Next Tuesday, Dec. 6, Kara Swisher and I are hosting a special one-night event focused on the future of commerce.
Recode’s future of commerce event is next week. What we want to learn from Jack Dorsey, Kate Hudson, Apple and Wish.
You can still be there if you register today.
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Code Commerce, taking place in San Francisco at Westfield’s Bespoke event space, will feature Recode’s usual brand of no-BS interviews with the entrepreneurs and business leaders who are shaping where commerce and payments are headed.
We’ll sit down with Square CEO Jack Dorsey, Fabletics co-founders Kate Hudson and Adam Goldenberg, Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey, and Wish CEO Peter Szulczewski.
If you value candid, unscripted conversations that include the chance for you to ask questions, too, you should be there. We’ll also give you time to get to know a group of your smartest peers over some food and adult beverages at the start of the night. But we have limited seating, and the event is just a week away. You should register today.
Here are some of the things Kara and I are hoping to learn:
Jack Dorsey has built a $4 billion payments company by giving small merchants modern software at an affordable price. But Square continues to invest considerably in Square Cash, a money-transfer app for consumers, not business owners. Dorsey’s long-held belief that Square can eventually become a two-sided payment company has yet to become reality. So we’ll press him for the rationale of investing in a money-losing, non-core product.
It’s taken just three years for Kate Hudson and Adam Goldenberg to build Fabletics into a $250 million apparel brand. Getting customers to sign up for subscriptions is a big reason why. But I’m still not convinced that a subscription business for clothing — stuff you don’t need to buy on a monthly basis like razors or diapers — can be a lasting model over, say, a decade or more. I’d love to hear why I’m wrong.
The benefit of using Apple Pay in apps and on the web is clear. The benefit of using your phone to pay in a store? Not as much. How does Apple plan to convince mainstream iPhone users that tapping a phone to pay makes a lot more sense than just using a credit card? We’ll have the chance to ask Apple Pay chief Jennifer Bailey next week.
In less than four years, Wish was able to build a multi-billion-dollar shopping app with a predominately international customer base right from San Francisco. That growth was fueled in part by aggressive advertising on Facebook that at one point made Wish the social network’s largest advertiser. I want to know what co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski learned from all that spending and why he thinks it’s sustainable.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
