MarTalks- The #1 Ecommerce and MarTech application podcast

Darrell Rosenstein
  • 5.0 (2)
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The Martalks Podcast is the leading source of the information and news from the Composable Commerce, MarTech and supply chain applications industries. Hosted by Darrell Rosenstein, the founder and managing partner of The Rosenstein Group. www.rosensteingroup.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosenstein-group 

  1. Jul 17

    Commerce for Weirdos: ElasticPath CEO Bryan House on B2B, AI-Driven Implementation, and Why Shopify Is a Fintech Company

    Most B2B manufacturers are still running digital commerce on platforms someone built in-house a decade ago — and the cost to replace them has kept everyone frozen. ElasticPath CEO Bryan House is changing that math, and this conversation is the clearest explanation of why the B2B commerce market is the most underserved greenfield in enterprise software.  Bryan House is the CEO of ElasticPath, the composable commerce platform built for complex B2B use cases in the $50M–$500M GMV range. He scaled professional services through Acquia's IPO, served as Chief of Staff at Acquia, and invested in Molten — the composable commerce startup ElasticPath later acquired — before taking the helm as CEO. What You'll Learn: Why Shopify is fundamentally a fintech company — and why that model collapses in the enterpriseHow ElasticPath handles 10,000 product variations and 1,500-product configurations that break every standard platformBryan's "six weeks, $100K" goal for implementation — and how AI is making it achievableWhy B2B companies with complex catalogs are the biggest untapped opportunity in digital commerceThe hustle mindset framework Bryan uses to hire people who thrive in a dynamic, startup environmentWhy bringing a proven playbook from your last company is one of the most expensive hiring mistakes in the marketKey Topics with Timestamps: 02:23 — Commerce for weirdos: who ElasticPath is built for 04:14 — Shopify as a fintech company, not a commerce platform 07:18 — AI-powered integration with Composer 11:41 — The six weeks, $100K implementation goal 19:33 — Why B2B commerce is the undiscovered country 21:22 — Complex catalogs, contract pricing, and dynamic bundles 37:23 — What thrives in a startup: hustle over pedigree 41:47 — The playbook trap: why senior hires fail 45:19 — The closing question every B2B brand should ask their platform Links: 🔗 Bryan House on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhouse/ 🌐 ElasticPath: https://www.elasticpath.com 🎙️ MarTalks on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4wNap4X 🎙️ MarTalks on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3PGs0es Keywords: B2B commerce, composable commerce, ElasticPath, MACH architecture, enterprise SaaS, AI implementation, digital transformation, headless commerce, startup hiring, MarTech Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  2. Jul 17

    Kelly Goetsch: The Standard That Changes Commerce Forever (And Why 62 Vendors Just Agreed to It)

    The biggest integration problem in commerce — getting a selling channel to talk to a fulfillment system — just got a solution. Kelly Goetsch rallied 62 vendors, including every OMS in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, behind a single open standard. If you've ever paid for a custom integration, this episode is for you. Guest Bio: Kelly Goetsch founded the MACH Alliance and serves as President of Pipe17. He began his career on FootLocker's first ecommerce site and has spent 20 years building at the infrastructure layer of the commerce industry. He's the most connected person in the composable commerce ecosystem and one of the few people willing to call the AI bubble by its name. What Listeners Will Learn: Why composability is a prerequisite to AI — and what the risks are for companies that skip itWhat the Order Network Exchange is and how it could remove $500K–$1M from a commerce replatformThe "Clippy problem": why most enterprise AI is still stuck inside a single application and how MCP changes thatKelly's honest take on the AI valuation bubble and what the Gartner Hype Cycle tells us about what happens nextWhy the churn question is the one hidden inside every consumer AI valuationHow to start a composable journey without a two-year project and a giant SIKey Topics with Timestamps: 01:58 — How to start composable without a massive SI project 05:19 — Composability as a prerequisite to AI 07:07 — The Clippy problem and Model Context Protocol explained 10:12 — Which SaaS companies actually deserve the funding slowdown 12:38 — The churn question inside AI valuations 16:07 — The AI bubble — called directly 18:27 — The Order Network Exchange announcement: 62 vendors, one standard 23:00 — MCP vs. traditional APIs: why it changes everything 30:54 — "Demand the standard" Links: 🔗 Kelly Goetsch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellygoetsch/ 🔗 Commerce Ops Foundation: commerceopsfoundation.org 📺 Full episode on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3PGs0es 🔗 MarTalks on Apple: https://apple.co/4wNap4X Keywords: composable commerce, OMS, order management, MCP, model context protocol, MACH Alliance, B2B ecommerce, AI infrastructure, SaaS bubble, retail technology Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  3. Jun 25

