Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Because you’re at Borderfree, your angle is on the international. We will explore that angle, but I just want to anchor this discussion by pointing out a few other things that I see in e-commerce. We started covering these quite extensively actually. Very recently, we have covered two companies that are each furthering the evolution of high-end e-commerce systems—0ne from the dimension of personalization and another from the dimension of content-driven commerce. Both are massive trends.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this piece that I wrote in 2007 defining what I see as the formula for Web 3.0. The formula was Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are defined as context, community, commerce, and content. P is personalization and VS for vertical search. Now eight years later, we are starting to see systems that address not all of it but >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 1)

Borderfree provides tools to help move e-commerce to its next phase: going global. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you a little bit as well as all your different e-commerce-related experience so we can set the context for the conversation.

Brian Dhatt: I’m the CTO at Borderfree. That means I’m responsible for our product and product strategy. We are based in New York City and we have offices around the world in Dublin, Ireland as well as in Tel Aviv, Israel. From a path perspective, I came from Gilt Groupe. I led product, engineering, and creatives for Gilt City.

Prior to that, I co-founded POPSUGAR, which is a content commerce company based in San Francisco. We founded that back in 2006 and we were Sequoia-funded. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are the opportunities to do new and innovative companies in this whole space?

Keith Anderson: There’s at least a couple of ideas that spring to my mind. There’s always a diffusion of technology over time from the very high-end to the broader mainstream market. Think of technology that originated from the Department of Defense, for example, and then eventually making it to the more mainstream. There’s the lower end disruption that starts as more affordable and reaches the mainstream by meeting the basic need and getting more sophisticated over time. In this area, I think it’s more of the former. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 4)

Keith Anderson: Prices are really a key driver of that ultimate decision to buy from one retailer versus another. The manufacturers of course are wary of deflation. They don’t want a race to the bottom. They introduce policies like minimum advertised price (MAP). MAP policy is a policy that retailers and manufacturers enter into voluntarily. It often has implications or willingness to partner on promotions or programs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 3)

Keith Anderson: Besides exactly matching products, one of the fundamental, but not obvious ways we add value is through the matching of products that are not exactly identical. There is just one example—private label products, which are the products that the retailer sells under their own label or a private brand are often positioned as national brand equivalent, but they’re not exactly the same product. From a data perspective, matching those products is possible with a unique identifier like UPC. You have to have fairly sophisticated matching algorithms that either use product characteristics or visual matching that are associated with the products. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got this. You help retailers with pricing information and you help manufacturers optimize their channels through these retailers. Is that a good summary?

Keith Anderson: That’s a great summary. The retailers also care about assortment. We can also help them, very efficiently, identify products that they don’t carry and that their competitors carry that may be selling well and or that shoppers have reviewed positively. The retailers are getting more sophisticated in how they leverage our capability but it’s primarily about price and assortment for the retailers. For the brands, it’s an even broader set of analytics that they care about.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down a bit and give us the kinds of insights that you are able to extract for pricing optimization.
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 1)

Price personalization has been touted as the holy grail of e-commerce. This conversation brings to light the state of the union in the domain of price optimization, price intelligence, and price personalization.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by setting some context for our audience of what Profitero does and what your background is.

Keith Anderson: Profitero was founded in 2010 in Dublin, Ireland by former IBM and Google software engineers. Sometimes people ask why the company was founded in Ireland and not in Silicon Valley. Dublin has established itself as a European technology hub. Our founders live there. We’re backed by Polaris Partners, which has offices both in Boston as well as in Dublin where we’re headquartered. We now have offices in Dublin, London, Boston, San Diego, Belarus, and Minsk. We’ll shortly open offices in Asia and other parts of Latin America this year. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You joined the costume business in 2004?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, I was the only one doing it full-time. It was only a seasonal business up until 2002 and then I built a website to see if I could make it a full-time job. I was doing extra orders basically through college out of my dorm room, which was just extra cash for going out. When I graduated, I wanted to do it full-time. In October, everything exploded.

Sramana Mitra: What happened that October? >>>