Commerce Conversations Commerce Ventures

Dima Batsev, he’s an MD at Lazard, a firm with more than 270B dollars of AUM, where he’s spent the past two decades focused on public equities in the financial services sector. In this episode, Dima and Ys discuss what’s in store for Financial Services and tech players in 2023, having joined the assets manager in the market downturn of 2002 and of course advised throughout the GFC. With that outlook Dima shares his opinions about today’s uncertain market and why he’s hopeful for a soft landing.

In this episode, we'll be looking into the crystal ball to make some predictions about the venture-backed market in 2023. What trends are we seeing that will shape the future of entrepreneurship? What opportunities and challenges will startups face as we enter a new year? Tune in to get a glimpse of what the future may hold for Retail Tech and FinTech in 2023.

Pete Kight is a founder unlike any other. After dropping out of college, Pete started running a chain of gyms and after spending time with a few banker friends his eyes opened to the promise of the newly rolled out ACH method for payments. Mind you, this was in the mid 70s, when the foundations of the internet were only just being built. Dan and Pete discuss the journey of bootstrapping a business and the determination it takes to see it through to a close.

“Death by a thousand paper cuts” is what Vivek Krinshnamurthy calls the demise of InsurTechs that don’t find product-market fit. In an infamously slow moving market, InsurTech is perhaps one of the most difficult spaces to build new technology in. Today, Vivek sits with Mike Chen, Head of Corporate Development at Guidewire, to discuss the dynamics of the InsurTech space and advice they have for founders here.

Women control over $10T in assets (according to McKinsey) in the United States and we only expect that number to grow as wealth is transferred from the Bay Boomers in the years to come. So why then, despite being a major market opportunity, do women feel so deeply underserved by financial institutions?

Vrinda Gupta is the founder of Sequin (YC S21) a Fintech company focused on rebuilding women’s financial profiles via community education and squashing the pink tax through a reward debit card. Vrinda and Claire (Commerce Ventures) discuss the different systemic challenges that women face in finance and the opportunities to overcome them.

Checkout had its time in the sun earlier in 2022 with the rise and fall of notable venture-backed startups. Today, Matt Nichols brings together two of Commerce’s favorite players in the e-commerce industry: Rally and Violet. Brandon (Violet), Jordan (Rally), and Matt discuss why it seems to be so impossible to solve the clunky experiences in e-commerce and their collective vision for the experiences of the future.