    How to scale a martech sales function w/ Tod Klubnik

    We speak to Tod Klubnik, about how martech and ecommerce businesses can scale their sales teams at pace. Some of the key questions covered, included:  What are the mistakes to avoid when hiring a large number of sales professionals early in your business’s journey? (2:00)Who should own go to market - sales or marketing? (6:00)And how do martech providers progress from serving SMBs to the enterprise market? (15:00) About our guest Tod Klubnik has 25 years of software and SaaS sales & marketing experience, and has led the sales team in businesses such as BigCommerce and MessageOne.  He now provides board, advisory and part-time consulting services to early and mid-stage companies.  About The Martalks Podcast The Martalks Podcast features insight and comment from thought leaders in Martech and ecommerce sales. It is hosted by Darrell Rosenstein, the founder and managing partner of The Rosenstein Group.  About The Rosenstein Group The Rosenstein Group is your recruiting agency and executive search firm for matching critical revenue talent with innovative technology vendors in the e-commerce, martech and supply chain space. www.rosensteingroup.com  https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosenstein-group  Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

    How to scale a martech sales function w/ Tod Klubnik

  4. Jun 6

    Technology Attorney George Brunt on AI IP Ownership, Embedded Legal Counsel, and the Legal Mistakes MarTech Founders Keep Making

    Most founders know they need a lawyer. Almost none of them know they need one before the problem shows up. George Brunt wrote the first shrink-wrap software license in history. Managed 23,000 patents at Alcatel. Raised $83 million. He's been in the rooms most founders will never get near — and the pattern he keeps seeing is the same one. The CEO who waits until there's a contract dispute, a misclassification lawsuit, or a deceptive AI claims inquiry from the FTC is paying three times the price of prevention. And in a funding environment where VCs are doing legal health checks before they write the check, what's in your legal drawer has direct valuation consequences. George and I went deep on the questions most founders aren't being asked: Who actually owns the IP when your developer used AI to write the code? That question is not resolved. Not in case law, not in the patent office, not anywhere. What does a $330,000 annual savings look like when you swap outside counsel for an embedded legal team? He breaks down the math. And what are the five questions a VC should be asking every Series A and B founder in a legal health check that most of them aren't asking? If your legal strategy is "we'll deal with it when we need to" — this one's for you. Full episode link in the first comment. Tag a founder who needs to hear this. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  5. Apr 28

    She Cracked the Code on Why You Buy That Military Jacket. Online Retail Has No Idea Why Either.

    Welcome back to MarTalks. This week Darrell sits down with Anabel Maldonado — CEO of PSYKHE AI, ShopTalk startup competition winner, former luxury product copywriter, and the person who has been screaming into the void that e-commerce has been solving the wrong problem for a decade. Here's the stat that should make every retailer put down their coffee: online conversion rates are still hovering around 1.5%. Billions of dollars. Endless A/B tests. Recommendation engines with Stanford pedigrees. And still — the vast majority of products a shopper would actually love never appear in front of them. Not once. Why? Because nobody put product intelligence in the stack. Nobody asked why you bought that military jacket. Not because it has Bellows pockets. Because it makes you feel gritty. It offsets the softness of the rest of your outfit. It aligns with your contrarian streak. You weren't conscious of it. And no algorithm ever tried to figure it out either. Anabel built Psyche to fix exactly that using 700+ psychographic dimensions to match products to people at a level that goes way beyond "you bought blue things, here are more blue things." The results? A 22% lift in conversion for mono brands. A $16 million revenue unlock without a single new SKU, dollar of ad spend, or new customer. Just showing people the right stuff. In this episode: why "personalization" is actually just optimization in a fancy hat, why grocery is the most underrated category for psychographic commerce, why agentic shopping is a discovery problem the entire industry forgot to prepare for, and what a $100M retailer should do in the next 90 days before they become invisible to the agents doing everyone's shopping. Also: the Jay Peterman reference lands perfectly. Obviously. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  6. Apr 27

    He Dropped Out at 15, Made $15K Flipping Pokémon Cards at 13, and Is Now Teaching AI Agents to Stalk the Entire Internet. Legally.

