In 2016, U.S. consumers spent $360 billion at online retailers, with Amazon accounting for a whopping $150 billion of that. In other words, almost 50 cents of every ecommerce dollar goes to Amazon. Amazon is hard to beat on price, selection, and convenience. So what ecommerce opportunities are left for startups? This is a question my fund looks at very carefully, since we’ve been focused on high-potential ecommerce plays. Here are a few takeaways from our playbook: Where Amazon wins — and where it doesn’t Amazon wins when you already know the specific SKU you want to buy. But half the shopping experience happens when you don’t know exactly what you want. In those times, you’re shopping for entertainment, discovery, ... Play Now

Jason Kilar’s interest in customer service was sparked by a visit to Disney World when he was 10 years old. The wonder he felt as he walked underneath the train station and out onto Main Street stays with him to this day. It was a pivot point for him, even at that young age. Eventually, Kilar would intern at Disney World and walk those same steps each night after his shift ended. “It really influenced who I was as an early manager,” Kilar shared. His career started with Amazon when it was a relatively small, early-stage private company. While there, Kilar was able to grow from his roots and expand while learning deep lessons about the importance and value of ... Play Now

Ron Gutman began his entrepreneurial journey leading a multi-dimensional group of graduate students and faculty that focused on personalized medicine. As a result, Gutman found his passion for health care and helping people. He also recognized the need to not only engage people in their own health care but also to measurably prolong the life expectancy of humankind. With the launch of HealthTap, Gutman and team began to explore and ultimately create solutions that enabled end to end care, building the experience “that is very similar to what Uber did in transportation, for example, or what Amazon is doing in commerce, what Netflix is doing in entertainment.” Having a vision was one thing, but creating a team and culture that can ... Play Now

James Currier focuses on building businesses with network effects, but he builds those businesses by choosing the right people first. Currier started as a schoolboy entrepreneur, selling worms to fishermen at six and later selling boxer shorts in college. After getting started in venture capital, Currier founded a series of companies and incubators that took advantage of network effects to grow and create defensible value. He co-founded the social network Tickle and grew it through the dot-com ups and downs until it grew its membership to a quarter of the existing Internet population before it was sold to Monster.com in 2004. “Why would you start a business without a network effect?” Currier said.  “Because the value that’s created when you finally hit one is so vast, that ... Play Now

Jonah Goodhart started his entrepreneurial journey while still in college at Cornell University. What started out a bit haphazardly with an email list turned into solid learning opportunities that have informed his business decisions along the way. After the acquisition of his second company, Right Media by Yahoo in 2007, Goodhart decided to go in a different direction and started investing in other people. This angel fund, WGI, helped to fund numerous data and next generation location companies. But Goodhart missed creating and running a company. In 2010, Moat was launched to make digital a more effective medium for brands to reach consumers via measurement and analytics. Building on the belief that people and culture are the core of the ... Play Now

Rehan Jalil came to the US to attend graduate school and then took a job at Sun Microsystems, accidentally ending up in Silicon Valley that would be the base for the rest of his career. Recognizing that he wanted to make a positive impact on the world, he started his entrepreneurial journey by founding WiChorus, which focused on enabling 4G technologies. After it was acquired by Tellabs, Jalil went on to look for new problems to solve. Elastica was formed to innovate cloud application security. It was acquired by Blue Coat in 2015, which recently was purchased by Symantec. In this interview, Jalil emphasizes passion and perseverance in building a company. He relates the story of how, after raising Series A ... Play Now

Manish Chandra is founder and CEO of Poshmark. As a serial entrepreneur, he also founded Kaboodle in 2005, one of the industry’s first social shopping sites, which was acquired by Hearst, and prior to that, he served in executive roles at several foundational technology companies. On this episode of Chat with Champions, Navin Chaddha welcomes Manish to discuss his journey from IIT in India to Founder and CEO of Poshmark. He credits his summers with his grandfather in his wholesale shop in the bazaars of India for his entrepreneurial tendencies. He had been through two enterprise software IPOs and an acquisition on his journey to founding two consumer-facing companies. Manish talks about his biggest learnings, why culture is key and how critical authentic engagement is for consumer platforms. The ... Play Now

Jake Winebaum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Winebaum), founder & CEO of Brighter (www.brighter.com), a Saas-enabled dental marketplace, has been a serial entrepreneur for 35 years and throughout his career has been responsible for many successful companies. Along the way, there have been many pivots and adventures. On this first episode of Season 2 of Chat with Champions, Jake takes us on a journey from his first startup in college to his big idea to disrupt the healthcare industry as Brighter delivers on its mission to provide transparent access to dental benefits for consumers. Brighter’s investors include Navin Chaddha/ Mayfield, Bill Gurley/Benchmark, Stewart Gollmer/Tenaya and Gabe Ling/General Catalyst.  Jake is a self-proclaimed accidental entrepreneur who co-founded LA-based incubator ecompanies, which resulted in successful startups such ... Play Now

Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder and CEO of Nutanix, one of the private billion-dollar unicorns of Silicon Valley. In this episode, which closes out this first season of Chat with Champions, Dheeraj talks about his start in the technology business and about founding Nutanix, choosing an initial market, the importance of company culture, letting go as a leader, and leaving a legacy.   The full transcript is below. Sign up to be notified via email when new episodes of Chat with Champions are published using the form on the right. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client via iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or Soundcloud using the links. Dheeraj on building a company: I think it was that important to me that to build a business that ... Play Now

Max Levchin is a serial entrepreneur with a long list of credits to his name, including being co-founder of PayPal, chairman of Yelp, board member of  Yahoo, and is currently involved in two exciting companies, Affirm, where he serves as CEO, and Glow, where he serves as chairman. In this podcast, Max talks about hiring the right people, on true passion for an area of business, on the difficulty of building a network effects businesses, and the happiest day of an entrepreneur’s life. The full transcript is below. Sign up to be notified via email when new episodes of Chat with Champions are published using the form on the right. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client via iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or Soundcloud using the links. ... Play Now