Scot Wingo – My longtime podcast co-host and my own person go-to reasource for all things commerce, business, and finance. Amogst other things Scot was one of the first to see the potential of e-commerce marketplaces, and founded Channel Advisor, one of the first SAAS e-commerce vendors in our space, took them public ($ECOM) and served as Chairman. We’re all excited that he’s back in the commerce space with a new AI startup, ReFiBuy I’m super lucky to have access to Scot’s brain but you should at least follow his linked activity feed. By the way, Scot’s parents spelled his name wrong.
Bryan Gildenberg – Bryan is one of the smartest people in our space. His opinions always make me think. Bryan used to used to be the Chief Knownledge Officer at Kantar and all my smart clients hired him instead of me, which is annoying. Follow his linkedin activity feed. By the way, Bryan’s parents also spelled his name wrong.
Neil Saunders – The Managing Director and Retail Analyst at GlobalData Retail, he always has a great perspective. He has a deep understanding of the performance of most major retailers, and still does a ton of store visits and visual merchandising audits (which used to be my life). I look forward to the daily recaps he does of the the retail news on his linkedin activty feed every weekday.
Russ Dieringer – He used to be the go-to e-com analyst at Cleveland Research Company before launching his own business at Stratably He’s deep on Marketplaces and in particular Amazon and Walmart. Sadly he’s stopped offering individual subscriptions to his newletter, but he still offers lots of usefull content on his site.
Benedict Evans – A former analyst and partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Ben puts out a ton of really thoughtful content. Visit his website, where you can subscribe to his newsletter, and keep an eye on his essay’s and presentations. He’s writing a lot of the disruption of AI at the moment.
Ben Thompson – Ben is an author based in Taiwan. He has a paid newsletter called Stratechery, which I highly recommend. He also has a podcast. He’s a bit more general/abstract than the commerce practiioners on this list, but I find his constructs extremely helpful. In particular his Aggregation Theory and the distinction between platforms and aggregators is extremely insightful.
Peter Fader / Dan McCarthy / Michael Ross – These three guys wrote the book on CLV and customer based analysis, and they keep re-writting it. Follow them all.
Avinash Kaushik – Former digital marketing evalgelist at Google, Avinash is my go-to thought leader for all things analytics. He’s really taught me a lot and inspired my passion for winning commerce through measurement. You can get his newsletter for free here, but the paid version is well worth it.