    This week on MarTalks, Darrell sits down with Michael FanouS the co-founder of Nyne.ai, VC scout, part-time sleep deprivation case study, and quite possibly the only person whose career trajectory starts at a coin convention at age six, detours through Jake Paul's car channel, and lands squarely in the middle of Silicon Valley's AI arms race. Michael is 20-something, running on two hours of sleep, building a startup that deploys AI agents across hundreds of millions of websites to collect data points on... well, you, basically. Your posts, your forums, your niche subreddits where you complain about being a nurse in Texas. Nine knows. Nine always knows. In this episode: why LinkedIn is wildly overrated as a data source, why ChatGPT is the new MySpace, why Google's secret weapon is a chip you've never heard of, and why the best startup advice Michael ever gave was to a high schooler about a helicopter with five propellers. He also somehow finds time to scout for VC firms. The man does not sleep. We have receipts. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  7. Apr 25

    Dot-Com Crashes, Gold Coins & the Art of Not Panicking: Rich Lyons Has Seen It All

    What do you get when you mix two dot-com survivors, a generator that still runs, and enough saltines to outlast the apocalypse? This episode of MarTalks. Rich Lyons rode the dinosaurs in digital commerce since before the word "e-commerce" even existed.  He's also been front row for every glorious crash that followed. Whitman Hart? Bankrupt. March First? Bankrupt. Divine? You guessed it. And yet somehow, Rich took "roll your Aeron chair out to the parking lot" as career advice and turned it into a 20+ year agency run. In this episode, Darrell and Rich riff on the predictable insanity of tech hype cycles, why mid-market is always the jilted prom date when enterprise walks in the room, how Y2K gold coins are holding their value just fine thank you, and why the antidote to AI noise might just be... being a decent human being who looks someone in the eye. Fair warning: these two go way back, and it shows. Press play before they schedule a Part 2 you'll also be unable to skip. Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

  8. Jan 26

    The Outcome-First CEO: Travis Hess on Transforming BigCommerce and Leading Through Disruption

    Travis Hess - CEO of BigCommerce and veteran of the digital agency landscape (Accenture, LiveArea, PFS) - joins MarTalks to discuss leading a $350M+ public software company through a major strategic pivot.  Fixing a broken Go-To-Market: Why "trying to be everything to everyone" is a public market trap and how to narrow focus to ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for real growth. The "Services" Advantage in Software: Why a background in business outcomes and holistic systems beats a traditional "pedigreed" MBA in today’s disrupted landscape. Surviving Economic Cycles: Critical advice for the "generation of plenty" on navigating downturns and the "insourcing vs. outsourcing" swings that define tech cycles. Leading with Radical Authenticity: The mindset shift from "scripted" leadership to improv-ready, collaborative management where the best idea always wins. Software Transformation as a "Full Contact Sport": How to manage the "warts" of integration and the board-level reality of moving from defense to offense in a competitive market. Bonus: The CEO Playbook for Disruption - Learn why Travis believes most leaders rise not from steady growth, but from pushing through professional dysfunction and adversity. Perfect for Founders, CEOs, CROs and investors seeking a masterclass in authentic leadership and large-scale platform transformation. Steal the strategy Travis is using to take on industry giants and navigate the "agentic" AI era.  #ExecutiveLeadership #SaasTransformation #BigCommerce #MarTech #CEOInsights #BusinessOutcome #MarTalks Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies. Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO. Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

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The Martalks Podcast is the leading source of the information and news from the Composable Commerce, MarTech and supply chain applications industries. Hosted by Darrell Rosenstein, the founder and managing partner of The Rosenstein Group. www.rosensteingroup.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosenstein-group 

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