a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Welcome to the New Era of Commerce

Episode Date: September 18, 2016

Just as "social networking" is a bland term that doesn't really capture the layers of what happens underneath (and on top of) social networking platforms, "crowdfunding" is a broad...er phenomenon than what the term and tools implies. Or so argue the guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast, Tilt co-founder and CEO James Beshara and a16z general partner Jeff Jordan with Sonal Chokshi. Crowdfunding isn't just about reaching a certain threshold to make something, but it's also about "pre-commerce" or "pretail" -- the next evolution in commerce, which involves the ability to suss out demand before production and sell directly to consumers. Crowdfunding is also about "social commerce" -- the ability to not only build community, but trigger collective action towards some goal. There's even a sort of Dunbar's number equivalent for crowdfunding, the tipping point at which the momentum of this collective action takes over (hint: it involves the magic number of 34%). Beyond crowdfunding, there are broader themes of economic change and behavior at play here -- whether it's people's tolerance for waiting and buying something before it exists; a new type of scarcity and desire for experiential buying; or makers creating or co-creating things publicly, and even incompletely. All we know is that we're at a watershed moment of sorts -- as evidenced by car manufacturer Tesla's pre-orders for its Model 3, which is not even going to be available for a few years. And yet...! The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with James Bishara. He is the CEO and co-founder of Tilt, which is easiest way to collect, collect, fundraise, and sell with your community. We also have. A6 and Z partner, Jeff Jordan, who covers all kinds of things, including marketplaces. Hey there. It's great to be here. There's a lot of discussion in the news lately about crowdfunding. I've read everything from a report about Kickstarter. Someone did a study about how much economic benefits came physically out of like individual makers down to a community crowdfunding a beach that they then gave back to the city publicly, which I think is super, super interesting. So I think the question here is beyond crowdfunding. What is the broader theme that we're talking about? How is this sort of
Starting point is 00:01:04 changing our economy? It's a confluence of a few things. It might have a generic term like crowdfunding slapped on it. But when you look beneath the surface, kind of like social networking, it sounds like a catch-all term, but you really look beneath the surface on what's happening, the ability for social networking, you can connect with people around the world instantaneously. I think what is really interesting about crowdfunding or this notion of pre-commerce and pre-orders is you get to tap into demand before you put an ounce of work into production or for that beach example, you get to discover the demand for something you feel like the community might want, but you don't really know. And 20 years ago, you just have to make up your mind. You know what? I'm going to put all my social capital into this.
Starting point is 00:01:49 And I hope people want this. Financial capital to you. Financial capital in this. And I hope that this is just what. people want now with the connected web, you can actually tap into that collective and verify it before. Do people want this collectively? And they get to respond. I mean, you're seeing a really interesting potential evolution in commerce. And I think it's being enabled by two things. One, you have this, the internet. People are connected. And secondly, brands are building their social
Starting point is 00:02:15 followings. And this pre-tale or pre-commerce enables you to leverage the internet and your social following to go direct to the consumers. You get to basically disintermediate the historic aggregators. So, you know, if you were selling a phone 20 years ago, you can even say 40 years ago, you might go through Best Buy or through your own stores and more recently through Amazon. Now you can go direct and you can sell direct to consumers, which brands love to do because they have the consumer relationship and they make a whole lot more margin. You know, the most recent big splash of an example would probably be Tesla about four months ago.
Starting point is 00:02:52 Tesla's actually really counterintuitive because when I think of pre-commerce, pretail, and crowdfunding, I actually think of individual like small companies or makers. It's actually kind of surprising you're saying Tesla. In about three or four days, they sold 200,000 cars. I mean, this is a car manufacturer. I think they've sold essentially about $14 billion worth of their new model. And they're expecting, you know, 30% to drop off, but still 70% that would be $10 billion of a car that won't exist for three or four years that they got to start selling four months ago. And I think that probably shook the world to, all right, this isn't relegated to just small, nimble startups or, you know, toys.
Starting point is 00:03:32 And this is something that big business can wake up to. I mean, why did they do that that time versus the model that they've been using previously? Is it just that they want to disintermediate the dealerships or was it to just get capital right away? No matter how much capital you have, you still always take a risk when you introduce a product. A recent commerce partner for us, they make apparel. And they said, every time that we order a new style or design, no matter how many we order, we're always wrong. If we order 2000 and the demand is 1400, if we order 2000, the demand is 5,000. The number is wrong.
