In Part I, I gave a quick overview on the current state of play for marketers based on recent privacy changes, and how we ended up here. While historical context is important, the crux of the discussion is what is next for marketers, and which start ups will help usher in the new era of attribution.

In a cookie-less world, merchants are preparing themselves to see a reduction in conversion for much of their retargeting ads and campaigns. The size of a retargeting audience will likely shrink, and the campaigns based on lookalike audiences will also suffer. Moreover, these updates are creating significant gaps in a marketer’s ability to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. Measuring attribution — the instance responsible for leading a consumer to convert — is incredibly difficult without opt-in from users. So how will marketers target and measure campaigns in the future?

Merchants, the agencies that purchase ads on their behalf, and a handful of third-party applications are coming up with innovative ways to access first-party consumer information in the absence of Apple and Google, and hyper-personalize campaigns that should theoretically improve customer acquisition costs.

First-party data may be the saving grace for brands in a post-third-party cookie and tracking world. Through discount codes, gifting, group shopping, surveys, and other wedges, merchants are activating a host of access to consumer information that would otherwise be quite difficult to obtain without purchase data. With this first-party data, customer data platforms (CDPs) like our portfolio company mParticle make it easy for brands to collect customer data and create a unified customer profile that can then be shared across the marketing tech stack — providing marketing teams with actionable insights on their customer data to segment audiences, target lookalikes, and focus spend on owned channels like email and SMS marketing (use Attentive! cough, cough) to nurture existing customer relationships, drive repeat spend, and upsell.

However, this does not solve the broader issue of addressability and tracking for merchants since prospecting (finding new customers) is growing increasingly difficult. Google tried to solve the issue by launching Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) to replace cookies by grouping users with compatible interests…but that program has already died and has been replaced by Google’s Topics API, which aims to track consumer browsing history for up to three weeks. But Google’s tracker is just information on customers in their closed-loop ecosystem and not expansive across all channels. Plus, to reiterate the point, brands are spending more and more time diversifying marketing spend across multiple channels and Google and Facebook cannot be the “end all be all” for many marketers — so tracking the customer journey across multiple platforms is no easy feat.

Over the last decade, many point solutions have been built to help marketers better understand the customer journey and more effectively reallocate spend to where customers are converting. Historically, these tools have been “directionally correct” rather than the source of truth for many organizations.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA), the process of setting rules that determine how much each touchpoint along the customer journey contributes to a sale, is one way. The issue with MTA, however, is the inability to track every person’s every impression and click. People may argue collecting lots of data across touchpoints is better than none, but either way it will cause marketers to over-value certain channels and improperly spend marketing dollars. Also, MTA only tracks clicks! — so offline touchpoints, impressions and other social attributes are completely left out of model. And you probably guessed it, but the death of cookies means MTA will only become less accurate.

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), which uses multi-linear regression to help quantify the impact of several marketing inputs on sales, is another solution…or should I say tool rather than solution. The pitfalls of MMM comes from the complexity of metrics needed by marketers to accurately measure channel-level return on investment (ROI). It requires person-level, behavior data and proper marketing attribution on individual media effectiveness…two things that are increasingly hard to come by. And relies on the syndicated data providers (Nielsen, IRI, Kantar, Gartner) to provide the engine to analyze the data. So while MMM is good for an overview of market trends and media consumption, its long data collection timeframe and inability to provide specific insights for personalized marketing make it hard for marketers to solely rely on MMM for campaign optimization.

So what’s next? Marketers need next-generation attribution tools that are better than the free version of Google Analytics and ideally just as powerful as Google Analytics Premium, but at a fraction of the cost.

The next generation of tools are not for everyone. To see value as a DTC merchant you really need to buy in, spend a decent amount of advertising dollars, and let the campaigns run their course to truly understand what channels are working, and where efficiencies and increased ROAS can take place. It’d be great to see additional profit dollars overnight, but it rarely works like that. Typically, merchants best suited for value from attribution tools have greater than $1mm in GMV (arbitrary number, don’t quote me) where they have enough meaningful data to scale when putting marketing dollars to work and optimizing campaigns across channels. Right now, merchants find data in disparate places (Facebook, Google Analytics, etc.) but a single source of truth that operators and marketers can review multiple times a day to track performance is the goal, and what many next-generation attribution tools (as listed below in Figure 2) are striving for.

