Commerce Conversations

Scott's Background: Transition from payments (Vantiv, now WorldPay ) to travel. Six and a half years in the payments industry during a transformative period. Met founder of Allegiant, recognized it as a platform company, similar to Amazon, and eventually came on as CMO. Industry Trends: Resurgence in consumers using online travel agencies post-pandemic. Airlines seeking additional highly profitabl...

Gerry initially found himself in the Bay Area, started an MBA at Stanford, and worked in tech in SF. Inspired by the evolving mobility landscape, he saw an opportunity for shared bikes and scooters in LATAM with higher density and traffic issues. Gerry founded a micro-mobility startup in LATAM, which later merged into Grow Mobility, achieving rapid growth across 7 countries. Despite market success...

Yele's entrepreneurship journey was somewhat planned, driven by his desire to make a big impact on the African continent. He initially studied finance in the UK and worked in a hedge fund in New York before joining the United Nations in Kenya. Yele's motivation for starting his own business was fueled by the challenges he faced in accessing financial services on the continent, leading to his first...

Understanding Business Models: Recognize the commonalities of strong business models, even if they aren't flashy or consumer-facing. Valuable software products often drive recurring revenue streams on the enterprise side – student often don't know what the B2B side looks like. Framework for Market Analysis: Develop a structured approach to understanding markets, including size, pain points, existi...

Micro-fulfillment is a dynamic space that involves automated facilities, usually smaller than 10,000 square feet, for efficient order fulfillment. The landscape of micro-fulfillment solutions includes various goods-to-person systems that aim to optimize storage density and throughput. Instock is a micro-fulfillment solution that uses robots driving on the floor, ceiling, and vertical walls to maxi...

What is Karat? We’re building a better financial system for creators. So if you’re a YouTuber, an Instagram influencer, a TikTok or Twitch streamer, you are a business, albeit a new and different type of one that makes a living from content. Many of these new types of businesses really struggle to figure out their finances around getting access to credit, help with their taxes, setting up business...

Episode Highlights:  How did the idea for CNote originate?  At the intersection of social responsibility and financial services, CNote was born out of the need to align large institutional investors' values with their cash and fixed income portfolios. Cat, the founder, observed a growing interest among major clients to invest in socially responsible or ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) a...

What does WEX do? From 30,000 feet, what we're all about is simplifying the business of running a business. In this context, that means our three different product sets: benefits, corporate payments, and fleet payments. What’s happening in payments? A few major things… 1) Digitization of payments: even when Jay started his career in 2001, he was focused on the death of the check, and it’s still th...

Episode Highlights:  Andy and Matt talk about the shift in thinking that Millennials and Gen Z’s catalyze in regards to sustainability and buying preferences Like all of the big name innovators in the space like Rent the Runway and ThredUp, Trove started as a peer-to-peer model but the team realized early on that the way resale best played out for clothing was actually more akin to buying a certif...

Episode Highlights:  Chris began his career in IT at Nintendo before the company itself had a product. As he matured in his career Chris began to refine his expertise across sectors and products to deeply understand how to approach the sales process for different conditions. Chris then walks us through the EagleView and Pictometry merger.  Chris uses the metaphor of dating before marriage to exemp...

Episode Highlights:  Growing up with a physician father and social worker mother, a life of service was drilled into her from an early age for Betsy Cohen After absolutely hating philosophy as a major, she changed her focus to law on a whim Then after law school she was awarded a prestigious internship with a law firm and performed brilliantly. However upon completion her manager conveyed that the...

Episode Highlights:  Since joining Lazard in 2002, Dima has been investing actively in public equities in financial services with long horizons.  So, are we in recession? To Dima we either already are or about to experience one. However the real question is about the magnitude of such a recession. Dima started in 2002 when JPM stock went down about 50% and of course, was still an analyst in the Gl...

Episode Highlights:  Our Predictions, debated: 1. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) implodes. 2. More than a few challenger banks look for exits, or fold. 3. Private equity rolls up public former D2C retail darlings. 4. Crypto winter will persist through 2023, but not forever. 5. Mass merchants face headwinds while luxury booms. 6. Incumbents acquire at least one venture-backed payments company for $1B+. 7...

Episode Highlights:  Pete grew up in Ohio with 4 other siblings with a serious amount energy, which we later found out was ADD Without a diagnosis, Pete knew that his energy and intention meant he wouldn’t be a great employees, but entrepreneurship could be channel to funnel his drive at his own pace. Pete dropped out of college with just a quarter to complete and ended up running a chain of gyms....

Episode Highlights:  Guidewire provides a core cloud platform for property and casualty insurance providers, making the providers smarter and faster with technology. In a corp dev perspective, Mike is always looking for the next thing that will make the business more valuable to its provider customers. It’s easy to assume that when you build a new and shiny product that it will be adopted, but Mik...

After seeing her mother show hesitancy in the financial realm, Vrinda grew up deeply understanding that financial literacy and independence were critical to her success. Vrinda was on the Visa Chase Sapphire Reserve product team after her undergraduate study, but when she applied for the card she got rejected. Women’s discrimination in the financial sector is a complex and compounded issue: consid...

Episode Highlights:  Brandon Schulz: is the founder of Violet who Jordan Gal: is the founder of Rally. He started out as a merchant himself and jumped into the merchant software side of things. Thinking about one of the last things he bought online, which was in fact on Amazon, Brandon reflects on how Amazon sets the tone on how consumers expect to interact with checkout. Since their one-click che...

Episode Highlights:  Bradley defines web3 and what it means to be a driver of the next generation of the internet. If the medium for exchange with a creator and the community is a currency then we are enabling individuals to create their own economies.  Social tokens is a reinvention of the term “social capital” but with true fungibility and value Bradley recognizes that just in the span of 4 year...

The creator economy is now all about owning the means of distribution, no longer the means of distribution. The means of production or publication are cheaper and easier than ever, but in the creator context that means those with only the most savvy distribution models will succeed financially.  One of the most damaging things you can do in Josh’s opinion is giving those early, dedicated fans unde...

Episode Highlights:  After studying economics at USC, Shveta inadvertently fell into a career in M&A after seeing many of her peers pursue the same path. She  started out at Deloitte’s mid-market investment banking practice. She then was able to steer important M&A decisions on the sell side as a leader in corporate development at Lynda, where she played a key role in Linkedin’s acquisition of the...

Episode Highlights:  Kaya talks about the transition of individual creators and entertainment personalities as growing business people and enterprises. Kendall and Kaya define what a social token actually is and how it’s used in today’s context, even though the majority of creators haven’t begun creating coins. 80% of creators rely on brand partnerships and Kaya believed that will continue to be t...

Episode Highlights:  How does the leader fit in rest and balance in the c-suite? Blocking time for immersion in nature and being present with his family. Shane broke into technology first in sales and joined MX as chief revenue officer, after resonating with the mission orientation of the company and the stories of the leadership team he came aboard excited to apply his past experience and learn t...

It seems like every VC has a podcast these days... So why did we at Commerce Ventures jump on the train? At Commerce we have the unique advantage of being experts in our sector, and beyond that we’re some of the first investors to recognize the connectivity between spending, shopping, saving, and securing … It's what we call the Commerce Continuum and we’ve been focusing on this space since 2013…l...