, the kind of college town where the football team is the weather. He went to Yale in 2005 - public school kid in an Ivy collar - graduated in 2009 with a history degree, and joined Bain & Company as a consultant. Soccer, oddly, did the heavy lifting on the resume. He has said Bain partly hired him to play in the Bain World Cup. He met his first contact at Square on a rec-league pitch. He met a future Faire co-founder the same way.
At Square, he became the first product manager on Square Capital, which deployed more than a billion dollars of small-business lending, and Square Cash, Square's only Top-50-ranked iOS app at the time. It is a useful prelude: the entire arc of his career has been building tools for people who are running businesses on top of personality and a checking account.
Before Faire there was Blunt. Blunt is a New Zealand-designed wind-resistant umbrella - the kind with the rounded tips and the engineered ribs that does not flip inside-out in a storm. Rhodes started importing them into the United States as a side project. The job was unglamorous. Pack a suitcase of samples, fly to a trade show in a convention hall in Atlanta or Las Vegas, hand-sell to gift shop buyers walking the aisles. He did this for years. He kept thinking the same thing: this cannot be how independent retail still works.
Five years of that thought, plus three Square alumni - Marcelo Cortes, Daniele Perito, and Jeff Kolovson - and Faire became a company in 2017. They went through Y Combinator. They booked two weeks of interviews with retailers before writing a line of production code. They built the marketplace on the principle that the buyer should be allowed to be picky, and the brand should be allowed to be small.
I now gently encourage our product managers to get 'talk to customers' tattooed on their forearms.
- Max Rhodes
The classic wholesale problem: a shop owner has to pay for inventory months before customers buy it. Faire's net-60 terms shift the cash-flow burden off the smallest player in the chain.
If a product does not move, the retailer ships it back. Try-before-you-buy for a buyer who is also a curator. The risk underwriting is the company.
Discovery is the product. Rhodes scrapped the algorithm-as-buyer pitch and rebuilt the experience around browsing for hours. Faire sells the high of a great find.
Strip away the marketplace mechanics and Faire is doing something simpler: it is putting a back office on independent retail. The corner shop never had a procurement team, never had a credit line tuned to seasonality, never had a returns desk. The big-box stores had all of these for decades. Faire is just letting the shop down the street borrow the infrastructure.
Which means the company is - in the words it would never use about itself - a kind of public works project for the long tail. It works only if shop owners want to keep being shop owners. Rhodes's bet is that they do.
Bain hired him partly to play in their World Cup. He met his Square contact on a rec pitch. He met a Faire co-founder the same way. The man networks in cleats.
One question to filter candidates: would I be excited to work with this person for the next ten years? Almost nothing else makes the short list.
"As much as I value great design, I have no ability to do it myself." A useful confession from the CEO of a marketplace whose entire value proposition is taste.
I've learned to take the long view and focus on what Michael Moritz calls 'constant application of force.'
Would I be excited to work with this person for the next 10 years?
We have a one-year plan, but it's a step in the 10-year plan.
I now gently encourage our product managers to get 'talk to customers' tattooed on their forearms.
They were viscerally offended by the idea that some computer could shop for their store better than they could.
As much as I value great design, I have no ability to do it myself.
Late in the 2021 boom, every marketplace on the internet was buying revenue and explaining the math later. Faire was no exception. The valuation hit twelve and a half billion. The headcount climbed. The roadmap thickened. And by Rhodes's own account, the company started feeling wrong from the inside.
In a 2026 interview with CNBC, Rhodes spoke publicly about the near-miss. He has described the period as the company "growing too fast." The fix, when it came, was less a pivot than a return to the original posture - cut the noise, talk to the people the product was built for, decide what was core and what was luxury, ship from there.
If there is a Rhodes operating signature, this is it. He is not a thrash founder. He is a long-horizon founder, methodically pulling on a rope he knows he is going to be pulling on for the rest of his career. Moritz's "constant application of force" again. The one-year plan inside the ten-year plan. The shop owner who knows it is October but is already buying for next October.
Faire's near-term challenge is the one every marketplace eventually faces: keep the catalog interesting, keep the take rate sane, keep the buyer surprised. Its long-term challenge is bigger. It is the same challenge the small-business segment has always had - the chance that the corner shop, however cherished, is a category in slow erosion. Rhodes is betting it is not. He is betting that when the dust of the platform era settles, the consumer will still want a candle picked by a person, and the person picking it will still need software to keep the lights on.
Build the operating system for independent retail. The wholesale plumbing - inventory, terms, returns, discovery, payments - that lets a local shop compete with Amazon and big-box without losing the part of itself that makes someone walk in. Rhodes is not trying to disrupt Main Street. He is trying to put a competent IT department behind it.
Trade shows, paper catalogs, sales reps with rolling suitcases. The infrastructure of indie retail used to be analog by default. Faire's aim is digital by default, without losing the curation.
Expansion into Europe and beyond has been the past few years' work. Rhodes has spoken at length about how country-by-country playbooks differ - and how often founders get this wrong.
The Moritz line is not a metaphor. Rhodes makes one-year decisions inside ten-year frames. The hiring filter, the product reframes, the post-2021 reset - all of it.