E-Commerce Unicorns 2022: Oddity Leverages AI to Guarantee the Right Foundation Color

Online purchase of make-up has never been easy. But with the pandemic, that sector has also accelerated its transition to the internet. Virtual try-ons have become easier with brands like Dior and Charlotte Tilbury allowing users to see the impact of their products over Zoom. Chanel too launched an app, Lipscanner, that allows people to try on different shades of lipstick on their own face using augmented reality. There are several other niche players who have entered the market, and are doing phenomenally well in the recent past.

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Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds to me like you have very large deals in your pipeline. At some level, $5 million may be the only money you need to build this business.

Timothy Menard: Absolutely. The mindset was to build a company and be revenue-generating. Having these large contracts that pay 90% of the contract value in the first year is significant.

Sramana Mitra: Oh my goodness. That is fantastic! You won’t be able to recognize the revenue, though but cash-wise, it’s incredible for business-building.

E-Commerce Unicorns 2022: Fabric Builds Headless Commerce to Cater to e-commerce Growth

According to a recent report, the global e-commerce fulfillment services market size is expected to grow at 9.5% CAGR from $86.5 billion in 2021 through 2030. The continued adoption of e-commerce is resulting in the increase in the number of online buyers, especially in emerging economies. While Amazon remains the giant in the space, smaller companies are focusing on improving their tech stack to offer advanced fulfillment capabilities to other organizations.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 3)

Anupam Rastogi: I’ll talk about a more recent investment. They’re in the privacy space. They’re helping developers develop code that is more privacy-friendly. There are a lot of these regulations including GDPR in Europe where you need to be careful about what data is being stored, how it’s being stored and processes. Developers have to manually think about that.

This company has built a set of scanners to understand the privacy implications. That has a lot of intelligence around understanding what libraries are getting called. We co-led the seed round there. This was more in the pilot stage. We connected them to several people from our network who are close to the space, we sat through some of those meetings and got a good handle that this seemed like a wide need.

Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Santa Clara was the first that adopted your technology?

Timothy Menard: San Jose was first.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go into the mechanics of how you built the company from a financial engineering point of view. The first grant was $250,000. You got a second grant because of the discussions with Santa Clara and San Jose.

578th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Janam Mehta, Campus Fund and JSW Ventures

Janam Mehta, Partner at Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures, discusses the progress of the Indian startup ecosystem.

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578th Roundtable Recording with Janam Mehta, Campus Fund and JSW Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Niche E-commerce Brand Big Barker

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

We’ve talked about niche, proprietary e-commerce brands and how entrepreneurs are building businesses around different concepts. Founder Eric Shannon shared the story of Big Barker, a dog bed for large dogs, with me in 2017.

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

Eric Shannon: I was born in Pennsylvania in a suburb about 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. I went to Temple University. I was a Finance major. After school, I moved to California and took a job in banking. I hated it and was terrible at it. I had a couple of other jobs and eventually discovered the internet side of the economy. I became very attached to it. I started in that industry in 2004.

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