Saturday, November 5, 2011

Panel: Emerging eCommerce

Emerging eCommerce Panelists

Moderator: 
Tom Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration, Chair, MBA Elective Curriculum, Harvard Business School

Panelists:
Haley Barna, Co-Founder, Birchbox
Scott Friend, Managing Director, Bain Capital Ventures
Chris Morton, CEO, Lyst
Tim Riley, Director of Online Experience, Warby Parker
John Volturo, CMO Beachmint

Cyberposium Audience

Selected topics from this panel:
  • Copycats - you can outsmart copycats by focusing on vendor relationships, capturing and leveraging customer data, and offering brand partners the best ROI possible
  • Outsourcing - there's value to getting your hands dirty in the beginning and understanding that it makes a difference how you fold tissue paper and what length the ribbon should be, so you can share those learnings with an outsourced provider later
  • Unfair Advantage - make sure you have some unfair advantage that you really believe in, whether it be IP or something else niche
Advice for Entrepreneurs 
  • Just do it, try it, test it.  You may think you need $1M before you do anything, but you don't.  In fact, you may not even need technology to just prove the concept.  It may not scale, but you prove that customers want it, and that's really important to investors. 
  • Find a great co-founder.  
  • Find people who are geeking out to what you are interested in.  You need something that you're going to love from the moment you wake up to the minute you go to sleep. 
  • Just because you can create a company today for really cheaply doesn't mean you should.  There's a lot of value in spending a year in a startup before you do your startup.

On a side note, this panel had participants overflowing out of the door - keep the awesome energy of the conference up!


Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists:
@birchbox, @baincapvc, @chrismorton, @warbyparker, @volturo

2 comments:

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