Starting point is 00:04:03 And I think that that is the same, whether you're in a garage in Palo Alto or whether you are or Tesla. And so the ability in 2016 to be able to tap directly into your consumer base, It's really fascinating. If you were to describe how you can sell today versus how you would sell 20 years ago or 40 years ago, say, okay, yes, you could sell today directly to your customers, get the demand before you put an ounce of production to work and use that to Tesla since use that, I believe, for debt financing of $2 billion. So be able to use that to verify the demand and securing that outside capital to produce those cars. You could do that, or you could actually work through the example. from 40 years ago, an elaborate network of distributors and dealers, auto dealers, and you won't get the information from your customers. And you just have to choose how many you're going
Starting point is 00:04:53 to produce and just hope that you're close to the right number. You just wait and see three, four years down the road. And you put your whole company on the line betting that people will want this car. I was reading an article today about Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's company. Which I love, by the way. And they're debuting a clothing line with a very small number of SKUs. And the articles, Gwen is talking about, we had to decide how many to produce and we produced X and I think it's going to be way under. She doesn't have to think and speculate. You actually can. You could have discovered demand and produced exactly what you needed. And, you know, just turning the model on its head. And so for the retailer then, you know exactly
Starting point is 00:05:33 how much to produce. There's no wastage. You get a direct relationship with the consumer and you get direct economics on the margin. what's not to like? Well, the drawback is, and we hear about this all the time where, okay, you promise something, you don't deliver. So what do you guys think about that as a downside of this? Yes, and there are tradeoffs. One, you're out in the open.
Starting point is 00:05:55 So if you don't hit that minimum threshold, you need, people know about it now. The second is now you've made a promise to deliver something, and you may or may not have the perfect complete information of whether you can deliver it. So instead of directionally guessing the demand up front, now you have to guess directionally when you'll be able to deliver it. That is part of the art of this that people are still discovering. The story is obviously still being written for Tesla, but another really good example of a big company that's sinking their teeth into this type of commerce is Xiaomi and China.
Starting point is 00:06:31 And in each model, they will basically, the equivalent of tweeting it out, this is the new model, this is everything that's going to be in there. nine to 12 months and order it now to get in line and then you're batched based on when you order. And they've shown really strong muscles in delivering within the exact time frame that they say they are. So I think there will take, there might be some calibration for some brands. And I think you're seeing an evolution in how this is being used. The early adopters are early stage innovators. So, you know, people who are working on a hardware project and, you know, there are probabilities that they might not be able to deliver that new company, new hardware
Starting point is 00:07:11 product as planned. Now you've got Tesla and Xiaomi doing it and, you know, they're probably going to be able to deliver their product. They're doing it with lots and lots and lots of zeros attached to it. I actually think it's interesting that they chose to do it mid-cycle. When you look at that famous drawing that Elon Musk had about his vision for the future of Tesla and starting, it's almost like, you know, you've seen those drawings of the evolution of man to like from monkey to man standing up. And I view the same thing in a line of Tesla cars. You see this very expensive model going all the way down to a more mass mainstream model. And he's sort of mid-cycle on this whole evolution of that. And it's interesting that he chose this point to do it because
Starting point is 00:07:48 he already proved out, okay, we've learned a lot in how to produce these big different types of entirely new industry of cars. And now is a time that we can now go direct. You're right. It's got a lot of zeros attached to it, but it's actually not so big of a risk in the sense that they kind of know what they're doing at this point. Oh, and by the way, it was somewhat self-fulfilling because the more people who ordered it, the more you, everyone thought this is a thing. And I needed to order it. I mean, this was front page of the newspaper. Every tweet that he would write each day of now we've sold 100,000, now he sold 150,000, now we sold 250,000. You get to be, and we haven't discussed this too much, but you get to be a part of this community. That is, in many ways, you get to be part