At a high level, many of the solutions listed here are tackling a similar problem from different angles. Each do the heavy upfront work to update all UTM codes (snippets of code attached to the end of a URL) and the scripts in marketing campaigns to help track the customer journey. The promise to the merchant is an algorithm (sometimes with natural language processing, or NLP) that can digest the data, cleanse it, and make it usable in a way where the end-user spends less time worrying about the flow of data and more time analyzing it to make better decisions on campaign optimization.

Unsurprisingly, merchants will want different capabilities out of a product and will also take the same data served up from a tool to make different spending decisions. But overall, after talking to a ton of merchants, the general criteria for what I think people should expect out of the new attribution tools is as follows:

1. Reach and Coverage: The best tools have out-of-the-gate integrations with all the platforms — Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Shopify, live shopping platforms, etc.). Ideally, they can also track unpaid impressions and partially track OTT and OOH ads. The broader the coverage, the easier to attribute sales to the proper channel and ingest multiple data points across platforms.

2. Compliant With Privacy Regulation: Ensure proper consumer data privacy controls and make it clear to the customer how security and data issues are dealt with in any scenario.

3. Accuracy: Historically, multi-touch attribution tools did not accurately weigh value to the correct channel. Having a strong data management tool with breadth of coverage that properly reports ROAS will improve the effectiveness of a marketing organization.

4. Scale: Deepest levels of granularity while being able to manage the scale of both a sophisticated website, and a website that sees a ton of volume (typically mid-market and enterprise-scale merchants).

5. Real-Time Insights: Digesting, cleaning, presenting, and refreshing data in real-time to review immediately provides merchants tremendous efficiency. If a tool integrates into the existing tech stack, teams can more efficiently use insights to drive actions/changes in the marketing ecosystem.

6. Visibility: The models an attribution tool builds are intricate and complex, and in some instances a black box. For a merchant, strong visibility, control, and access to the algorithms are important. In case merchants want to gut check and triangulate the accuracy of an application’s model (like when Facebook underreports ROAS), then being able to run your own analysis helps.

7. P&L Visibility: Overall, using a tool that combines a view of the P&L (so the whole team works under one per view) is paramount. In a well-oiled organization, the P&L influences when and how the marketing organization spends to, at a bare minimum, break even on total gross-margin adjusted acquisition spend. The north star is using real-time insights for dynamic resource allocation — to understand how to forecast growth through a combination of growth opportunities and marketing spend, and properly allocate spend to channels that drive better ROAS based on available resources.

8. Recommendations: The most valuable tools are those that are “in the money”. Analytics are great, but tools that can run NLP on raw data to make suggestions and make those insights come to life drive the most value.

9. Customer Insights: On top of attribution, the data these tools collect enables them to do so much more. Tools that can also serve up customer insights on cohort data and lifetime value become the single source of truth for e-commerce operators.

10. Support: Ideally each tool is out-of-the-box and easy to use. While it seems table stakes, applications with a great user experience, savvy reports, and strong customer support are not that common.

The ecosystem of third-party providers building products that help merchants face regulatory changes to consumer privacy are growing. At BCV, we are seeing more and more B2B solutions think about this issue and incorporate varying capabilities to assist on data collection, and we are eager to back the next-gen mar-tech tools that can support most of the aforementioned criteria. Structural changes are bound to happen every handful of years, and it will be interesting to see how organizations adapt over the next 12 months to privacy changes. If you have opinions, or want to jam on this topic, or any other topics in the commerce and marketing technology arena, I’m always around.

P.S. By no means are my thoughts completely fleshed out. I welcome any constructive criticism and feedback to help me better understand what is happening in this space and what will happen.

Over the last few years, consumer data privacy has become an increasingly important issue. More than ever before, the products people buy are internet-connected (like the smart thermostats, Amazon Alexa, and the Whoops or other fitness trackers seemingly on everyone’s wrists). These are just a couple of examples of the many devices sold that give third parties access to your data — where you go, what Instagram accounts you follow, what spending habits you have, and more. This data is collected, sold, shared, and, sometimes, hacked, and deciding what risks you’re comfortable taking as a consumer should be your own decision. Hence why Europe implemented a comprehensive privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, that requires companies to ask consumers permission to share their data. While there is not a single law in the U.S that covers all privacy, a mix of several laws over the last few years embody a similar level of governance over consumer data protection. These major privacy laws are one of the many reasons Big Tech has started to enact change to comply with new consumer privacy standards.

