Caught My Attention Ed. 2: Curses, FedEx and Kiki's

This week in commerce review

I am flying back from our Alpaca partner’s offsite, which was impressively productive. We managed to isolate our priorities, find potential solutions to what we think we suck at, and even play a few rounds of rummikub. I haven’t been back in NYC for nearly a month and I couldn’t be happier to see this icy tundra. 

This week, I noted a few things to write about: 

• Curses. I had a couple surreptitious conversations about curses this week. One with a founder and one with a prolific commerce founder and angel. The first is the curse of the intelligent, defined as the lack of patience to persistently execute specific details. It’s a curse that befalls smart people interested in models and strategies, but who don’t stick around when the momentum stops or the model breaks; when roadblocks are hit or when minute attention to details must be maintained for longer periods than anticipated. The second is the winner’s curse, evidenced when the more and more successful you become, the less and less interesting people you are surrounded by. Yerp.

• FedEx Announced fdx. Usually the olds don’t innovate too well, so it was impressive this week to see FexEx unveil its new platform at NFR’s Big Show. The gist? They now have an end to end platform that can help brands of all sizes manage their forward and reverse logistics, complete with carbon tracking, real-time network capacity, and ship times. If it proves to deliver all tjat it says, it’s a great step forward for carriers to embed further into the customer and brand experience. It does make me wonder, though, how brands will surface this data to end customers (will a Net-a-Porter really only put a FedEx estimated delivery date on a PDP and not any other carrier? And will brands opt for the FedEx RMS over the dozen others that are also carrier-agnostic?). I also wonder how much arbitrage this will give fulfillment teams in their routing decisions. It also jeopardizes a bunch of startups' livelihoods as middleware for brands around these exact solutions (delivery, carbon tracking, route optimization, returns); or does it put them in the buy box for the next large carrier to drive innovation? Set to roll out in fall, should be interesting to watch. LINK. 

• Dive. Turn. Work. One final story that has been going around my female founder circles is the story of Kiki, the NY-launched subletting start-up with 5 male founding team members that recently pivoted to creating a “girls only club”. The whole story sounds like a viral marketing campaign in itself, but it does seem the young male hubris is in earnest. The Gen Z CEO claims to be enlightened “to this problem I never even knew existed where so many girls in the city have moved here thinking that they’ll live their best possible life, but they’re just living not thriving.” And who better equipped to know how to make New York girls (no, not women - girls) thrive than a twenty something Aussie cis man? LINK. 

I will leave you with this addendum: Despite the slight appropriation of the name, Kiki still threw me back to one of the best internet jams of the last two decades. LINK.