Serge Kassardjian of StayTuned and 6th Man Ventures on the Future of E-commerce and Crypto (EP.209)

Today’s guest, Serge Kassardjian, is the co-founder and CEO of StayTuned Digital, and a partner at 6th Man Ventures. He got his MBA from Harvard and Bachelors and Masters in Engineering from Stanford, where he was the President of his class. Serge is a fighter, an entrepreneur with irons in the fire of two incredibly volatile sectors – e-commerce and crypto, so he’s the perfect guest to come on 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, that are taking a beating. We discuss StayTuned Digital, which is a Shopify roll-up, but not in the classic sense of rolling up e-commerce stores – they’re rolling up software companies on the app side. We get into Serge’s love of STEPN – the crypto/web3 lifestyle 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.) 

Guest - Serge Kassardjian, Co-founder and CEO at StayTuned and Partner At 6th Man Ventures 

howardlindzon.com, staytuned.digital, 6thman.ventures, sergekassardjian.com  

Twitter: @howardlindzon, @PanicwFriends, @sergekass, @staytuned_dig, @knutjensen 

linkedin.com/in/sergekass 

#fintech #invest #investment #venturecapital #stockmarket #finance 

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)