There has been a lot of chatter about the impact privacy updates from Apple and Google will have among advertisers and marketers. The death of third-party cookies and mobile tracking has been an ongoing discussion for many over the last year, but it’s not until recently that marketing teams and e-commerce operators have noticed the impact. For some context on this matter, Google announced that Chrome would no longer support third-party cookies by the end of 2022, and ~12 months ago also announced its decision to end behavioral targeting (i.e. not develop or allow alternative identifiers to replace cookies on its ad products by third parties). In layman’s terms, use this example: when you are looking to furnish your new home, the retargeted ads you see on TikTok and Instagram after searching the phrase “L-shaped couch” in Google will be less personalized, and it will be harder for marketers to track your journey to purchase.

And that is just from Google. Apple finally rolled out the iOS 14.5 update, which comes with a new feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that prevents third-party applications from tracking users across the web. So what exactly does this mean? Historically, Apple granted third-party applications easy access to consumer data by defaulting to allow tracking when downloading an application on your iPhone or iPad. But now, with ATT, consumers get the option to opt-in or opt-out of being tracked across their web usage. Here’s a look at the privacy evolution:

This structural change has propelled the chatter amongst advertisers and marketers since it is harder to drive value productively and cost-effectively from campaigns. When apps cannot track user behavior, it becomes increasingly difficult for advertisers to know what ads to show. So while Apple has claimed this as a huge victory for consumers, it is viewed as the opposite by marketers. The ability to target audiences and measure the impact ads have on driving engagement and/or conversions is severely impacted. As a result, major ad platforms like Facebook are being handed a myriad of challenges.

But taking a step back, it’s important to understand the way we arrived at this crossroad. Traditionally, marketing involved the use of billboards, flyers, and brochures, print ads all over newspapers, broadcasting, cold-calling, and direct mail. For a more visual representation, think Don Draper in Mad Men brainstorming Coca Cola’s next TV commercial that was used in the series finale, and in real life back in 1971.

Up until the development of the internet in the 1990s, traditional marketing was pretty much the only type of marketing. Now, in the era of social media and websites, digital marketing has grown in importance and become a meaningful portion of advertising spend for brands, retailers, and enterprises across the globe. In fact, digital media spend captured ~65% of ad dollar allocation in 2021 relative to traditional marketing channels, and will likely continue to grow over time.

Among the many digital marketing channels that exist, Facebook has been widely regarded by many brands, retailers, and agencies as the most performant channel of them all. Its power as an ad platform not only comes from the sheer reach it has across huge audiences (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) but also from its ability to give business owners crucial information about potential customers including their purchases, preferences, credit ratings, incomes, jobs, and much more. Facebook allows business owners to inspect audiences, see demographical analytics, and take advantage of third-party data to help hyper target audiences with posts/ads based on data-driven insights that lead to better conversion. The advertising platform Facebook has built is genius; it’s a game of chess, not checkers. And because Facebook has historically generated such a strong return on ad spend (ROAS) for organizations of all types, and especially for direct-to-consumer (DTC) merchants, the amount of ad dollars marketing teams threw, and continue to throw, towards it is astronomically high.

Yet, in the last two years, Facebook as a marketing channel has begun to degrade. So much money was being poured into digital marketing, for obvious reasons, that it made the cost to acquire a customer very high and the ROAS multiple very low. After speaking to a handful of DTC merchants recently, I heard that the top-of-funnel cost per action (CPA) (essentially the cost to get someone to purchase your product) had increased from $40 to $220! A portion of that is driven by the increased competition for digital ad space from the growing number of DTC merchants in the e-commerce world, but another leading cause of these wild CPA prices are the third-party data changes I previously alluded to.

To be successful, ad platforms like Facebook need to understand what a user is doing off-site to properly serve the right ads to consumers that lead to conversion. With iOS 14.5’s ATT rollout, limited access to off-site information for Facebook and other social platforms means that targeting, optimization, and tracking get worse, and will likely degrade further as more consumers opt-out of tracking. Marketers are not seeing the same level of scale they previously saw on Facebook because the niche audience Facebook used to find on their behalf is no longer trackable. Facebook has already prepped advertisers for this by eliminating insights into performance beyond seven days from a click, and they are going to lose even more insight with time. As a result, companies are reallocating advertising spend away from Facebook and towards other marketing channels. One agency I spoke to told me that 90% of its clients have ALREADY reduced Facebook spend in search of stronger marketing efficiency elsewhere. So the end of pixel tracking and soon the end of third-party cookies means digital media spend will become increasingly anonymous…kinda.

