Why the Next Billion-Dollar Brand Won’t Have a Website | Roy Rubin, Entrepreneur and Investor
In this episode of Retailgenic, host Scot Wingo sits down with Roy Rubin, co-founder of Magento and General Partner at R-Squared Ventures, to explore the future of e-commerce in an AI-driven world.
Roy shares why he believes the next billion-dollar DTC brand won’t even need a website, what agentic shopping means for the future of retail, and how platforms like Shopify and Amazon may get disrupted next.
We also dive into:
- The founding story and evolution of Magento
- What went wrong (and right) during its acquisition by eBay and later Adobe
- His prediction that AI agents will replace traditional commerce UIs
- The good, bad, and ugly of agentic platforms like Perplexity
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📺 Watch episodes on YouTube: youtube.com/@retailgentic
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.
Notable Timestamps:
- 00:01:02 — What is Retailgenic and why now?
- 00:02:11 — Meet Roy Rubin: Magento founder, now VC
- 00:04:43 — The billion-dollar brand with no website?
- 00:06:07 — Origin story: How Magento was born
- 00:13:03 — PayPal's early investment & eBay’s acquisition
- 00:27:12 — Roy’s VC firm and investment thesis
- 00:40:00 — Agentic shopping and future of AI commerce
- 00:44:46 — Social commerce & influencer-powered retail
- 00:47:00 — Virtual influencers, LLMs, and the closed web?
