S3E01: Paul Briscoe & Arvind Rapaka | AI Revolution: Transforming the Future of Shopping

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the taste makers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Hello everybody.

This is Jason Nias, and welcome to Commerce Famous. This is episode one of season three, and I'm very excited today to have a couple of guests with me. First, I'll start off with Arvin Rapika, who's a SVP of AI, probably one of the first times I've seen AI in an official corporate role, joining us from WebScale, as well as Paul Briscoe, who ignore his title on LinkedIn. It says something about Magento, but, basically, he's the guy who gets it done over there at Human Element, an agency partner of ours, here at Shopware who's a superstar. So, anyway, excited to have these two gentlemen join me.

Arvin, maybe start with you. Love a love a brief intro, who you are, what you do, and we'll keep her moving. Thanks a lot, Jason, for having me here. I saw my colleague at Yahoo building some of the transformation technologies, Hadeep and electronic, absence building, OpenAI before OpenAI. And then that was got acquired by for almost $1,000,000,000.

And then I had few startups, which got acquired as specific in AI space. Led, AI at Nextdoor afterwards, and then I was fortunate enough to work at Dragon Fruit where I was building human brain, visual aspects of it. In the last two years, I've been working, on customizing LLMs for, for ecommerce space, and empowered, to an agent to flow for solving various workflows, from product discovery to, inventory analysis. Right? Those are some of the things that we're doing.

It's like an Amazon in a box for merchants there. And then I'm very excited at web scale to continue that, at bigger scale, Jason. Fabulous. Well, wonderful to have you on the pod, Arvin. Love your background.

We're gonna unpack more of that as we as we get into it. Paul, mister Briscoe, tell us about yourself. Yeah. Thank you. Glad to be here with you guys.

My name is Paul Briscoe. I'm, currently the director of technology and development at Human Element. We are a solution integrator for a bunch of different platforms and a bunch of different industries. Been working there since 2010, so going on about fifteen years this year. And, really, we just kinda focus on, making technology work for our clients in whatever way that that means.

Currently, you know, as we all know, there's a a a trend and a race towards, AI tools. So I'm excited to to be here and talk with you guys about it today. Fabulous. Well, let's start off by talking a little bit about the the purpose of the podcast itself. It's it's really commerce famous.

So this is mostly about people who, you know, we go to trade shows or events or on sites with with our, clients and partners, and you guys are rock stars. And then I'm assuming when you go home, you're just dad or, you know, a husband or or a son or whatever. And so you we're all kind of living two lives. And you guys are no exception. I I've obviously been in shows with with both of you and you guys are commerce famous, which is why we wanted to kick have you on the show.

Obviously, the topical conversation for today in the world is AI and what it's gonna do in ecommerce. But before we get into that, I'd love to maybe take us a walk down memory lane, maybe starting with you, Arvin, about some of your stops. I mean, we've we've been here before in terms of big innovation that's gonna change commerce, before. Right? Mobile and social and marketplaces and you name it.

So maybe you can pick one spot on your journey, kinda talk a little bit about what you did there, Arvin. And and, you know, at the end, we'll create the parallel to AI and what we think that's gonna go do. So, Arvin, what would you say were some of the most impactful times in your journey and what was the big technology of the day? Yeah. That's a really good question, Jason.

Wait. So, the way ecommerce evolved in nineteen nineties, it was very foundational. Right? Secure payments were coming with PayPal, websites around, ecommerce. Right?

But, really, the transformation happened in February. Right? And, fortunately, I was working with Yahoo building, Yahoo shop, right, providing tools, for merchants to be enabling them from an offline to online, all the kind of tools that you can think about for selling from a website perspective, to tools perspective, like recommendation engines, personalization. Those are some of the key things that we're building at Yahoo. And, of course, it didn't take off as expected, but Shopify took it and run with it.

And we know how why Shopify has become so big in providing the entire infrastructure for, ecommerce, especially from the, store to personalization to checkout. Right? And, later on, right, it's mostly about the growth. The, you know, the SEO, social aspects of it came in, and, but but I didn't get involved in that phase of the ecommerce, growth. But later on, when the in twenty twenties, right, that's where the AI started coming big.

Right? And, I was looking into some of the, interesting concepts around starting a company. And from my past experience, what I felt at Yahoo and also starting my company is that ecommerce market struggle very much with, with the technology. Right? Competing with Amazon and other people in the space.

