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.

Discussion with Gus Tai, Trinity Ventures

Gus talks about his (and Trinity’s) investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future. Blue Nile, by the way, is a classic case study of a true Web 3.0 company, and it was a contrarian investment thesis from Trinity to invest in the business. Find out more in the discussion below.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see here, which is interesting actually, talks to a similar trend. It’s a significant opportunity out there. There are tons of people in tons of different verticals who have built followings. Maybe, they could be traffic followings. It could be a blog that has a readership. It could be various kinds of social media following. There are influencers of various scale and levels of influence in all kinds of niches. I believe that there is an opportunity at this stage of the game to create technology, product, or services through which these influencers can monetize their assets. I think that’s what you’re doing—taking advantage of that influencer pool out there who can drive commerce basically.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The students are making $8,000 to $10,000 a year and you have about 100 of these kinds of sites that you’re working with?

Jeff Cohen: I can’t give specific numbers but we have sites that do $100,000 a year in sales and we have sites that do multiple millions a year. They can be making anywhere from 6% to 10% commission on each sale.

Sramana Mitra: That’s essentially the business model. Let me revisit the question about trends. What is the thinking here?

Jeff Cohen: There are a couple of trends that I think are rather critical to our thought process. There is a trend where a lot of technology has moved into the API arena whereas 10 years ago, you built your own code internally. Now, you build all of your sites to be platform-based. We are >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 3)

Jeff Cohen: Let’s say you are at the University of Denver and you wanted to open up a local online textbook price comparison and market it on campus to all the people you know—that was easy to do. But it was difficult to take that concept at an individual campus level and scale it across the country. By creating a platform and partner program, we made it even easier for people to enter our market space because we took most of the technology out of the development and put it into a single API for people to be able to program against. By doing that, we were able to enable more competition in the space at the micro level.

We were allowing college students to create their own little businesses that they would run while they were in college and generate their own local marketing effort. Typically what happens is that a college student can make some good money from doing this but it wasn’t full-blown >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your target audience is all college students and the price comparison of textbooks is your sweet spot.

Jeff Cohen: That is definitely our sweet spot. The technology, theoretically, can be used in the comparison of any book. It’s not specifically tied to a textbook. The actual comparison of the prices could happen for everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to your basic biology textbook.

Sramana Mitra: For the 100 partners that you have, what are they using it for?

Jeff Cohen: I would say that their sweet spot is in the collegiate space. In many instances, their websites have collegiate traffic in some way, shape, or form. Either their primary service on the site is textbook price comparison or their secondary service is textbook price comparison. >>>

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 7)

Sramana Mitra: You should look at WebLinc. WebLinc is a very comprehensive system with one of the best personalization capabilities on the commerce side. They’re not necessarily as focused on the content side, although they are doing some very interesting user-generated content work.

Let’s talk about open problems and opportunities out there. Based on this conversation and the WebLinc conversation that we had a few weeks ago, one of the opportunities that comes to my mind is an integrated next-generation e-commerce system that really is set-up to power a Web 3.0 user experience which fuses content, community, commerce, vertical search, and personalization but can be handled from one system. Isn’t that an accurate observation?
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Can you give us some examples from your customer base where this kind of content–commerce fusion is happening on their website as we speak?

Gerrit Kolb: One example is Homebase. Homebase is using IBM system in the back-end. Then, we have JD Group who is using SAP in the back-end system. What usually happens is that people consume content form internal and external content editors. Then, they link it to specific offerings. They specifically create topic pages. Homebase is probably the largest retailer of home furniture and garden furniture in the UK. This is a very seasonal business. In the Fall season, you have different offerings and different stories. One thing they do is take pictures of those specific seasons. They have automatic flyover areas where they position their products directly in the story of a family that is going to picnic. >>>