Much of this reallocation of ad spend is a testament to the increasing amount of data-driven insights e-commerce operators, entrepreneurs, and growth marketers are making regarding business strategy success. In e-commerce at least, many DTC brands have been spending less time on improving operational efficiency because the e-commerce spike from COVID compensated for areas of misalignment and inefficiency. As the pace of COVID-fueled growth has slowed, a switch has flipped in the minds of merchants who want to continue to grow profitably. They are beginning to diversify ad spend across multiple channels (TikTok, YouTube, SMS, e-mail marketing, influencer marketing, in-game, etc.) to optimize for better ROAS. One of the fastest growing channels is TikTok.

Brands can advertise on TikTok in four main ways: 1) creating quality original content 2) paying TikTok for ad placement 3) collaborating with influencers who promote on behalf of a brand, and 4) whitelisting an influencer’s account to run their own ads. Influencer marketing (#3 and #4) have taken off dramatically as alternatives to top-of-funnel marketing on Facebook. You can now pay people like Charli D’Amelio or Jackson Mahomes (jk, Mahomes won’t work) to help drive better brand recognition given their immense followings — and brands work with both macro and micro-influencers to reach different segments of audiences and drive varying ROAS.

This is all to say that operators are getting better at multi-channel diversification and optimization. With the newest privacy controls making Facebook advertising far less successful, marketers are waking to different forms of marketing for 1) top-of-funnel and prospecting 2) retargeting, and 3) retention and customer acquisition. Facebook still wins for prospecting, Google for retargeting, and Attentive & Klaviyo for retention — but knowing how to properly manage how much to spend and when to spend on each channel is no walk in the park.

Click here for Part II

by Scott Friend and Dawit Heck, Bain Capital Ventures

“A more beautiful internet for all!” — Liz Giorgi, Co-Founder, soona

We’re excited today to announce BCV’s investment in soona, bringing the ecommerce photoshoot into the cloud. With today’s vast number of ecommerce choices, it’s getting harder and harder for retailers and brands to attract and retain new customers. As the cost of getting a customer to an online storefront skyrockets, ecommerce sellers really need to bank on ensuring those clicks end up converting.

That’s why brands are eager to use top-quality visual content in their marketing campaigns and on their product pages; after all, if your products don’t jump off the page for customers, you have almost no chance of driving a purchase.

It’s that backdrop that explains why we’ve been so focused on tools that help sellers sell more effectively, and why we’re so excited to lead the recent $35M Series B round for soona, on its way to becoming the de facto visual content creation platform for all of ecommerce.

As Liz Giorgi, CEO and Co-Founder of soona, often notes, there is not a single physical good bought on the internet that does not include a visual asset. Anyone who has sold online knows that a high-quality photo or video leads to higher conversion and lower return rates; even a basic pair of white socks sells better with the right images.

With more and more sellers, large and small, coming online, the need for an easy, inexpensive yet high-quality way to add visual images to online stores and marketing campaigns has never been greater.

Before soona, quality photography was certainly available, but typically at a high cost and complexity (find a photographer or agency, schedule a shoot, show up and spend hours at the shoot, pay by the hour [whether you like the output or not]…). Brands have regularly turned to agencies and online labor marketplaces to find freelance photographers — paying up to $1,000 a pop for virtual assets, with little assurance of the quality of the final output.

In today’s exploding ecommerce landscape, brands need a better way to produce high-quality content. Enter soona, enabling brands to create professional content quickly and inexpensively at consistently high quality.

How is this possible, you might ask? By putting the whole process in the cloud! soona has centralized and automated photoshoot operations with top creatives on staff. Marketers collaborate online in real-time with their photographer during the shoot and then choose and pay for just the images they want to use.

The result is extremely high customer satisfaction and best-in-class repeat behavior — in fact, soona’s customer repeat behavior and retention is among the highest of any transaction-oriented business we’ve ever seen!

Here’s how it works:

Not surprisingly, Co-Founders Liz Giorgi and Hayley Anderson are experienced and award-winning veterans in this arena. They have been recognized as innovators in the world of visual content creation and have now brought their talent and vision to the cloud, enabling access to high-quality creative for all.

This new commerce reality includes not just the need for the highest quality visual assets, but also the growing prominence of first-party data, the critical importance of highly personalized interactions, and the requirement for optimized site experiences.

