I met an interesting startup founder yesterday. When he introduced himself, he said “I own a beauty salon”. His investor immediately chimed in and said “he’s being very humble. He is launching a tech enabled beauty salon chain and already…
Bots already account for nearly half of global web traffic. With the rise of large language model (LLM) agents, that number could reach 90% or more in the near future. But as the Economist puts it, the rise of the…
In 2018, I wrote about the rise of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands as they disrupted legacy incumbents with better design, pricing, and customer intimacy. Seven years later, some say DTC is dead. But they’re wrong—DTC isn’t dying. It’s evolving. Just last…
The most comprehensive collection of Israeli startup maps, last updated March 2022. Includes Israeli innovation in a diverse range of sectors: Metaverse, digital health, fintech, climate tech, real estate tech and more.
I'm currently in Madrid, Spain, giving a keynote in La Red Innova, speaking about mobile search and its impact on ecommerce. Red Innova is a thought leadership conference held for the third year in Madrid
, on more than one occasion I encountered a VC saying that the eCommerce model doesn’t have a “VC feel” to it. Huh? What were they missing? Why weren’t they seeing what I was seeing? Hadn’t they heard about the recent funding rounds from Ecommerce companies Groupon and LivingSocial? Since then, and after resting aside my ego, I placed myself back in my VC shoes to try to understand what “proof” such VCs needed to feel comfortable with an eCommerce investment.
For all the advertising and ecommerce startups out there: the Consumer Commerce Barometer (CCB) is a great way to gain market insights into how consumers interact with the internet as a source of information for purchasing decision. CCB is the result of a global effort by the IAB Europe in partnership with TNS Infratest and Google to quantify the role of online in the consumer journey from research to purchase.
One example of a rapidly-growing open source eCommerce platform solution is Magento Commerce, which is developed by L.A.-based Varien.
Weekly Firgun Newsletter
Join founders and investors reading the weekly Firgun newsletter by Eze Vidra.