be early | building @storefrontlive | NYC
New York, NY
Joined January 2014
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Muse / Instinct / Grok Bot / other AI agent seem like they will eat away a big portion of our shopping tasks that we don't want to handle.
Call this utility-based shopping
- travel
- bills
- subscriptions
- price-based comparison decisions
But what about the buying that we do want to be involved with?
At heart, browse-based shopping is entertainment -- the pleasure of discovering new brands, finding a great deal, or better refining your tastes
Most people want more of that
Jonah Platovsky retweeted
Unrelated to the game, but just a reminder that Florida is an elite university.
X-axis: average football + basketball rating percentile.
Y-axis: Forbes Top Colleges ranking, which factors in things like graduation rates, earnings, student debt, ROI and access.
Jonah Platovsky retweeted
Still remain a big $HNT fan despite the market turbulence. The funny thing is that nothing about the original thesis (post mobile pivot) has been invalidated - in fact it has actually been well validated with ~3M DAUs across the offload network.
The market is pricing this as a dead project when the reality is that the fundamentals are very very much alive - and outside of stablecoins / payments @helium is truly one of the only crypto projects that has found real PMF
6 years ago I was an early builder of the IoT network (within first 5k hotspots out of 1M+), and the idea of deflationary economics was somewhat of a pipe dream at that point. But that is now happening, more HNT is burned than created right now from real usage from real companies.
I can't predict how the market will price the token, but I do know that as long as the underlying metrics (users, data transfer, network revenue) continue moving up and to the right, the business does get stronger and more valuable.
Good chance that “consumer ai” abstracts AI as far away from the consumer as possible
Instagram is already consumer AI - it’s AI algo is hyper trained to deliver people content that they want to watch. And it’s working well.
People want to browse, discover, and be fed, not chat with a bot all day
I imagine that the new winning consumer businesses will use AI to develop incredible, specialized models to help people better discover the world around them
Last NYC hidden gem was hot so sharing one more
Sushi yasaka on UWS - great quality for insanely low prices
(where can you find rolls for under $7 in Manhattan)
Found new NYC cafe for working
Actually has good WiFi, good coffee, good setup, quiet, spacious
Rare find in the city
Cafe-flor in Chelsea
People think follower count still matters most for influencers
When it comes to driving sales, small creators are taking up an increasingly large portion of spend
I imagine this is a result of 1) more talented small creators emerging and 2) these small creators better serving their specific niches than mass market high follower accounts
Becoming a thought leader in an emerging space is a cheat code.
Back in my DePIN days, @richhomiecon and I were actively posting on X and gaining substantial attention from big players in that ecosystem. It led to a startup offer that was a huge stepping stone for my career
When more attention starts to head towards a growing industry, people want to see more thoughts, takes, and opinions. Surprisingly very few people do a good job of providing unique insight.
Be that person
Launching my Substack with a timely piece: Whatnot's huge raise shows US live shopping is just getting started
Check it out and subscribe for more to come:
jonahplatovsky.substack.com/…
Storefront soon
That’s what we believed when we invested in @AnthropicAI’s series D…and when we led @WeAreLegora’s series C. @Ramp - also in the portfolio. We love the talent-dense, high-velocity, hungry-as-hell #2s…that combo often becomes the #1. Watch this space.
@BessemerVP Growth
The growth of live commerce is a 2nd order effect of AI.
As more interactions become chatbots and automations, people want to interact with people
Yet they are still addicted to their phones, and I don’t see that changing in the near future
Maybe the next “consumer AI” startup everyone is looking for is really just AI abstracted away from the consumer to deliver the best “in-person” experience possible
Congrats to @GrantLaFontaine, @loganhead13, and @whatnot (W20) on their $545M Series G at a $20B valuation!
They run the biggest live commerce platform in North America, the UK, and Europe.
Six months into 2026, they’ve already passed their entire 2025 GMV of more than $8 billion. Buyers have more than doubled over the past year, and more than 650,000 people are joining the platform every week.
fortune.com/2026/08/07/ai-ob…
Every marketplace with some scale is going after live shopping at this point. The writing is on the wall.
eBay, stockx, whatnot, poshmark, TikTok, and others
The problem is most are building live as a secondary feature. It is the product. It is what the consumer wants.
Transurfing still best mindset book I’ve read by far
I finished the full 750 page version in April and although lengthy just does an exceptional job explaining the topics
Immediate buy
I was at a very high level investor summit back in June and spoke with a few operators that deeply deeply understood the business models of some of the biggest Saaspocalypse victims. It's clear that if you can identify the winners in this pack there is huge opportunity
Huge Atlassian quarterly beat. There was a misplaced thesis over the past 6 months that somehow agents would be bad for certain software categories. There’s definitely truth in this in some areas, but many were parsing this poorly.
In a world where agents are generating 100X more code, processing massive amounts of data, or making decisions across your systems, the role of the platforms that manage this data and these workflows becomes more important, not less.
Enterprises care about governance, security, compliance, guardrails, safe access to data, and many more critical capabilities that go into these systems of record.