In that emerging market landscape, tools like soona become a necessity, as do the many other commerce-tech leaders in the BCV portfolio, including Persado for highly-personalized and optimized language content; Attentive for delivering those messages via the most personalized channels (SMS); Bloomreach and mParticle for the infrastructure and tools to manage all the first party data; Flow (now part of Global-E, NASDAQ:GLBE) to localize the experience and facilitate the sale to a cross-border global audience; Mirakl to build out third-party marketplaces; Recharge for managing subscription-oriented relationships with customers; Shipbob for handling all of the logistics; and the list goes on.

We’re proud at BCV to have been on the front-end of so many ecommerce trends over the past twenty years, backing best-in-class founders who have literally transformed the commerce landscape for all. And we couldn’t be more excited to begin our partnership with the soona team as they continue to reshape digital content creation for commerce and help create, as Liz often says, “a more beautiful internet for all!”

by Scott Friend and Dawit Heck, Bain Capital Ventures

We’ve all had that terrible feeling of clicking on a product, hesitating to buy it, and then going back the next day (or even just a few hours later!) only to realize the color and size you wanted is out of stock. Every year, retailers and brands leave billions of dollars on the table due to inventory issues; either products are more popular than expected and quickly go out of stock, or the opposite is true, causing overstock.

As much as possible, brands want to avoid both scenarios, striking a delicate balance between demand forecasting and vendor lead time. The illusory goal is to get inventory “just right” — the right quantities shipped on time, and not one unit extra. This is true now more than ever, as more than 40% of retail supply chains are looking to invest in real-time supply chain visibility solutions in 2021.¹

Optimization of inventory and merchandising decisions has always been important to retailers of all sizes but historically could only be accomplished with enterprise-scale solutions. Software platforms for managing pricing, allocation, assortment planning, markdowns, and promotions were costly and complex, limiting their use to larger retailers.

Many retailers don’t use inventory software at all. The state of the art, as we saw in the enterprise twenty years ago, is currently manual aggregation of disparate data sources and spread-sheet level analysis. If you talk to most merchandise and financial planners at retailers or direct-to-consumer brands, they’d likely say their primary tool for assortment and merchandise planning, as well as inventory forecasting, is good ‘ol reliable Microsoft Excel.

However, manually aggregating data and churning through dozens, if not hundreds of spreadsheets, per month results in a slow and often inaccurate process of analysis and action around reorders or overstocks and clearance.

It is no secret that inventory planning and ongoing in-season management is a complex endeavor. Because of the complexity, small merchants have had few easy-to-use (and affordable) tools to help make more informed purchasing and merchandising decisions. A newer generation of solutions have emerged in the past few years that are “excel-lite” but are limited in true forecasting and optimization capabilities.

At BCV, we have been on the hunt for more SMB-focused, cloud-based, self-configurable inventory management solutions appropriate for the vast universe of small online sellers. These retailers want to more effectively, and simply, make sense of inventory levels and how they impact marketing decisions to drive more sales and gross profit.

For smaller retailers, fueling growth of the long tail starts by fueling their most prized asset, inventory. That’s why we are so excited to have the opportunity to partner with Adii Pienaar, CEO and founder, and the rest of the team at Cogsy! BCV is a supporting investor in Cogsy’s $6 million seed round announced today.

Cogsy’s vision is to be a “small online seller’s intelligent co-pilot,” as Adii has reiterated, turning all facets of retail merchandising from purely retrospective reporting into a competitive advantage. Cogsy arms modern brands with greater agility, alignment, and control over their largest area of investment, inventory.

To enable this, Cogsy has started with a backorder solution that enables brands and retailers to give customers an accurate view of when items will next be available to ship, despite being out-of-stock. This simple tool is a bit of a Trojan horse for Cogsy to engage with the retailer, demonstrate quick-time-value, and, along the way, capture the data needed for more extensive inventory and price optimizations.

More importantly, the person leading the charge to change the way inventory management operates has exemplified amazing domain expertise on both product building and go-to-market. Adii previously co-founded WooCommerce, an open-source winner in the e-commerce platform category alongside Shopify and BigCommerce, and is keen on using his experience to build something that makes it easy for product, marketing, and finance teams to work together to drive business growth.

We are both thrilled and honored to partner with the Cogsy team along their journey to recreate the future of inventory management for brands and retailers. To learn more about Cogsy, check them out on:

• Shopify
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Their Website!

P.S. The team is (always) hiring!

