A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So tell me more about what happened when you launched it?

Rafael Ortiz: The business was an app for digitizing your wardrobe. The thinking was, we would digitize everything in your closet and provide you with styling services. We would create outfits of all the items in your closet and use that as a basis to generate recommendations for what you should then buy. There was a bit of service. We’re styling you as the value-add and then, hopefully, doing great recommendations all in this app.

A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If I remember correctly, NexTag was a vertical search engine right? These half a million keywords were all within the domain of electronics.

Rafael Ortiz: Initially yes. We added other categories like home goods and clothing.

Sramana Mitra: How big a business did the tech product vertical search engine become?

Rafael Ortiz: By the time we sold it, the entire business was doing $200 million in revenue. The tech portion of that was over half.

A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s important to figure out why it didn’t validate. What was your analysis of why the company failed?

Rafael Ortiz: In the end, the reason was margins were so tight for those retailers. They were in no position to issue dynamic pricing for their products. At that time, the whole sales channel was under a lot of pressure. Retailers simply cut prices to break even. There wasn’t a way in which they could do that. We could not deliver enough customers who were willing to pay different prices. The savvy shoppers would just play with our software. They did their homework and they would just hold out for discounts.

A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Could you describe the process of figuring out what you wanted to eventually build a startup on? What was the process of coming up with that problem?

Rafael Ortiz: What we did is counter to what a lot of people advise. A lot of people advise finding the problem and doing something that you’re passionate about. We didn’t do that. It was very much an MBA kind of exercise. The most important decision was deciding that we were going to start the company. Once you decide, everything then starts happening. The hardest part was making that decision.

A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 1)

As you know, I have a passion for personalized luxury fashion and ventured into that market early on in 1999 when the market wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Rafael is building a wonderful luxury fashion venture with unique personalization details.

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?

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is your engineering team in Brazil like? How big is it? Is it all in one place?

Ricardo Josua: It’s spread around the world. We have 280 engineers at this point.

Sramana Mitra: In Sao Paulo?

Ricardo Josua: No, they’re remote. Maybe 120 are in Sao Paulo. We have become remote-first. People have an office if they want to go to an office. If the team wants to have a meeting and three of them are in India, everyone has to connect on their own device. It has to be the same experience for everyone. We have now engineers in India and Singapore. We have a growing team of engineers in the US and UK.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different kind of question. You are a developer who turned into a successful entrepreneur. You have a real insight into how a developer becomes an entrepreneur. Torc is working on the basis of equipping developers to be freelancers and blossom their careers. Given what’s going on in the world today, there is this tremendous desire for developers to be entrepreneurs. Is that something that you’re thinking about? Is that something that you want to facilitate?

Michael Morris: In our original business plan, we wanted to have a track in Torc that allows that path of going from a developer to an entrepreneur. I also want to be realistic. I think that for 9 out of 10 developers that want to go down that path, it’s not a great idea. Maybe they’re part of an entrepreneurial team. Everybody wants to be a CEO or a visionary.

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your core value proposition when it comes to the global market is the combination of payments and core banking?

Ricardo Josua: This is one of the main features. You have everything rolled up in a single integration. The second one was that this is not a monolithic solution. It can provide all the systems, but you can build around them. One of the pains that we try to solve was that we don’t want to be the bottleneck in the development of products from our clients. We have to make sure that we have out-of-the-box solutions if you want a basic product.