Serge Kassardjian of StayTuned and 6th Man Ventures on the Future of E-commerce and Crypto (EP.209)

Today’s guest, Serge Kassardjian, is the co-founder and CEO of StayTuned Digital, and a partner at 6th Man Ventures. He got his MBA from Harvard and Bachelors and Masters in Engineering from Stanford, where he was the President of his class. Serge is a fighter, an entrepreneur with irons in the fire of two incredibly volatile sectors – e-commerce and crypto, so he’s the perfect guest to come on Panic with Friends. As the pundits at CNBCq say ‘the markets are in turmoil’; and it’s not just crypto, but our beloved e-commerce stocks, including Amazon $AMZN and Shopify $SHOP, that are taking a beating. We discuss StayTuned Digital, which is a Shopify roll-up, but not in the classic sense of rolling up e-commerce stores – they’re rolling up software companies on the app side. We get into Serge’s love of STEPN – the crypto/web3 lifestyle app, and what the future crypto/web3 ecosystem might look like for us ‘normies’. (Full disclosure: StayTuned is a Social Leverage (Fund III) portfolio company.)  Guest - Serge Kassardjian, Co-founder and CEO at StayTuned and Partner At 6th Man Ventures  howardlindzon.com, staytuned.digital, 6thman.ventures, sergekassardjian.com   Twitter: @howardlindzon, @PanicwFriends, @sergekass, @staytuned_dig, @knutjensen  linkedin.com/in/sergekass  #fintech #invest #investment #venturecapital #stockmarket #finance  Show Notes: Introduction (00:043) Welcome Serge (03:21) Selling dumbbells (04:05) Coming to America (05:11) Starting in e-commerce (07:17) Macro trends in e-commerce (09:22) Growth is in headless solutions (10:50) Non-linear paths in startups (13:14) Serge’s time at Google (13:38) Shopify app roll-ups (14:03) Building the StayTuned team (14:43) Getting into crypto (16:02) Early whale on NBA TopShot (17:28) International e-commerce (18:06) Venture debt model (19:05) StayTuned apps (20:26) Shopify competition (22:25) Catching the crypto bug (24:35) Talent moves to crypto (26:02) Crypto adoption demographics (27:40) STEPN sneaker NFTs (29:54) Wrapping up (37:23) Closing thoughts (38:59)

Om Podcasten

Hello, I’m Howard. I’ve been a financial industry entrepreneur and investor for over 20 years. I am a General Partner at Social Leverage - we invest in seed stage software companies. I was a co-founder of Stocktwits and a seed investor in Robinhood and Etoro. On this podcast, you will hear interviews with great entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, traders, and friends about their companies, their track records, and their new fave ideas and trends. This includes best ideas, worst investments, biggest failure, daily habits, and recommended reading. I know your time is precious, so I promise to keep it simple and on point.