And for me, I was thinking about the first few things that were not right with the ecommerce, today is the first party, leveraging the first party data. Right? And that's where we started caught up, like, in 2022, focusing on how we can provide a turnkey solutions for, merchants. We empower them to sell more and more profitability. Right?

And that's when, we started leveraging the data, their first party, and then building custom LLMs that can transform how they automate the entire workflows from marketing campaigns to product discovery and, supporting afterwards. Right? So these are some of the key challenges that we saw, and I was very lucky to, build some incredible technology for the last two and a half years, especially on the around the agent AI. That is what we're going to continue at web scale at much bigger scale, working with Fortune 500 companies, Jason. We're gonna get to that.

We're gonna get to today in a minute. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. I'd like to I'd like to take a little bit more of a a walk down memory lane.

Paul, I'll take you with me. But before I do, I love the Yahoo store as examples, Arvin. So I I started in ecommerce in 2000. And back then, it was kinda pretty clear that this SMB offering, everything in a box, the fact that it was multi tenant SaaS, it was a lot of reasons to believe that was Yahoo was gonna be the winner. And there was a lot of reasons to believe that Amazon was gonna have their own offering that was gonna be their winner.

And both were not really true. It ended up being Shopify and platforms like Magento and others that really kinda answered the the unique requirements and needs of the market. So I really love that example around that was a trend that we thought was gonna change the world and ultimately the the market chose differently. So really good example. Thanks for for stopping us there.

Paul, you've, you've got a tremendous background. You've you've got a very technical background having been a front end dev, a web developer. You own the technology management for for a couple of places. Talk to us a little bit about your journey, some of the things you were really excited about, company partners or clients you worked on. Give us give us some of that.

Yeah. You know, I I I'm gonna take you guys way back. Well, way back for me. You know, I'm not trying to age anybody here. But, it's interesting because I never really set out in my career to be in, like, an ecommerce developer.

It just kind of happened organically. I studied, hybrid computer science and, critical theory, degree program at the University of Detroit Mercy. It was called, electronic critique, and the professor that I had there, his name was, Marcel O'Gorman. And his big shtick was he was trying to give us, all of his students, the technical skills and the critical thinking to understand new media, which at the time, in in the humanities and and really, I think, in the world was traditionally focused on print publications. And he was trying to kind of disrupt the, I think, the in the intellectual purpose of higher education and kind of, like, force people to start thinking about what was technology really, how were we going to start to use it, and how would it evolve and change the the workplace and and our lives, however that really meant.

And I I mentioned that, I think, because, like, that was that program was kind of my first introduction into, like, a, like, a techno culture, of just, like, critiquing culture, you or critiquing technology, using technology. And it gave, I think, gave us in in that program an edge when we went into, into our careers, which and, you know, you mentioned a couple of them, but I I started after university at a company called Entertainment Publications, which interestingly was, the I don't know if you guys remember. They had, like, the big coupon book, but they were the the publishers of that book. And they were, bringing their business online. They were using this, platform called OCP, which was open commerce platform.

Oh, yeah. And, that was developed by Fry Interactive, which is a Michigan company. And, what I've noticed throughout my career since then is that everywhere I go, I seem to meet different people from Fry. I had a couple technical mentors from there, and Ben, Ben Lorenz and Jason McGee, who are the managing partners at Human Element, both were former Friars. So I think, you know, that's kind of, like, a little bit of where we started, but, where it evolved from there, we started to to see things that were happening around 2009.

You know? Clients were stuck with legacy systems, and they had a lot of, I think, you know, applications where you know, think static HTML pages, inline styles, monolithic applications. And they were trying to figure out how can they start to run their businesses and provide value to their customers. And that's kind of, I think, where where we started using, like, Magento a little bit because that offered a lot of the the back then, that was like a like a new deal. Like, it was like flexibility, a platform they could own, an open source community, multi website, multi store.

It was kind of everything that I think some of those merchants needed, which maybe I don't know if that gave them the edge over what the Yahoo offering was or what the the Amazon offering was at the time, but it just, like, allowed that industry, I think, for for, b to c and SMB to kinda really take off and grow. So thinking now to kinda where we are, I see a lot of similar trends about AI adoption, where we're going. So, yeah, that's a that's a little bit, I guess, down memory lane there. I love it. It's fascinating.

Well, so let's let's this is probably the perfect time to talk a little bit about, you know, about AI and about how it's impacting. Obviously, you guys sit in very interesting roles inside of companies. Paul, obviously, you help companies implement technology changes, and AI has to be part of those conversations today. And and, Arvin, you joined WebScale about seven months ago to really help develop what the AI story is gonna be for a hosting managing company. So maybe we'll start with you, Arvin.

