Nestlé x Helaina | Outdoor Voices' Comeback | Phia: Chrome Extension of the Stars
Nestlé is putting human-identical proteins in baby formula — the timeline is processing what precision-fermentation hitting infant nutrition means for CPG. Plus three guest interviews on performance TV, the DTC personalization pivot, and the AI-native bank for middle-market operators.
ON TODAY'S EPISODE OF ECOMM COWBOY
Daniel Druger (VP of Product, Universal Ads) — Building Comcast's self-serve TV ad platform across NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Fox, and Roku. Previously COO of AlgoLift (acquired by Vungle) and Head of Global Revenue Partnerships at Snapchat. Co-hosts ADSN with James Borow. We get into what changes day one for a DTC brand spending its first $10K on TV, the new MCP integration that lets you ask Claude or ChatGPT "how is my TV advertising doing," and when linear earns a line in a performance-first budget.
Sean Agatep (Co-Founder and COO, Vincero Collective) — San Diego premium men's accessories brand he started in 2014. Launched on Kickstarter, scaled to ~700,000 customers, now in low eight figures. Spent five years in China on product development. Has led a pivot from "watch brand" to "gifting and personalization brand" — including the rotary-engraver-in-the-office story studied across DTC. We dig into the attachment-rate threshold that justified the engraving bet, when Vincero admitted watches alone wouldn't carry the brand, and the cheapest test a $5M operator could run this quarter.
Zaid Rahman (Founder and CEO, Flex) — Miami-based AI-native "private bank" for middle-market business owners ($2M-$100M revenue). Thiel Fellow whose prior company Volley was backed by JPMorgan and Mark Zuckerberg before ChatGPT existed. Closed a $60M Series B led by Portage in December 2025, grew revenue 4x, tripled payment volume from $1B to $3B. We dig into where Flex draws the line vs. Brex and Ramp, the worst credit decision an LLM-led pipeline has made, what the model weighs differently for seasonal inventory-heavy operators, and the moat for Net-60 once a competitor offers Net-75.
ALSO ON THE SHOW
Bill Gates' daughter raises a star-studded Series A for Phia
Outdoor Voices: a quiet comeback
The Kool-Aid Pineapple conspiracy
Employees 1, mouse-tracking 0
ODD earnings mirror the whole DTC market
A $2,000 shipping option — hand delivery by Beef CEO
Microsoft bans Claude Code
Watch and react: Crumbl Sugar Crush
Watch and react: Jensen Huang says nobody uses AI better than Meta
Quince built a shoppable home inside a hotel
Ramp Cold Brew
Natty hits 100+ new stores
Moment of zen: smokable electrolytes
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