Transforming E-Commerce: The Future of Online Shopping

In this episode of Retailgenic, host Scot Wingo sits down with Roy Rubin, co-founder of Magento and General Partner at R-Squared Ventures, to explore the future of e-commerce in an AI-driven world.

Roy shares why he believes the next billion-dollar DTC brand won’t even need a website, what agentic shopping means for the future of retail, and how platforms like Shopify and Amazon may get disrupted next.

We also dive into:

• The founding story and evolution of Magento
• What went wrong (and right) during its acquisition by eBay and later Adobe
• His prediction that AI agents will replace traditional commerce UIs
• The good, bad, and ugly of agentic platforms like Perplexity

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Notable Timestamps:

• 00:01:02 — What is Retailgenic and why now?
• 00:02:11 — Meet Roy Rubin: Magento founder, now VC
• 00:04:43 — The billion-dollar brand with no website?
• 00:06:07 — Origin story: How Magento was born
• 00:13:03 — PayPal's early investment & eBay’s acquisition
• 00:27:12 — Roy’s VC firm and investment thesis
• 00:40:00 — Agentic shopping and future of AI commerce
• 00:44:46 — Social commerce & influencer-powered retail
• 00:47:00 — Virtual influencers, LLMs, and the closed web?