And before you look into the future, we'll do that in a minute. I want you to talk a little bit about today. What are the conversations that you're having with merchants and partners around the practical application of what is available today and how are people thinking about using it? K. So maybe, Arvin, we'll start with you.

Yeah. I think the two key trends are right now big, especially with the AI skills. Right? So one, I think the intelligence has been commoditized. Right?

Few years ago, that was only accessible to Amazon or Google. Right? And that's pretty much it, in the whole of the entire industry. Not Walmart's Wells Fargo. And now that's available to everybody.

And that's the beauty about it. Right? Now we can empower the merchants in the way that we never, thought about. And, two big, ones that I really see when I talk with the customers is one is, marketing automation. Right?

So the reason why I think it will have a very deeper impact right now is that today, if you think, Jason, right, before even ad goes to retarget or email campaign goes, almost 45% is up to 45%, 22 to 45% is of the budget simply goes into drain because the agencies are needed human effort to do that. Right? And, so that's a that's something that needs to be, you know, a very, good application to automate entire workflow where I can just prompt saying that, you know, I want to find, you know, to give a 10% discount to people who have registered for past one month. Right? And that's boom.

Right? We segment it and then able to, create the templates, ad campaigns, right, and launch it, and then optimize twenty four seven based on the, hyper personalization. Right? And that's possible one, and the merchants are super excited to have that because that will certainly put the 45% up to into their pockets. The second one that is evolving, Jason, is the AI companion.

Right? People like Amazon are already getting onto the boat. If you look into the roofers today, it's available. Right? For for people to, purchase, make purchase decisions, to getting support.

Right? And what I think is that in the AI companion, it's still we don't know how it will evolve eventually. But right now, basic interaction between a conversational chat is what evolving around right now. But in future, I think it will become really big, in this way that we, will totally transform how we'll be sharpening this. Good practical examples, Arvin.

Totally agree with you. It's kinda same question to you, Paul. I mean, you and I have been in plenty of client meetings together, and AI comes up all the time. What are what are people concerned about in terms of things like data privacy? And are you sharing my data?

What what are they excited about in terms of automating their work? Like, give us the view of the merchant in terms of how they think about the potential of AI. Yeah. That's a that's a good question. I think some of the the things that we're seeing right now are are still maybe a little bit of confusion on the merchant side.

Like, they know that they want to use AI, but they're they're maybe a little bit inundated with all of the the options or unsure of which path to go down. Like, we we talk about, like, the the agent based, chat to try to, like, find product data. Does this, like so I think that they're thinking about it in ways of, like, how can it enhance, customer service? How can it, create a more refined touch point between the the customer and their experience with their with their online shopping? And, ultimately, can that help to convert more sales for for that merchant?

I think one of the things that they're also concerned about, you kinda mentioned it, is is data privacy. Because depending on how some of those AI tools are implemented and used, you don't want to be sharing, all of the data that that your agents may be learning on, with the world, with with your competitors. And so there's, I think, some, some reservation there about how can they make sure that their data remains their data and that they're they're using it appropriately. And, also, you know, making their customers aware that they maybe that they are using AI and that some of this information that they're they're learning on when they're using it. So I think that's that's definitely a consideration that's on everybody's mind.

And, also, just to kinda call it out, like, there's from from the solution integration side, the usage of AI in in kind of the peripheral of how it affects commerce for, I think, efficiencies of of development teams. Like, I I you know, we joke around about it in in some meetings where we're we're talking with clients, and they're like, oh, so you can just use AI to create this app. So it should only take about 30. Right? So, like, they there's that kind of thing where you can use AI to to start to build things and and really it really does speed up the the development process.

But I think that we just need to be careful about how we're using it, and just making sure that, you know, we're being good stewards for our merchants and and making sure that we're we're on the right path there. Yeah. That is an excellent example. You know, one of the conversations we had recently was around data security and privacy. And I think there's a lot of concerns around like, every merchant that I've talked to wants to get the benefit of AI in terms of auto generate product catalog, auto generate images, auto price my products, do all these things.

But what they don't want is for that secret sauce of their instance and their information to be shared back with the LLM. So in other words, they wanna benefit but not contribute. Have you guys seen that use case come up? Maybe, Oliver, and I'll start with you given you're in the hosting managing world. Is that something you've talked to merchants about?

