Panic with Friends – Investing for Profit and Joy
Today’s guest is my friend with a super large brain, warm heart and a great smile Serge Kassardjian. Serge is the co-founder and CEO of StayTuned Digital (they acquire and grow Shopify apps that accelerate merchant growth) and a partner at 6th Man Ventures (I am an LP in his fund). He got his MBA from Harvard and Bachelors and Masters in Engineering from Stanford (lazy kid), where he was the President of his class. Serge is an investor and entrepreneur with irons in the fire of two of the most volatile sectors these days – e-commerce and crypto, so he’s the perfect guest right now for 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.
On today’s podcast we get into Serge’s love of STEPN – the crypto/web3 lifestyle/fitness 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.)
You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well. You can click subscribe on any of these channels and get the podcast alert each week.
You can also listen right here on the blog:
More details on the podcast are below…
Guest: Serge Kassardjian
Profile: Co-founder/CEO StayTuned Digital, GP at 6th Man Ventures
Where to Find Him: LinkedIn, Twitter
What’s Serge Panicked About?: All the crazy volatility that’s in the world today.
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)
Related Episodes:
Mike Dudas of 6th Man Ventures on Crypto/NFTs, LinksDAO, and Applying a DAO Model to Biotech (EP.203)
Roy Erez & Roy Rubin of R-Squared Ventures on How they Think about Investing, Networking, and the Future (EP.177)
© Panic with Friends, 2022. All rights reserved.
Host: Howard Lindzon | Producer: Knut Jensen | Researcher: Pete WeishauptDisclaimer: All information provided is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. For full disclosures: https://howardlindzon.com/disclaimer/
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