This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey on the emerging opportunity to transform how we shop online. My guest is Angelo Coletta, CEO and Co-founder of Zakeke.

Angelo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and exited multiple companies.

In 2017, he co-founded Zakeke, an AI Visual Commerce platform. It's doing groundbreaking work in transforming the B2B customer journey and shopping experience. With this focus, it's now serving 10,000+ eCommerce brands worldwide across 400+ industries

Their mission: To improve the industry's environmental footprint through the use of technology in the display process, the shopping experience, and the purchasing experience.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Angelo to my podcast. We explore how the shopping experience is still broken today - and why. Angelo shares his how he's building an organization to fix this and shares anecdotes about his lessons learned in choosing the right team, fostering a culture of innovation, and setting ambitious long-term goals. He then elaborates on creating resilience across the business, customer-centric product development, and how strategic acquisitions and investment in eco-system helped to scale their business.

Here's one of his quotes

I wanted to create a company that was totally based on a long-term vision. This is one of the most difficult choices to make when you start because it means you burn more money in the first years of the company. My opinion is that if you don't start as a long tail business, it's difficult to transform a company with 200 or 300 big customers into a company able to serve 1000s of customers, maybe most of them small customers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why have a global mindset from day 1.
2. Why focus on product excellence first before you consider a marketing push?
3. What Angelo specifically prioritizes when it comes to hiring the right people that will help the company grow in good and tough times.
4. The strategies he applied to establish trust and leverage their growth opportunity via the e-commerce ecosystem.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Angelo Coletta
• Website: Zakeke