Starting point is 00:08:29 creator of saying, I want this to exist. I want to be a part of the community. You get to be a part of it. You get to be a part of the story. That's also something really unique, very internety, but really cool. You almost get the potential for exclusivity, too, that if I don't pre-order it, I don't get it. Right. I think Tesla has actually, they batched them as well. So if you're number 400 and 13,000, you're going to get it way after, you know, number 87,000. So it has a FOMO quality as well. It does have a fear of missing out quality to it. I definitely felt it when he did that on Twitter. I think additionally, besides this community aspect, there's a democratization of access that comes with it as well. There's a lot of different people who can participate precisely because the Internet sort of levels a lot of these boundaries. So going back to the question of why now, if you paint the history of the evolution of commerce on the web, where are we in this evolution? What happens is the first people to show up were the people who sell other people's stuff because that's the easiest thing to bring on. So Amazon being the prototypical example, you know, the world's large. just bookstore. What I think over time you're seeing is brands now have more options and power to develop that direct relationship. You know, Dollar Shave Club just sold for of a billion
Starting point is 00:09:40 dollars. Honest company is rumored to be in M&A negotiations for over a billion dollars. Tying it to that chronology, if you want to sell a book, you can sell directly through Amazon. And I think this fourth layer is sell before the book exists. The Atlanta Hawks is selling a hat on tilt to its fan base before the hat has even produced. And in Tesla selling the car before it's produced. Before it exists. And so I think that's a brand new territory of sell a product before it exists. And that we're just starting to see. You know, interestingly, you can even think about it as a little bit of an as a servicification of a concrete consumer product. This doesn't sound crazy for a minute, but bear with me. Connie was telling me this story about how
Starting point is 00:10:20 China authors will actually write chapters as they go, partly because they'll iteratively see what the demand is. And what's really interesting is that some of the TV producers and movie makers will actually look at the data to decide what books to option. That may sound like a crazy example. But I think it's super interesting because I'm even thinking of Life of Pablo, Kanye Wes's album, where he essentially released it incomplete. Because what it's almost inching towards is not just sell before it exists. It might even be like create in public as you go. So what are the benefits to companies that are doing this? Brands get a few things out of it. I feel I would be remiss not to say that it comes to the risks, but the concrete benefits are it's
Starting point is 00:11:00 something that I call perfect scarcity. You create this fomo of be there first, be one of the first buyers. Or you could say, we're going to make this shoe with Kanye and we're only going to sell it for seven days. Oh, so it's using time as a way to create that scarcity. What Tesla more less has done is as that number gets to 100,000, 150,000, 200,000. Right, because they have no way of knowing what that number would be. No, they've got no way of knowing. And they could create scarcity by saying, we're only going to make 100,000 of these. And that is typically how you do it. Now they've created this fear of missing out and this exclusivity through time of, all right, I better buy now at 401,000. Even though that number sounds really high, that number is going to,
Starting point is 00:11:41 it's only four or five months in. So that number is going to get to 600, 800, 900,000 sold. So that is something that is, that's really interesting. The other thing is they just get the actual efficiency gains of knowing what is the demand. So instead of a working capital risk of All right, let's build one factory and hope that we choose the right number. You actually get to know the right number before you start production. It's hard to overstate how valuable that is in manufacturing. The third thing, I think is, and this is, it's subtle but really powerful and that you get to build this relationship with your community and turn someone that would otherwise just want the car into now an advocate and a purchaser of that car. Or there's a self-hosted crowdfunding, a game out there called Star Citizen that has had 300,000.
Starting point is 00:12:25 people buy into this game. It hasn't been released yet as far as I know. But there is a subreddit with about 30,000 people just talking about the game every day, every week for a game that doesn't exist yet. And you don't need to pay for it, by the way. Right. They're paying for it. They are buying in to be a part of it. People cite this stater all the time that millennials are increasingly wanting to pay for experiences rather than goods. But there's this unique combination when you get to be a part of the experience of bringing that X, Y, Z to market and part of that community. Just to pause on that for a moment, because there is a shift towards experiences versus goods. What you're arguing is something even more nuanced and precise, which is that
Starting point is 00:13:06 you get to be part of that and the co-creation side. And this is definitely the evolution of art and fandom, right? People are saying that all art is actually more about the fans and interaction than it is about the art itself at this point. I mean, there's always views on that. But you're saying something even a little bit more, a little bit further about that experience. Does this confine to the domain of physical products? Is this, or is it like big Tesla products? Like, who, who's going to win in this space? It's not just hardware and it's not just merchandise. We have seen it with events over and over again. The number one DJ duo in the world used Tilt to bring to life an entire tour. The first time anyone had quote unquote crowdfunded a tour.