_______________________

¹ Statista: Retail Supply Chain Executives Willing to Invest in Following Areas in 2021

by Scott Friend and Dawit Heck, Bain Capital Ventures

We’ve all had that terrible feeling of clicking on a product, hesitating to buy it, and then going back the next day (or even just a few hours later!) only to realize the color and size you wanted is out of stock. Every year, retailers and brands leave billions of dollars on the table due to inventory issues; either products are more popular than expected and quickly go out of stock, or the opposite is true, causing overstock.

As much as possible, brands want to avoid both scenarios, striking a delicate balance between demand forecasting and vendor lead time. The illusory goal is to get inventory “just right” — the right quantities shipped on time, and not one unit extra. This is true now more than ever, as more than 40% of retailers are looking to invest in real-time supply chain visibility solutions in 2021.

Optimization of inventory and merchandising decisions has always been important to retailers of all sizes but historically could only be accomplished with enterprise-scale solutions. Software platforms for managing pricing, allocation, assortment planning, markdowns, and promotions were costly and complex, limiting their use to larger retailers. Many retailers don’t use inventory software at all. The state of the art, as we saw in the enterprise twenty years ago, is currently manual aggregation of disparate data sources and spread-sheet level analysis.

If you talk to most merchandise and financial planners at retailers or direct-to-consumer brands, they’d likely say their primary tool for assortment and merchandise planning, as well as inventory forecasting, is good ‘ol reliable Microsoft Excel. However, manually aggregating data and churning through dozens, if not hundreds of spreadsheets, per month results in a slow and often inaccurate process of analysis and action around reorders or overstocks and clearance.

It is no secret that inventory planning and ongoing in-season management is a complex endeavor. Because of the complexity, small merchants have had few easy-to-use (and affordable) tools to help make more informed purchasing and merchandising decisions. A newer generation of solutions have emerged in the past few years that are “excel-lite” but are limited in true forecasting and optimization capabilities.

At BCV, we have been on the hunt for more SMB-focused, cloud-based, self-configurable inventory management solutions appropriate for the vast universe of small online sellers. These retailers and brands want to more effectively, and simply, make sense of inventory levels and how they impact marketing decisions to drive more sales and gross profit. For smaller sellers, fueling growth of the long tail starts by fueling their most prized asset, inventory.

That’s why we are so excited to have the opportunity to partner with Adii Pienaar, CEO and founder, and the rest of the team at Cogsy! BCV is a supporting investor in Cogsy’s $6 million seed round announced today.

Cogsy’s vision is to be a “small online seller’s intelligent co-pilot,” as Adii has reiterated, turning all facets of retail merchandising from purely retrospective reporting into a competitive advantage. Cogsy arms modern brands with greater agility, alignment, and control over their largest area of investment, inventory.

To enable this, Cogsy has started with a backorder solution that enables brands and retailers to give customers an accurate view of when items will next be available to ship, despite being out-of-stock. This simple tool is a bit of a Trojan horse for Cogsy to engage with the retailer, demonstrate quick-time-value, and, along the way, capture the data needed for more extensive inventory and price optimizations.

More importantly, the person leading the charge to change the way inventory management operates has exemplified domain expertise on both product building and go-to-market. Adii previously co-founded WooCommerce, an open-source winner in the e-commerce platform category alongside Shopify and BigCommerce, and is keen on using his experience to build something that makes it easy for product, marketing, and finance teams to work together to drive business growth.

We are both thrilled and honored to partner with the Cogsy team along their journey to recreate the future of inventory management for brands and retailers. To learn more about Cogsy, check them out on:

• Shopify
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Their Website!

P.S. The team is (always) hiring!

Dawit shares how the intersection of investment banking and growth equity served as a useful stepping stone to becoming a value-added venture capital investor

I took a slightly untraditional path to early-stage venture capital, as I didn’t realize right away that it was the field for me. When joining the professional workforce, it’s often difficult to know if your first job will be the right one for you down the road. I went to college at University of Pennsylvania and used my four years as a time of reflection to discern, when it came to a future career path, what would keep me motivated; who were the types of people I wanted to surround myself with; and in what industry would I be able to add the most value.

What I came to realize was that I had a passion for building relationships and working with disruptive leaders across categories and/or asset classes.

I majored in History and Spanish, and although neither taught me the fundamentals of financial literacy, I was fortunate enough to intern in investment banking over two summers, and then took a job at Lazard Freres after graduation. I worked in Lazard’s Restructuring Group, advising clients in special situations, restructurings, and distressed mergers and acquisitions across many industries.

