Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Benoît l’Archevêque: It was in 1990. One Thursday morning, I lost my job. That noon, I said, “Nobody else will fire me again in my life.” So I started my own advertising agency that’s still running. People were coming to me with their problems thinking that only advertising could solve them. I was not just changing the advertising model; I was just changing the business model. If you’re not shouting the right message, you’re not going to get any more result just because you’re doing more advertising. It’s important to have the right business model.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 1)

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

We normally only feature companies that have proven concepts in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. This concept, however, is not entirely proven. It is interesting and bold.

Sramana Mitra: Benoit, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Give us some back story of the Azzimov journey.

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s a rather peculiar story because I’m a French Canadian. I come from a very low class family from Montreal, Canada. I was actually raised by a plumber and my mother was a Customs Officer – very creative people but not really much into businesses. I was surrounded by people that never really did anything to create a company. They’re not entrepreneurs. I come from a weird place where I didn’t know, at a young age, what an entrepreneur was. The only thing I wanted to do in life was cartoons. I studied Art. >>>

Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley

NYT has a fun article, Punching Above Its Weight, Upstart Netflix Pokes at HBO. Are we getting ready for a Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley next in Television and Film?

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Online Fashion: A Venture Scale Opportunity That Silicon Valley Does Not Understand

Fashion is a HUGE industry. The global women’s clothing industry, just a piece of it, is expected to exceed $621 billion in 2014. How many industries do you know of that scale?

Yet, online, fashion has still relatively a small presence.

In this article, I will explain why, and how to unlock the potential of this enormous industry using the strategies and tactics of Silicon Valley.

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Introducing a Company that is Doing Justice to Web 3.0

On February 14, 2007, I wrote a widely read post titled: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). On the Internet, it remains, after seven years, a widely read piece, defining a vision for the evolution of the web.

However, the web has not evolved according to this vision quite as rapidly as I had imagined. We have hardly seen the fragmented web mature into a more deeply personalized user experience.

Given that backdrop, I was excited to encounter a company recently that does realize the true potential of a context-specific, deeply personalized user experience that brings together content, community, commerce and vertical search.

Have a look at our recent Entrepreneur Journeys story: From Berlin, Bringing Art Auctions Online: Auctionata CEO Alexander Zacke.

Auctionata competes with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, engages a community of art collectors – both buyers and sellers, and art experts who know how to appraise and value art. It takes 20% from the buyers, and 20% from the sellers, and pays a commission to the experts who help them in each transaction. Given their items are high ticket, the business model is fabulously lucrative. I would even go so far as to say that this is one of the best business models I have seen on the web in a long time.

The entrepreneur, Alex Zacke, is from an Austrian family that has been in the art business for generations, and has deep domain knowledge of the art business. This background has enabled Alex to raise funding from VCs in Berlin on a powerpoint. The company is doing phenomenally well.

Cross-Border E-Commerce: Strong Emerging Market Opportunity

I have been consistently bullish about e-commerce as a global phenomenon. However, compared to the scale of what is to come, we’re still only scratching the surface. Remember, the forecast is five billion consumers on the Internet by 2020 …

Read Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia to get a feel for the appetite international markets have for American products (and extrapolate to European products as well). The company was built with a total of $2.3 million in investment, and it is about to hit $40 million revenue run rate this year.

Being in the UK this past week, with talks of the euro imploding, and so forth, I am reminded of how precarious the Western world’s economic situation is right now. But stories like this are reminders that there are many cross-border e-commerce opportunities that would meet the demand for European and American products in emerging markets.

Entrepreneurs, please note.

The Promise Of E-Commerce

Whichever way you look at it, the web has become the place for commerce.

Online spending grew again over 2011, and the growth rate has outpaced that of traditional brick-and-mortar stores. While many chain retailers’ online sales are growing, their store sales are shrinking.

For the longest time, entrepreneurs wanting to venture off on their own would open a store downtown where foot traffic abounded. But that trend, it seems, is changing. Today’s equivalent of foot traffic is eyeballs. Much of this new traffic flows from search engines and mega-marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay. Today an entrepreneur contemplating a retail business no longer leases space on Main Street. She opens a website. Her market is no longer local. >>>

Web 3.0 and Social Dance: Jive

Here’s jive …