Starting point is 00:13:49 And I use that term crowdfunding kind of lightly because it's, Crowdfunding can mean 100 things, 100 different people. But in this case, they just looked at it as, hey, we could actually pre-sell tickets to a concert and only do the show if we sell 1,000. In the first six cities that sell 1,000 tickets and quote-unquote tilt and 1,000, then we'll come do a show there. They sold out about 100 or about an hour and 20 minutes, almost the time it takes for Coachella to sell out off of one tweet to their user base. And granted, this is a very socially savvy DJ duo. And what they immediately created was their biggest fans became their advocates trying to get 999 other people at their school to buy this concert so that they would actually come to their school. It empowered the advocacy of their biggest fans and the ones who were most successful got the concert.
Starting point is 00:14:40 What about people who don't have existing brands? Like how do they fare in this sort of new world of pre-tale or pre-commerce? I'd be lying if I said that this just is the panacea for law. a product or company, it still takes a lot of work. Of course. And to succeed, you've got to be really on your game. You have to have a finger on the pulse of what people really want, and you've got to take it extremely seriously.
Starting point is 00:15:02 But we've had a project, use our enterprise tool, which is the most popular pre-order and enterprise crowdfunding tool in the world for $32, $35 million projects. There's a drone company. They were a six-person company. They launch. and within about 30 days, they reached 10 million in orders. And then they went on to reach about $35 million of orders. So you don't have to be a large brand.
Starting point is 00:15:28 Tesla, yes, they had a brand. But I think we could all agree that the last four months, it's kind of entered into a very new territory. Right. So going back to the experiential economy, what are some of the experiences that people can buy online? It's not just on tilt, but across a lot of these platforms. For us, you could tilt a $500 group gift or pitch in for a $2,000 honeymoon instead of individual gifts.
Starting point is 00:15:55 The thread and what we're talking about is collectively we can really unlock much more than we can individually. Whether you're the individual company, Tesla, and collaborating collectively, collaborating with your customer base, or you are Sonal and you're collaborating with your 15 friends for the friend's wedding gift. Baby shower gift. Baby shower gift. Right. Okay. So what you're talking about, though, how is that different? and just like saying like, oh, let's all go in together and get a gift.
Starting point is 00:16:20 Very simply. You get to essentially publish the idea online and then gather the collective demand for it and not take on any risk. At the end of the day, what is, you know, and I almost hate to use this term because it's been thrown around so much, at least in the valley, of trying to search for social commerce. And there have been different ideations of what it will look like. Is it commerce on something like Facebook or on Twitter? I think it will be much more nuanced, but much more powerful than just, oh, add your social graph to your credit card transaction. It's much more participatory of collectively, socially, the only way this happens is if everybody goes in. Right. To me, the overarching theme of this
Starting point is 00:17:04 entire conversation is new types of commerce. And we've talked about pre-commerce and now social commerce. To your point, they can be related. And you're right, people have been talking about this concept of social commerce in the sense of commerce on Facebook and Twitter and just like you said, just adding your social graph. But it's not as simple as simply going to your social graph. It's actually about collectively purchasing something, whether it's an experience or a gift or something else. Right. It's not just kind of something that you slap on, but it's actually baked into the actual commercial behavior. So it's interesting. If you look historically, you'd say, okay, social commerce, that's just.