And if so, how do you how do you kinda overcome that objection? That's a really good question that often comes in this way because the privacy is really, really important. Right? And then there is a lot of secret sauce that goes how, ecommerce world merchants work. Right?

Their own pricing, their own customer base. But here is the key thing. Right? One, I would say that customization of the LLMs are way important part of it, of this journey. Right?

So what that means is that, taking the first party data, right, and then training that LLMs on their own data and also, securing that, that customized LLM that specifically work for them in an on premise environments or in a world that is not multi tenant. Right? We're not going to share, the customized element with the other, other merchants or other cloud providers. Right? And as long as we do that, I think we can be, secure the data.

Right? Though they share with the LLM, that doesn't mean that we're sharing with the wall. Right? So that kind of an, solution that we can provide, with customization. And, I believe that that's the future, of how we're going to train the LMS and put in use our merchants where they are very, secure enough to think about, okay, my data is not going outside the, outside of my, my LLM.

So that's the beauty about the customization LLMs and empowering to private clouds, just Very helpful. Thank you. Same question to you, Paul. How do you when you talk to them about this use case around, you know, how the data gets stored, how it gets used, who's learning on it, how how do you address that with merchants? So I'm gonna take a little bit of a side side approach to this question only because, you know, I was, Human Element is involved with, an organization here in Michigan called the MMA or the Michigan Manufacturers Association.

And I recently, attended a roundtable on security in general for the the manufacturing associations. They they don't necessarily relate it just to, AI, but I think one of the things that that kind of came out of that was having, having some data security plans in place so that they so that everyone at the at the company is understands and is aware of, what is the plan for data security? It sounds sounds like a no brainer. Right? But just having it kind of laid out, like, what happens, you know, if data is released to the public that is unintentional or there's some kind of security breach.

And then what is the response to that? How how are how do you mitigate it? How do you communicate it to your customers? And then how do your internal teams react to that? And I I think that the same thing kind of would apply to using AI in the workplace for, even for for data that you're feeding into an LLM is just having a thoughtful conversation with your business about what that mean what security for your data means for you and and creating a documented plan for ensuring that you're taking the steps that are appropriate to make sure that data is secure, that you're communicating to your customers appropriately around those procedures and policies.

Like and then just making sure that people know that if something does occur, that you have a plan in place to kind of respond to it. So, like, those are, I think, the things that that you need to make sure that you're doing. Outside of, like, the the basic, I think, you know, blocking and tackling that we always do, making sure that wherever that data, is is used, that you're accessing it, securely using, you know, OAuth, or tokenization to make sure that you can go and get the data, that that's just not publicly available. So I think that, like, as long as you have some policy controls and and governance around how all of that is used, that you are gonna be in a good place as as a merchant. Well, now is the moment we can actually look forward.

So, obviously, you guys both have a wealth of experience and actually two very different view two different kinda ways that you've solved and seen that the the the world of ecommerce evolve over time. So maybe we start with you, Arvind, just to keep the ping pong going back and forth. Mhmm. How do you think about where we're going with AI? What are some of the what are some of the the big impacts that are gonna happen and and when, from your point of view?

Yeah. So think about this. And, like, today, just 20% of entire global retail sale go to, through ecommerce. Right? That means that the 80% still, goes through a brick and mortar despite all the convenience that we have, despite all the tools that we have.

And why? Because today, ecommerce is built to solve for someone who knows what he wants to buy. Right? For example, I want to buy a black t shirt of size medium. Boom.

It's great. Right? If I want to fix a drywall hole of three inch, right, I don't know what kind of products I need to buy. But always, the heart of a shopper is trying to get something done. Right?

And how do we understand that more effectively, to the commerce world, to the online world? And we don't we didn't have the technology prior. Now that technology is available. And, of course, it has to take a lot of, more years to get there in terms of, like, how we understand the agent, how we, understand about the product, and how they're related to getting things job done for sharper. Those are the things that will evolve.

And I believe that it's becomes more, like, for, searcher to seeker approach. Right? That's one thing that, I I I'm betting big time that how the, the LLMs can help and enable the commerce into or someone who's seeking something to get job done rather than, just searching some keywords. Right? That will really, unleash, a different kind of commerce.

The second one, I believe, is that how we get, a lot of support. Right? And make, purchase decisions to making getting the support afterwards. A lot of the times, we don't know what we're trying to, buy, and helping to make those purchase decision along the way is one of the, major task. And most of the times, what happens today is we bounce out to, yeah, YouTube or some getting some reviews from the third party and then talking to friends.

