One of my favourite e-commerce business models is a 15-year-old listed company that very few people have heard of before: Redbubble (ASX: RBL).

Redbubble is an Australian-based global e-commerce business where shoppers can buy quality products with designs on them that are created by artists who upload their designs and can open mini-shops of products with their designs on them. Some of the product categories include wall art, clothes, phone cases, pillows, aprons, bags and so on.

Redbubble solved two key issues in a way that I have not seen other e-commerce platforms in the creative space do so well:

• …

A few years ago, as I was early in angel investing, I was offered angel allocation into a deep-tech computer vision company. One of the arguments given for investing was that the founders and team were highly technically competent and that there was at least a downside valuation floor of an acqui-hire at the going rate of 1–2M USD/engineer. Given that the company already had 4 engineers, at a 10M valuation, I was basically investing in the liquidating price of the company.

This was a very interesting argument because it was basically an arbitrage on tech talent hiring, and can…

In this article, I talk about the two types of legitimacy [Brand + Filter] that constitute Community Branding, how various communities have actioned such legitimacy, and how to effectively segment communities into sub-groups and sub-brands.

The process for attracting members to a Community consists of two levers:

• Legitimacy — how legitimate and well-curated is the community?
• Commonality —how much do we have in common or do I identify with the common purpose of the group?

Legitimacy

Legitimacy of a platform is derived from two sources:

• Brand Legitimacy
• Filter Legitimacy

Brand Legitimacy: In many cases, the filtering mechanism for communities is opaque…

I got an award from Forbes recently for the startup/VC work I’ve done, and this comes with attention that I want to redirect to something more important than me — how we think about the state of mental health and normalizing getting help for it.

This seems fitting because while we celebrate achievement — we should also talk about the costs of achievement and about one of the more important things I did to get there that we don’t talk about — working on being mentally healthy.

If you would like, you can also donate to my fundraiser campaign for…

Why we featured Covid Interns:

COVID introduced a lot of uncertainty and it was always great to hear stories of people who stepped up to try and help others. To find out that not only did the Covid Interns founders themselves graduate into a difficult job market but built a project that has now become a side-hustle business was an impressive mark of side-hustling.

Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?

Rob Muldowney: I finished my undergrad in May last year. I studied business studies at Trinity College London. As soon as we finished college, my close friend and I from uni started Covid interns.

How did you get the idea for Covid Interns and how did you get started?

Rob: The initial idea was to help…

My thesis is simple:

Circa early 2000's/10's, the world (first the West and then the East), largely faced Internet 1.0, which was a great place. Fundamental foundations of the internet and digital economy was being built everywhere. In the East, I joined Rocket Internet and helped clone e-commerce companies in South Asia. Those business models made sense.

Localization was always crucial but manageable with Internet 1.0 business models. Along the way came the Great Internet Divergence.

The Great Internet Divergence saw Governments, Culture, Regulations and various pieces of complex parts of local society react to technology in a way that fundamentally caused divergence in…

The passion economy is here and the long-tail of influencers, bolstered by various social media platforms, has emerged in a big way. As the distribution and growth of reach has professionalized, how will the development of the monetization infrastructure look like?

We focus on the history of influencer monetization, its core value proposition, and what the new monetization layer looks like in the influencer/tech world.

Let’s go back 50 years. Influencers (celebrities when the mode of media distribution was more traditional/centralized) had agents/managers that helped with everything that was not the acting-side of acting. …

When people think of online side hustles one of the first things they think of is an e-commerce store. But with the wide variety of items to sell, what should one pick?

In A Perfect World is a jewellery-focused e-commerce store started by 2 millennials almost straight out of university.

Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?

Erica: Hi! My job role is currently in business development and I lead strategic partnerships for a microblogging app.

Sarah: And I work in the finance industry, managing marketing campaigns and handling branding & communications. …