Steve Conine, left, and Niraj Shah
Boston Globe via Getty Images
The two cofounders of publicly traded online furniture retailer Wayfair are billionaires yet again.
Wayfair’s shares have skyrocketed in recent months, nearly tripling in value since April and giving the company a market capitalization of $8.4 billion. Forbes estimates that CEO Niraj Shah and his cofounder and co-chairman, Steve Conine, are now worth over $1 billion each.
It’s not their first time in the three-comma club. The duo joined the billionaires list in 2018, worth $1.6 billion apiece, after Wayfair’s stock price doubled in a five-month span. Their fortunes climbed all the way to $3.6 billion in 2021, as the pandemic home goods craze pushed revenue through the roof, from $6.8 billion in 2018 to $13.7 billion in 2021. Then it all came crashing back to earth. Wayfair’s stock plummeted 87% in 2021 as inflation ran rampant and demand for home projects fizzled amid workers returning to the office, pushing Shah and Conine out of the billionaire ranks.
But Wayfair has kept going. The company, helmed by Shah and Conine, reduced net losses from $1.3 billion in 2022 to $492 million last year, thanks in part to cost-cutting initiatives, one of which resulted in laying off 13% of its global workforce and 19% of its corporate team, roughly 1,650 employees. More recently, Wayfair has been aided by the success of a new retail strategy, which relies on physical, large-format locations. Wayfair’s first store debuted in Wilmette, Illinois, in May 2024. The company announced in March that it plans to open a second location, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2026. Shares are up 225%, to $65.60 as of Wednesday’s market close, from a post-pandemic intraday low of $20.41 in April.
No one has benefitted more from the turnaround than Shah, age 51, and Conine, 52. Wayfair’s largest individual stockholders, they each own more than 10 million shares, around 7% of the company each, even after selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock over the years. Conine also sits on the board of online automotive marketplace CarGurus. A spokesperson for Shah and Conine did not respond to a request for comment.
Shah, 17, and Conine, 18 met in high school at a summer program hosted by Cornell University. In their first year, while attending the same school where they first met, the two became good friends. After college, Shah and Conine founded Spinners Incorporated, an IT services firm which was sold to iXL, a publicly traded global technology consulting firm, in 1998 for an undisclosed amount. After the success of their first venture, they launched racksandstands.com, the first of 250 niche furniture sites the duo would end up creating. They consolidated the sites under CSN Stores, the name a combination of Shah and Conine’s initials, and moved into their first office located in Boston in 2003. Four years in, the business generated $100 million in sales. In 2011, the pair merged everything under the name Wayfair and sales grew to $600 million. Two years later, with revenue approaching $1 billion, they took Wayfair public on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, the business sells everything from beds to washing machines to swing sets to more than 21 million active customers. It did $11.9 billion in revenue in 2024.
“We have a tremendous amount of opportunity in front of us, and so we will be both incredibly ambitious,” Shah and Conine wrote in a February shareholder’s letter, before outlining a favorite motto for future success: “Winners, win.”