Technology

E-commerce beauty startup founder, Glossier CEO Emily Weiss, dished on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 this morning about some of the companytop competitors in the e-commerce space, including Amazon as well as the forthcoming threat from Instagram & which is building out its own standalone shopping app, according to reports.

Glossier, founded in 2014 and backed by $87 million, has created a massive beauty brand thatnow a household name among women. And itdone so without being on Amazon.

The company doesn&t work with Amazon, and Weiss said that it doesn&t intend to.

When asked if the company would sell into Amazon, she responded with an emphatic &no, no, no.&

Glossier may have been acquisition target for Amazon, however & when asked if Amazon ever approached Glossier about about a deal, Weiss didn&t deny it, but instead demurred, &a lot of people have approached Glossier,& before quickly moving on.

Weiss, clearly, doesn&t think that Amazon is the best place for beauty brands.

&The interesting thing about Amazon and how they&ve addressed obviously one of the biggest consumer needs, which is solving buying, is that in the process, in some ways, they&ve kind of killed shopping,& Weiss said.

&I think in terms of breadth of product, obviously, no one will ever beat them. They have done the most phenomenal job,& she continued.

But going to Amazon for everything, every time doesn&t make sense, she believes. Itonly one kind of shopping experience.

And even though Amazon is massive, it doesn&t mean thereno room for others outside of its shadow to grow.

&E-commerce is 10% of global commerce & thatnothing,& Weiss pointed out. &We are at the dawn of e-commerce, and this is one user experience,& she said, referring to Amazon.

Plus, Amazonuser experience may not be the best fit for beauty and fashion products & even though Amazon is quickly ramping up in those areas with its own private labels, Amazon Fashion, Prime Wardrobe, beauty boxes, and other initiatives.

&I think itexciting that we are really at the dawn of e-commerce, and that theregoing to be so many paradigms. What we&re focused on building is an emotional commerce experience which is focused on a breath of connection, and not a breath of product,& Weiss explained.

While Glossier may not be on Amazon, it does leverage Instagram to reach customers, possibly making Instagramshopping app a bigger rival, if launched.

&It makes sense,& Weiss said, when asked her thoughts about Instagramplans in this space. &72% of millennials make their purchasing decisions for beauty and fashion products through Instagram,& she said.

Glossier itself has a long history with Instagram. It launched on Instagram before it even had its website up, for example. They also just hired Keith Peiris, who led DMs and Camera at Instagram, as Head of Product.

&Instagraman incredible tool,& Weiss admitted, but also cautioned that it could still face difficulties as a shopping app.

&I think of the challenges might be these platforms were not built around specific topics, they were built around specific media expressions,& said Weiss.

That said, Instagram could have more potential in the beauty market than Amazon.

&When you look at a platform like Amazon, no woman has ever told me that their criteria for best mascara was what was fastest or cheapest. Thatnot how people are buying emotional things & like a fashion or beauty product,& said Weiss. &But the leading paradigm of what an e-commerce experience gives you is one of efficiency, and one of breadth of product. When what users are actually doing and wanting is one of breadth of connection,& she said.

Tachyon, the accelerator of the blockchain powerhouse ConsenSys which launched earlier this year, has announced the first cohort for its 10 week accelerator program which is aimed at taking early stage blockchain projects from idea to a viable product. Sixteen companies were selected from around the world and will be brought together in San Francisco to participate in programming and accelerate their businesses. The projects are placed into one of three tracks: Blockchain for-profit projects,open sourceand social impact. The program will culminate with a demo day for investors onNovember 17th.

KavitaGupta(Managing Partner, ConsenSys Ventures) said: &We launched Tachyon with the intention of finding extremely promising early-stage companies and providing them with hands on support from the get-go. Among this inaugural group, I feel confident that we&ve found the next crop of game-changing projects that will drive innovation across the blockchain ecosystem.&

Joe Lubin (Founder, ConsenSys) commented:&One thing that excites me about this first Tachyon cohort is that it demonstrates the degree to which our Ethereum community remains decentralized, even as it continues to grow. In this first batch, I see companies coming from Israel, China, India, Europe, the South Atlantic and Pacific Northwest all coming together to drive innovation beyond their geographical boundaries.&

Herea run-down of each company selected, in their own words:

BULVRD:BULVRD is Washington DC based map and navigation app that tokenizes and gamifies the community aspect of navigation apps like Waze, rewarding users to report route information in the app making maps more real-time and community driven.

Decompany:Decompany is aKorea based decentralized and incentivized knowledge trading system coming from Polaris Office (Infraware is publicly traded parent company). Decompany will be using the blockchain to build a global and monetizable version of Slideshare, utilizing network effects and a lone currency for transactions.

Elkrem:Elkrem is a Cairo based company creating hardware that will make it easy for IOT devices to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Using proprietary software, Elkremboards can force devices to interact with the Ethereum stack in an efficient and scalable way.

Eth Status Codes(Open Source Grant): A Candian company,ETH Status Codes, also known as the ERC-1066 proposal, outlines a common set of Ethereum status codes in the same vein as HTTP statuses or BEAM tagged tuples. These shared set of signals allow smart contracts to react to situations autonomously and expose localized error messages to users.

