Sam Blumenthal

When it comes to buying, more buyers can be validating. Unlike the rise of social vertical communities—a promising trend in its own right—the success of a shopatainment platform isn’t about fostering community and intimacy among a small group of fellow shoppers. Shopatainment is a numbers game, where seeing more shoppers purchase a product helps... See more

Enabled by secure and transparent decentralized ledger technology, branded stablecoins provide marketing intelligence to brands on who their biggest fans are. At the same time, branded stablecoins incentivize and reward customers for their loyalty. Brands can store user purchasing histories on the blockchain and then apply associated savings to... See more

“From the consumer side of things, the appetite for that live content increased right at the same time” as when retailers were attempting to find interactive methods to put products in front of consumers, said Matt Moorut, senior principal analyst at Gartner. “It sort of makes a perfect storm where, from both sides of the equation, there’s more of... See more

Founded by Zhang, an early TikTok investor in 2017, Shop LIT Live received a $6 million seed round led by CRCM Ventures in April 2021. It currently has slightly under 100,000 monthly active users, over 10,000 weekly active users and “thousands” of daily active users, said Zhang. Month-to-month user numbers are growing by 40%, he said. The platform... See more