February 15 Chat with Chris Tsakalakis

2/15 Chat with Chris Tsakalakis

Background: Former CEO of Vivino, StubHub

Notes

• To some extent → vivino does both of those things
  • People can see what their friends are drinking and how they rated different wines
  • Was second CEO because of his marketplace experience
• Vivino advantage in wine space → initial version of the app provided reviews of wine so that when someone went to buy wine they could decide if they wanted to buy wine based on the reviews of others
  • Could get a lot of users without spending a lot of money
  • What is important in a marketplace → provide an efficient way to generate demand from customers
• Sellars can get buyers more efficiently and more cheaply through marketplace than buying Facebook ads or Google ads
  • Make it easy for them → don’t need to process credit cards on the seller side, etc.
    • Buyer side → transparency, understanding what is available in the market, etc.
• Lots of issues with wine:
  • Primary issue → if you’re shipping wine from one place to another it is very expensive
    • Bottles are heavy and shipping is expensive
      • On average → bottles sold online are $30 per bottle
• To some extent → being able to aggregate reviews from a variety of sources is a value
  • Wine critics just aren’t able to cover all of the wines that are available
  • Something like rotten tomatoes for wine? → value for the consumer, someone working at a restaurant
• Cellartracker → mostly used to track what is in your cellar (not as many reviews as vivino)
  • As a matter of personal taste for wine → very valid in the wine space
    • But still need to create taste profile (lots of user generated wine content)
    • Vivino has tried to do something like this → based on already having a large amount of data
• “I wouldn’t encourage you going into the wine industry”
  • Was hard to turn people who were rating wine into people who were buying wine
  • Current wine.com → current set of wine players who weren’t doing very well
• Not a very large market online because of weight aspect which causes shipping to be expensive
  • Selling through grocery stores makes more sense
• Wine → not a great online, e-commerce platform
  • What every investor told him during his time at Vivino
  • European dynamic is different
• Aggregating rankings is interesting
• If I’m carrying wine → I don’t want any negative reviews on that wine
  • I want to assemble a catalog of product that is only highly recommended
• Doing middleware → have to go to retailer and provide recommendation to you but probably means that you will need to get rid of your old inventory and bring in new inventory
• Create something similar to wirecutter at the New York Times
  • Recommendation engine similar to consumer reports
  • Gives affiliate links to other websites
  • People go there for the content primarily
• Tough business
  • “Epinions”
• If trying to buy best product → hard to know what it is
• Other problems:
  • If you order wine or other alcohol → an adult has to be there to sign for it
  • Third issue → people are used to buying wine locally
• Personal taste aspect
  • Still have issue of “hey I just go to the grocery store and get this”