Restructuring banking taught me deep technical capabilities; I learned the ins-and-outs of cap tables and the intricacies of deal structuring, and moreover gained a healthy dose of cynicism when evaluating any business and its potential viability at scale. What was most fascinating to me, though, was working with management teams post-restructuring on plans to revitalize their businesses.

Invest In People

The late 2010s marked a point in the economic cycle that led to multiple bankruptcies and distressed enterprises in two key industries: oil and gas, and retail. Advising companies like Toys “R” Us and Sears while at Lazard taught me about the importance of becoming detail-oriented and working efficiently, and, more importantly, that the massive changes taking place in the retail landscape was an area of disruption I wanted to work on for the foreseeable future.

I saw how technology was upending retail, and the only way forward was to automate and innovate. Direct-to-consumer offerings are removing the need for retailers in the supply chain entirely, and fast-fashion brands are leveraging the internet to grow brand recognition, drive massive volume, and operate at better margins.

I wanted to work with the innovative technology companies empowering ecommerce operators, and I realized venture capital was the best way to do that. However, I wasn’t quite sure how to get involved in the field, so I cold-emailed lots of people off of LinkedIn and through my network — I probably spoke to over 100 people — frankly just to learn. I would say that you should never feel afraid to reach out to people, as they are often very happy to chat and share their experiences, and learning through osmosis from others is the most valuable information out there.

I ended up taking my first venture job at Long Ridge Equity Partners, where I learned all about investing in value-driven B2B software companies through growth-stage financings. In the back of my mind, I realized it wasn’t just technology-based business models I was interested in, but more so the chance to interact with the highest quality founders.

When I heard through my friend Zeeza Cole that BCV was hiring for an associate position, in particular someone to focus on retail-related technologies on the East Coast, I jumped at the opportunity. Here was a venture firm that aligned with my vision for the future: deep operating experience with inherent domain expertise, a focus on early-stage partnerships with flexibility for growth-stage investing, and a wide network of resources and people available through the greater Bain Capital platform. This, coupled by the opportunity to work directly with BCV Partner Scott Friend (a leader in the commerce technology ecosystem) made my decision to join this team a no-brainer.

Learning To Build Relationships And Think Critically

Through BCV’s mentorship model, I can reach out to any of the partners for questions. In particular, Scott is infinitely approachable and, like other partners, is focused on my own development as a value-add investor; I am provided with hands-on opportunities to learn and contribute on each and every deal. And I’m not just learning how to do the nuts-and-bolts of deal sourcing and structuring, but also developing the necessary skill set to think critically and to organize my thoughts in a structured, concise, and very simple manner.

Equally weighted is the firm’s focus on enabling more junior team members to build proprietary relationships with founders, startup employees, and other VCs. I’ve been fortunate to meet many exceptional individuals, some of whom I reconnected with after those cold emails a few years back.

Building Domain Expertise

What I like best about my job at BCV is just what I thought I would: working with founders. I feel fortunate to be building domain expertise at such an early point in my venture career. I’m encouraged to reach out to CEOs, operators, direct-to-consumer brands and retailers to develop perspectives, ranging from backend commerce infrastructure enabling flexible website development and iteration, to front-end point solutions that enable DTC brands to increase personalized outreach to drive stronger customer engagement.

It’s incredible to see how wide and deep BCV’s network is in this space. I grew up speaking both Amharic and English, interacting with a wide diversity of people from many different backgrounds, and I value that now I get to interact with so many different types of people at work — founders, investors, operators, engineers, coders, product builders, and more. Being a small contributor to a founder’s success is the goal, and one I feel honored to be a part of.

If BCV sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work, I encourage you to apply! You can submit your resume through BCV’s application by Monday, November 29. All candidates will write a one-paragraph answer to either of these prompts:

• Describe an experience you’ve had that illustrates why venture capital is exciting to you.
• Share your perspective of a technology trend or opportunity that you believe Bain Capital Ventures should be spending time on.

If you progress in the interview process, BCV will ask you for a one-page investment memo outlining a team or company that you believe we should invest in.

Dawit shares how the intersection of investment banking and growth equity served as a useful stepping stone to becoming a value-added venture capital investor

I took a slightly untraditional path to early-stage venture capital, as I didn’t realize right away that it was the field for me. When joining the professional workforce, it’s often difficult to know if your first job will be the right one for you down the road. I went to college at University of Pennsylvania and used my four years as a time of reflection to discern, when it came to a future career path, what would keep me motivated; who were the types of people I wanted to surround myself with; and in what industry would I be able to add the most value.