Starting point is 00:17:45 obvious, you know, put the two together. It actually's been harder in real practice. I mean, PayPal did a few deals back at the beginning of the decade with the Facebook. And, you know, felt like, okay, there you have money. There you have social graph. We have social commerce, right? Well, it just, it hasn't worked that way. It hasn't been easy. So it takes a new approach to doing this. It's not just a new set of pain. It's a native thing where you understand that it's about collective action, not just about, oh, my social graph does my social graph. There are all kinds of different graphs that are coming together. You get graphs of friends for a wedding present. You get graph for sports fans for fantasy football. You get graphs of car owners for Tesla. And so it's not
Starting point is 00:18:27 just the meeting of the two. It feels like it needed to be something new, something native. So a few interesting stats, there's this tipping point within, let's say you need $100,000 for that widget. If you can get to about $34,000, it kind of takes on a life of its own. When you get to about five people and about 33, 34%, that community is committed. They obviously pulled out their wallets. They want this thing to exist. And now they become advocacy to get that other 66%. I don't even know how to couch this as you want, as anything other than just a really unique stat that we've seen. What you're really saying is it's a tipping point at which that campaign will have enough momentum that it will close and be successful. Right. For
Starting point is 00:19:11 a group gift on tilt or a large product. So 10 friends are going together on a baby shower gift, you're saying about three and a half of us. Three people and a half of a torso. We will be getting that gift successfully. I think it really ties in this communal, social nature to how we operate as humans. From the advocacy side of, hey, let's everybody pitch in the money or a project on Kickstarter, hey, everybody, let's reach this minimum threshold to the other side of people kind of in-group outgroup, being on the outside saying, I want to be a part of that community. It looks like it's
Starting point is 00:19:44 taking off. You know, it's really interesting about this, as we've been talking about this idea of not being able to just slap on social commerce onto a social network, there is a concept that comes out of social networks of Dunbar's number. You know, it's that famous number that psychologist Robin Dunbar found that it takes about people really only have about 150 friends. And there's a lot of interesting studies about whether that's true or not true online. And, you know, there's a lot of debate. Overall, though, that number has held pretty steady. And so it's really interesting is this is almost like a Dunbar's number for social commerce, this 33.4% or is it what's exactly 34%? 34%. This 34%, which is it takes about 34% to tip the completion of something that's collectively
Starting point is 00:20:25 shared or bought. Another characteristic of it that may help explain that is all this is happening in public and it's very visible. And there's all kind of subtle, um, motivational. innovations that come into play, one of which is almost obligation of like, oh, crap, all my friends are giving to this and I'm not. It's not even fear of missing out. It's embarrassment at that point. Or the other one's excitement. It could happen. Think of the psychology that underlies a number like that. You get different psychologies in different campaigns, but the fact that it is public. I mean, our son went to a high school and they used to offline, they used to have the thermometer saying, we're raising for the new science center. It's $100,000. And our goals.
Starting point is 00:21:07 there. If it's not thermometer, it's like a big hourglass thing with like beads in it. It's so unbelievably static. Whereas if you can go on and say, oh my God, it's already half funded and Jane and Jimmy gave it to it. It is just so exciting. It will have a different outcome. It'll be more successful. You know, it's so fascinating about this. It's essentially what you're talking about is bringing the mechanics of what really makes online special, virality, the ability, you know, but we have morality in the real world, obviously, let alone actual physical viruses, like catching a cold. You also have word of mouth and things spread, but it happens in a very different way online and much faster. It's accelerated, reaches a different range of people
Starting point is 00:21:45 outside your own echo chamber. It can be democratized, different groups. There's all kinds of flavors to it. But it's really talking about bringing the mechanics of online into the physical world. If you think about brick and mortar retail, and then you think about e-commerce and then you think about crowdfunding, it's not linear either necessarily. And now you think about this pre-commerce economy. To me, what's interesting is it's actually the intersection of physical and software eating the world at the same time because then you can actually bring like software type thinking into the real physical world. And this idea of pre-commerce, pre-tail, social commerce, it kind of sits at the wedge of this. One of the potential challenges of doing this is you publicly may put out
Starting point is 00:22:26 something that doesn't get funded. That's a whole lot better than actually have built the product, shipped it to stores, and then find out there's no demand for it. How do you think other big companies like other big enterprises are going to take this on it. We talked about examples like Tesla and Xiaomi, but do you see like Best Buy? You're at the forefront of watching this happen and so it and our prediction is that it will continue to evolve and it will just go from the nimble startups to the nimble big companies than to really everyone recognizing the benefits and I think that is the evolution of what we will see is let's just actually sell the thing that we want to sell and let's see what the demand is. There's a whole, their whole industries around