Expercoin:Out of the Harvard innovation lab, Expercoin is a decentralized AI powered marketplace protocol empowering non-technical individuals to create specialized learning economies with the ability to instantly monetize them.

FastX:China based high throughput decentralized exchange protocol built on Plasma. At scale, FastX will combine the security of a DEX with the UX and low fees of a centralized offering, offering a low-latency decentralized platform to serve Web 3.0largest use-case to date: the exchange of digital assets.

GlobalXplorer(Non-profit grant, Social impact track): A TED prizerecipient, GlobalXplorer is a crowdsourced archaeology initiative that allows for locals to participate in archaeology and legitimize findings in their region. The GXº Blockchain is a global registry for antiquities and an Ethereum-based marketplace for the sustainable distribution of an antiquitycultural heritage data which can be curated and collected.

Groundhog(Open Source):Out of the Nova Scotia based Blockcrushr labs, The Groundhog Wallet is a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for decentralized access to Web 3.0 that includes Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants world accept all types of crypto currencies including subscription payments over Ethereum.

MWC Vision:MWC Vision is a Berlin based studio spinning up decentralized, on-chain video games, the first of which is Chainmonsters. ChainMonsters is an Ethereum-based game in which users can catch, collect, and battle with monsters known as ChainMonsters (much like the handheld Pokemon games). Utilizing non-fungible Ethereum tokens, users can fully control and own an in-game avatar and explore a digital world, catching and training ‘monsters& represented by tokens which can be sold and used elsewhere.

NetNinjas:NetNinjasis an Israel basedprotocol for all things decentralized compute and storage, starting with an offering that will use the blockchain to create a decentralized VPN that can be used by enterprises.

Nuo:Nuo is an India based project facilitating decentralized crypto lending on-chain. Borrowers on the platform can stake tokens as collateral and get ETH as a result. The protocol has already processed $15,000 worth of loans and provides an entirely on-chain lending solution for digital assets.

Pulse:The Pulse protocol allows users to tokenize their ‘intent& to procure a service that potential sellers can bid on, aiming to become the defacto protocol for service customer acquisition and a simpler way for users to connect directly with service providers. In this decentralized network, relayers and market makers help organize ‘intent& and any dApp or current publisher can plug directly into the Pulse infrastructure to participate, contribute, and earn tokens.

Quidli:Quidli is aFrance based protocol building the technological infrastructure that makes equity based employee compensation possible & with a particular focus on the startup space . Currently a centralized protocol, integrating an Ethereum-based solution will allow for the tokenization of equity & making equity based compensation programs programmable and tradeable.

Stealth Project:A member of our cohort still in stealth mode is a project re-imagining databases by building a P2P network with an open participation model aiming to be a decentralized version of an SQL database, providing a fundamental data storage building block enterprises and future dApps.

TapTrust(Open source):SF based,TapTrust is building a a self sovereign wallet that utilizes a standard username and password login and allows users easy set-up without ever needing to back up a seed phrase. In addition to their wallet offering, TapTrust is incorporating a commercial feature called TrustFund that provides loss protection for smart contract security exploits. The loss protection offered with TrustFund along with the ease of setup for the TapTrust wallet should make it easy for people to get started with using dApps without the major risk factor of losing their crypto.

WalletConnect(Open Source Grant):WalletConnect is a simple solution that bridges communication between browser-based dApps and mobile wallets using a QR code scan to establish the initial connection. It is an open protocol and does not require a dApp user to install a browser extension. The protocol is agnostic to specific mobile wallets a user may want to use and will enable dApp developers to integrate with multiple wallets and reach users through a single implementation.

Elon Musk made an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast hosted by the eponymous comedian, where the pair smoked a blunt and pondered the flat-Earth movement, the future of AI, &inventing shit& and several other of the eccentric billionairefavorite topics.

The now-viral interview, which was live-streamed to thousands of viewers, was immediately followed by two high-profile executive departures at Tesla. The companystock temporarily dropped 10 percent Friday.

Here are a few highlights.

• Elon Musk probably got high. We weren&t in the room with him, but the Tesla CEO looks to have inhaled what was described as a mixture of marijuana and tobacco. &You probably can&t because of stockholders,&Rogan said to Musk before he took a hit of the blunt. &I mean,itlegal right& Musk asked, proceeding to smoke.

• He vented about the negative effects of social media: &Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do,& Musk told Rogan. &People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are and they are way happier-seeming than they really are. If you look at everyone onInstagram, you might think ‘man, there are all these happy, beautiful people and I&m not that good-looking and I&m not happy, so I must suck.'&

• In the words of Rogan, Musk just can&t stop &inventing shit.& But being Musk comes at a high cost.&I don&t think you&d necessarily want to be me,& he said. &I don&t think people would like it that much.& Rogan, in response, suggests meditation and an isolation tank.

• He worries about the future of AI — but not as much as he used to. &The danger is going to be more humans using it against each other, I think, most likely, that&ll be the danger, yeah,& he murmured.

You can watch the full interview here.