1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Domain Knowledge

At 1Mby1M, we believe in learning from case studies of successful entrepreneurs. These case studies involve discussions on opportunities and challenges specific to the domain such as Generative AI, E-Commerce, Digital Health, Cyber Security, and FinTech. 

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 1)

We’re always impressed by entrepreneurs who manage to build sizeable companies without outside capital. Read how Cleverbridge has maneuvered to $40 million in revenue and doesn’t want to deal with venture capital and private equity.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Christian Blume: I was born in Cologne, Germany. I moved over to the US when I was seven years old. I stayed for two years in Detroit. Then, I moved back to Germany again for a couple of years. When I was 15, I moved to London and did my International Baccalaureate over there. Then I moved back to Germany again and did my apprenticeship as a car mechanic. I then went to study Economics and went to an asset management company based out of Frankfurt, which was addressing high net worth individuals who needed investment opportunities. >>>

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 1)

This interview delves into a somewhat obscure aspect of e-commerce: margin optimization through non-core product recommendations. Quite an interesting subject in its own right.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some context about yourself as well as the company.

Bob Dufour: My background is in a couple of different disciplines—statistics and analytics, direct marketing, and psychology. That’s my background and that’s how I put these all together in a company like Fusion, which was started in 2007. Our go-to market strategy is in digital optimization. What do I mean by that? We were formed in 2007 and had our launch with our first client in November of 2007. What we did at that point was we were this intermediary company that sat in between companies that had products to sell through a digital media and distributors that had customers interacting through a digital media. We sat in the middle and did real-time recommendations and real-time optimization. That was how we got started. >>>

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 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. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of the fashion industry ever since the Internet was born. Jodie Fox discusses why mass customization is so hard, and how her company is scaling a business that offers custom shoes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jodie Fox: I was born in a small country town in Australia. I was raised by a Sicilian mother and an Australian father. I was the first person in my family to go to university. Both my parents came from very humble backgrounds and worked really hard so that my sister and I could have a good education. It was very challenging to decide what I wanted to study. I was torn between my more artistic side and my more academic side. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Web 3.0 / e-Commerce domains, I strongly recommend you listen to these three interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 1)

There are hundreds of thousands of people in various niches who have built followings online. Now comes the question: how can they monetize this following?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as CampusBooks.

Jeff Cohen: I currently live in Chicago, Illinois. I was born and raised in St. Louis. I went to the University of Missouri and got my first job out of college doing marketing internship where I was involved in developing websites for the B2B market. They were basic websites from a communication standpoint. I went on to run the corporate website of a large distributor of college textbooks. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 1)

You have heard me talk about a vision for Web 3.0 since 2007, when I first published my Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) equation. In this interview, we discuss how the systems behind the scene are coming along to make a full Web 3.0 user experience possible.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about your company CoreMedia. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Gerrit Kolb: CoreMedia has been in business for about 19 years. At the very beginning of the Internet, CoreMedia started to develop software that was related to the management of structured content. That was quickly picked up by most of the media and telco companies in Central Europe. CoreMedia became, I would say, the heart and soul and the backbone of most of the media sites operating in Central Europe. As I said, our roots are media and telco, which is typically where the leading edge >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 1)

As you know, I am deeply interested in personalization as it applies to e-commerce & Web 3.0. In this interview, Darren Hill and I discuss the subject at length, especially as it pertains to fashion e-commerce, another area of significant interest for me.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as WebLinc. Tell us what you do and what you’re focused on.

Darren Hill: I started WebLinc with my brother in 1994 when I was 18 and a freshman at college. Before we started WebLinc, we owned a small mail-order business, which was a traditional mail-order business for mailing out catalogs. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express (Part 1)

E-Commerce is a global phenomenon today, and over the next decade and more, it will become more so. Eugene talks about the trend from the perspective of one of the top logistics vendors.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to the Thought Leaders in E-Commerce series. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what you’re working on. We’ll take it from there.

Eugene Laney: I’m the Head of International Trade Affairs for DHL Express here in the US. I have two responsibilities. One is to represent DHL Express here in Washington DC before Congress as well as US embassies. The second part of my role is export promotion where I work with our sales, marketing, and media as well as operations team to develop products and services to help SMBs as well as large corporations to >>>