Starting point is 00:23:09 demand discovery, you know, just trying to figure out, okay, how much of this, you know, and they're all, you know, predictive tools subject to error. This isn't subject to error. This is, this is a number, yeah. And you are discovering exactly for better or worse. And typically, the earlier you know, your demand, the better off you are. And this gets, this tells you your demand immediately. I think that that type of efficiency, when you can speak to the economic, of the business, then it's not just a kitchy marketing thing. It's a real hard conversation that executives should have. And that's why I go to that Tesla example, because it was this watershed moment. I would imagine that Monday, when they had reached about $3,4 billion in sales,
Starting point is 00:23:50 that Monday, three days after launch, a bunch of executives are going into the office in cities around the world saying, how the hell do we take advantage of this new behavior? Of customers willing to pay before the product exists, willing to wait, much longer. longer than, and that's a very crowdfunding-esque thing, willing to wait. Because you're right. People expect instant gratification otherwise. You would think, but if you can essentially say, all right, you're going to give up the immediacy of this, but you're going to get to be a part of the story, get to be a part of the experience of bringing this to market. I think it's a tradeoff consumers are making every single day and showing in a
Starting point is 00:24:24 really big way. I just want to make a note that it's everyday people because my sister-in-law, her mother in Irvine, California, doesn't know much about tech. I mean, she has a mobile phone that's about the most is one of the people who signed up to pre-order that Tesla. And it's perfectly willing to wait a couple years and, in fact, is discussing how long to hold on to her current rickety car so she can wait out buying that car. No, I had a friend that actually, I think one of the questions that comes up is, well, what's the conversion? What are kind of the typical conversion rates you see of something that won't launch for, you know, years? And so their big question was, okay, is this going to just cram down conversion? Because people are like, well, I'll just wait.
Starting point is 00:25:04 What is really interesting, what we've seen is actually heightens conversion. From the conventional points of just you're only taking in the credit card. You ask for shipping later. It's super just you, it's basically six fields instead of 18 to convert on a mobile device. I had a friend that bought a Tesla and put down that deposit in an Uber. While driving in the car. While in the back of a car, he bought it on his phone. And I think it is something tied to that, one, just the conventional mechanics.
Starting point is 00:25:36 It's just, it's really easy. But two, it's this being a part of the story. It's three, this fomo of, oh, I better get in line quickly. That momentum, that early momentum. You want to be part of it. Exactly. Right. And it's not just a tech thing.
Starting point is 00:25:48 Guaranteed access. And I think it really plays in the back of people's minds of I might miss out. Even further, you would, in the typical car buying scenario, you go to a physical dealership, comparison shop, you look at consumer reports and you trade and compare and blah, blah, blah. It'll be really interesting to see how this ecosystem evolves because as crowdfunding or even more precisely as social pre-commerce takes off, there will now be an ecosystem of new tools to help enable this frictionless experience where you can buy, you can do a review maybe in app or get other insurance pre-approvals or- You can get a discount if you recommend it to enough people
Starting point is 00:26:23 and it can dynamically. If there's an instant email thing, it's going to do. change our entire vocabulary for marketers, for manufacturing heads. I mean, down to even the word conversion. I mean, you describe conversion, but I'm thinking that the definition of conversion will change in the future as you talk about this very concept. We try to stay pretty level-headed around this of where it works and where it doesn't. But I think it's one of these things where, you know, it's kind of like the term e-commerce. It feels really dated now. Well, isn't everything at this point? Right, exactly. You know, buying on Amazon, I don't really think I'm participating in
Starting point is 00:26:52 e-commerce. This is so many. It's just this is the best way to buy for me. And And I think that similarly, this pre-commerce, this notion of buying something before it exists, is, I mean, it's radically different right now. But you fast forward five years, six years, seven years, and it will just be the best way to sell something. And in fact, as you say, as people do more and more of this in public, the expectations will evolve as well, societally, where you then are okay waiting, as we talked about. You are okay with imperfection. you are okay if deliveries are early or late or maybe not quite as specified. I think as this evolves, so will our behaviors, as they do with every other social system that we've built. Well, you guys, this has been a really interesting conversation.
Starting point is 00:27:36 We've talked about a couple of different things. We've talked about the evolution of commerce and whether you define this new aspect of pre-commerce, pre-orders, or pre-tail. And whether those are all different overlapping things, I think time will tell. Social commerce, is it also the same thing or something different? and finally what comes next, but it's a really interesting trend to pay attention to. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

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