What I came to realize was that I had a passion for building relationships and working with disruptive leaders across categories and/or asset classes.

I majored in History and Spanish, and although neither taught me the fundamentals of financial literacy, I was fortunate enough to intern in investment banking over two summers, and then took a job at Lazard Freres after graduation. I worked in Lazard’s Restructuring Group, advising clients in special situations, restructurings, and distressed mergers and acquisitions across many industries.

Restructuring banking taught me deep technical capabilities; I learned the ins-and-outs of cap tables and the intricacies of deal structuring, and moreover gained a healthy dose of cynicism when evaluating any business and its potential viability at scale. What was most fascinating to me, though, was working with management teams post-restructuring on plans to revitalize their businesses.

Invest In People

The late 2010s marked a point in the economic cycle that led to multiple bankruptcies and distressed enterprises in two key industries: oil and gas, and retail. Advising companies like Toys “R” Us and Sears while at Lazard taught me about the importance of becoming detail-oriented and working efficiently, and, more importantly, that the massive changes taking place in the retail landscape was an area of disruption I wanted to work on for the foreseeable future.

I saw how technology was upending retail, and the only way forward was to automate and innovate. Direct-to-consumer offerings are removing the need for retailers in the supply chain entirely, and fast-fashion brands are leveraging the internet to grow brand recognition, drive massive volume, and operate at better margins.

I wanted to work with the innovative technology companies empowering ecommerce operators, and I realized venture capital was the best way to do that. However, I wasn’t quite sure how to get involved in the field, so I cold-emailed lots of people off of LinkedIn and through my network — I probably spoke to over 100 people — frankly just to learn. I would say that you should never feel afraid to reach out to people, as they are often very happy to chat and share their experiences, and learning through osmosis from others is the most valuable information out there.

I ended up taking my first venture job at Long Ridge Equity Partners, where I learned all about investing in value-driven B2B software companies through growth-stage financings. In the back of my mind, I realized it wasn’t just technology-based business models I was interested in, but more so the chance to interact with the highest quality founders.

When I heard through my friend Zeeza Cole that BCV was hiring for an associate position, in particular someone to focus on retail-related technologies on the East Coast, I jumped at the opportunity. Here was a venture firm that aligned with my vision for the future: deep operating experience with inherent domain expertise, a focus on early-stage partnerships with flexibility for growth-stage investing, and a wide network of resources and people available through the greater Bain Capital platform. This, coupled by the opportunity to work directly with BCV Partner Scott Friend (a leader in the commerce technology ecosystem) made my decision to join this team a no-brainer.

Learning To Build Relationships And Think Critically

Through BCV’s mentorship model, I can reach out to any of the partners for questions. In particular, Scott is infinitely approachable and, like other partners, is focused on my own development as a value-add investor; I am provided with hands-on opportunities to learn and contribute on each and every deal. And I’m not just learning how to do the nuts-and-bolts of deal sourcing and structuring, but also developing the necessary skill set to think critically and to organize my thoughts in a structured, concise, and very simple manner.

Equally weighted is the firm’s focus on enabling more junior team members to build proprietary relationships with founders, startup employees, and other VCs. I’ve been fortunate to meet many exceptional individuals, some of whom I reconnected with after those cold emails a few years back.

Building Domain Expertise

What I like best about my job at BCV is just what I thought I would: working with founders. I feel fortunate to be building domain expertise at such an early point in my venture career. I’m encouraged to reach out to CEOs, operators, direct-to-consumer brands and retailers to develop perspectives, ranging from backend commerce infrastructure enabling flexible website development and iteration, to front-end point solutions that enable DTC brands to increase personalized outreach to drive stronger customer engagement.

It’s incredible to see how wide and deep BCV’s network is in this space. I grew up speaking both Amharic and English, interacting with a wide diversity of people from many different backgrounds, and I value that now I get to interact with so many different types of people at work — founders, investors, operators, engineers, coders, product builders, and more. Being a small contributor to a founder’s success is the goal, and one I feel honored to be a part of.

If BCV sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work, I encourage you to apply! You can submit your resume through BCV’s application by Monday, November 29. All candidates will write a one-paragraph answer to either of these prompts:

• Describe an experience you’ve had that illustrates why venture capital is exciting to you.
• Share your perspective of a technology trend or opportunity that you believe Bain Capital Ventures should be spending time on.

If you progress in the interview process, BCV will ask you for a one-page investment memo outlining a team or company that you believe we should invest in.