We discuss why being exposed to her family fashion business was a stepping stone to a corporate career, the importance of personal values alignment when making career choices, the untapped potential of Web3, Sprint’s investment criteria and process, the current state of financial markets and central bank strategy and advice to anybody considering a pre seed, seed or Series A investment raise.
We discuss the print services origins of Wiro, pivoting from a platform-agnostic model to Shopify only, his take on Commerce Components and why this additional enterprise layer is useful from a pricing perspective, the similarities of brand expectations and caution between COVID and now, using the current market volatility to their advantage when hiring, why partnerships with bigger agencies is a great growth initiative, why we need to enter a new era of hyper-realistic case studies and his go-to internal agency stack including Slack, ClickUp, Notion, Google Drive, Pipedrive, Quickbooks and Loom.
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We discuss building the Lizz Truss of Shopify apps, the advantages of being non-developer founders, approaching the agency business from a fist principles perspective, the keys to hiring great people, why the best partnerships are based on client needs not the best technical solution, the advantages of having a wide partner network including VCs and branding agencies, why adding quality to the conversations is the key to good personal branding, the advantages of a fully remote team and why working with your best mates is a good foundation for a successful business.
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We discuss getting approached by an agency group in 2019 sparked the idea of an exit, how COVID derailed the exit plans, the key milestones of the Born deal; the initial conversation, due diligence and SPA negotiations, the advantages of having one person focusing on the deal, the importance of the business being able to run in parallel to the exit plan, the challenges of due diligence, specifically the difference in process between the target and acquirer, the lessons learned of not taking corporate finance advice, the inherent risk of a deal falling through and what he’d do differently if he did it all again.
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I sit down with Gavin Ballard, founder of Disco Labs and Submarine. We discuss how a love of Shopify led to the creation of Disco Labs, why they decided to pivot from an agency to a product, the challenges of process transition when pivoting, why being at the coal face of client issues helps with product development, Submarine’s GMT through their existing agency partner network, the importance of the developer experience and a revolutionary new paradigm in online retail; ‘flexible commerce’
I sit down Lauren Kleinman, founder of Dreamday and co-founder of The Quality Edit and we discuss why being brand side helped shape the agency model, the impact key hires can have on a business, how a passion project turned into a separate business in The Quality Edit, why gut and intuition are so important for decision making, why hiring for culture and vetting clients reduces the chances of working with assholes and what Lauren’s dreamday looks like. A quick word on my sponsor... Klaviyo is the world’s leading owned marketing platform known for accelerating revenue for online businesses using the channels they own like email, web and mobile. Enabling companies to leverage these owned marketing channels, Klaviyo makes it...
