Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If I got it right, you bought BustedTees at $4 million in 2011 and got it up to $8 million in 2013. Adam Schwartz: Yes. Sramana Mitra: You sold it at that point? Adam Schwartz: We were growing through this customer acquisition program. We had done a lot of work to get our

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Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of how you would do this buyout? What proposal was on the table and how did you do the financial engineering of this buyout? Adam Schwartz: It was somewhat complicated actually. In all honesty, my partner Josh orchestrated it because he was already at IAC. Effectively, IAC owed Josh

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Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the company grow? How far did you get? Adam Schwartz: It’s a while ago now, so it’s hard to remember exactly. I worked on it from 2009 to 2011. We definitely had thousands of SKUs of textiles and we’ve had hundreds of suppliers and thousands of designers who were using this

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 4)

Jacob Cooke: Some of the software that we’ve developed plugs into all of the stores, so we can actually take products, put them in warehouses, and fulfill for JD.com, Yihaodian, or Tmall out of one logistics center. Once you’ve got your legal and licensing details worked out, they really push you towards getting into the platform.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 3)

Jacob Cooke: What Alibaba has done is take that a step further and acted as the mediator between the transactions. Owner Jack Ma is one of the richest and most trusted people in the country, just the way Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are perceived in the West. What he’s done is add a level

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, Baidu controls all the search traffic in China and this traffic gets routed largely to servers hosted in China. So websites have to be hosted in China to be ranked for the Chinese consumers. That’s the reason why you have to have a strategy for China to do e-commerce. Is that the

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The competition for keywords has gone up in the course of this, right? Azim Makanojiya: Significantly. What we used to pay 20 cents for, we now pay $6 to $7. Sramana Mitra: How has that impacted the business?

Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 6)

Azim Makanojiya: The other company then told them that they can still service us. They got their orders for three weeks but didn’t pay the factory. In the meantime, they built their own factory in China and started doing orders. They left the factory with unpaid bill of about $175,000. We’re now basically the sole company that sources from

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