INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally
Among its predecessors is Hunch, a company that delivered customized recommendations to users based on signals around the web (and sold to
Another variation on the same theme can be traced back to the dot com era company Keen.com, a live answer community where people could get
established a name for itself as the preeminent investor in e-commerce companies, just led its $22 million Series A round
It was the only venture firm in the round by design, says cofounder and CEO Eddie Vivas, who says the funding was filled out by the same
Right now, those experts are mostly athletes or coaches, as the platform is starting out with a handful of verticals, including golf,
cycling, and a few winter sports
Longer term, the idea is to launch new sections on the site every six to eight weeks, including fly fishing, kiteboarding, camping and
Curated their goods at wholesale prices
Curated can then sell them at retail prices to its customers
(Curated fulfills the order itself.)Part of that markup is used to pay its experts, who tend to be people who have jobs in related fields
but could use more income and who love sharing what they know about a topic
To ensure that these experts know as much as they claim, they are vetted by other experts on the platform, answering a battery of questions
as part of that process.Vivas stresses that experts are in no way incentivized to recommend anything in particular to a customer, but he
says customers can tip the experts if they wish
(Curated suggests tips of 5%, 7.5%, or 10%, and Vivas says they are sometimes given much more than that by shoppers who are thankful for
their time and effort, especially when their interactions end up leading them to products that cost less than they might have paid
For one thing, it uses artificial intelligence to connect shoppers with the right advisors
Though everyone tosses around AI as a competitive advantage, Curated seemingly has a genuine competitive advantage on this front, owing to
the background of Vivas, who sold to LinkedIn an earlier company that used AI to automate the recruiting process.At the time, in 2014, it
And Vivas stayed at LinkedIn for another 3.5 years as the head of product within its talent solutions business, which is where LinkedIn
derives most of its revenue
roles.But perhaps most meaningfully, Curated is a kind of antidote to Amazon, where shoppers can turn when they need something fast but
Consumers may pull the trigger on items anyway, but often, they end up with merchandise that they then have to send back or never wind up
using.The question now is whether the company can scale
also need to strike enough deals with goods manufacturers to make the platform compelling for shoppers, and to ensure that the level of the
The service launches publicly today.