It's always a lose. It's not a sequential process of buying. And that's going to be, a major problem for merchants today because once they bounce out, they're not coming back on the site. So how do we retain the customer or the shopper when he wants to buy something? Giving those answers to make this purchase decisions is one of the critical aspect in the journey, but also at the end, how do we support afterwards?

That's something lot of peep lot of shoppers don't have confidence in small merchant and SMBs. Right? And that can change with the elements, and provide very similar services like the big box guys. So, those are the two big plans that will come in play, but, but it takes some time for the shoppers today's shoppers to adopt to to those technologies. And also the technology has to evolve in the process, Jason.

So it sounds like you're you're saying, basically, there's gonna be a a a re a a social reengineering of the way people interact, digitally. Is that kind of I'm putting words in your mouth? Yeah. I mean I mean, yes. Right?

Like, you know, it's a social engine. Today, let let let let me go back. Right? One other standard I want to provide, Jason, is that today, 57% of the, shoppers believe AI to make much better purchase decision than their friends. Right?

Certainly, the social aspect will be there, but at the same time, I believe that, we make purchase decision to AI a lot, Jason. Got it. Well, you know, it's interesting. I have a I have a prospect, not yet a client, hopefully soon, who said for the first time ever, their SEO traffic that they got from Google, the they got more traffic from ChatGPT and OpenAI than they got from Google last month. And that blew me away.

So, anyway, I I think I think that's probably an outlier, but I do think it's a sign of where we're going that people probably need to now instead of optimizing for Google, they're gonna be optimizing for LLMs. And how do you play in this new world where this data, is as far as is is used by engines and it's harder to really make sure you're optimizing for that outcome. So I think we're in early days there. Paul, let's go to you. What are you seeing from you know, I one of the things I love about working with you is you you you're able to have your head in the cloud, but you also got your feet on the ground.

And you're able to really articulate how it impacts the merchants and their customers with some of these new technologies and innovations. So from a from your and human elements perspective, how do you see AI in the future really impacting the way business is done? Yeah. And, just a a quick note, like, the about, ChatGPT. Like, there's there's a new lead funnel there because we we've also kind of been seeing that as well.

Like, normally, we'll get see you'll see, like, organic traffic coming in to generate leads, but now we're also seeing though those leads coming from ChatGPT. So it is interesting. I think, and I guess to directly answer your question, like, there's been a lot of things also in the past that are kind of similar to to what what we're kinda talking about now. Like, and I think that, like, if you if you compare it a little bit to, like, training your product data and and your merchants on, like, large language models for data, kind of hearkens back to a little bit the the EDI, shift that happened, like, back in the day where everyone tried to format their product data into this this in this, format that was could be reused by multiple different people, different companies. It's kinda the same thing that is happening with your product data, with any data that you want to be available in these LLMs.

So I think that, like, trying to get those like, your product data into a state that it can be operable and structured and kind of agentic ready is is helpful. And as far as, like, the tactically, like, what can you do to make sure that you're doing those things? Like, as long as you're you're looking at, like, your applications that you're building internally, like API first, And if those APIs, you know, are returning data that they can have, like, standard, interfaces or or models for them. I think that would be important. And then as far as, like, I guess, like, a technology road map or, like, what we're what we're kinda seeing is, you know, we've discussed this a lot internally, and and we're in the thick of it right now.

You guys, at Shopware put out, a white paper about AgenTic Commerce, and there was, like, a quote in there that kinda stuck out to me about how there's, kind of like a pressure cooker environment for everything that's happening in in the AI field right now. And so it's like, it's making all this juicy meat in there very, very quickly. And so, like, the road maps that traditionally, I think people would be looking at to, like, start to think about how they're going to start to to rebuild maybe some of their applications is a lot faster than what maybe they're used to in the past. So, like, right now, we're in this kind of, like, foundational stage, I think, maybe more than foundational. But over the next one to two years, like, I think that merchants and SIs and and businesses need to be adopting these open data standards, trying to centralize all of their information for, inventory, for product information, for pricing, so that they're ready to start to enable their businesses for AI.

And I think, you know, we're seeing that a lot as we start to build these, like, agent ready workflows for for businesses, and trying to get to some kind of, like, future state, you know, whether that's two to five to ten years out where there is, like, real intelligent commerce happening. That's kind of, like, based on all the work that we're that we're doing right now. So I think that if if if merchants can get on the ground and and try to start to, like, structure their their data and prepare their systems for it, that that's what's gonna to help them be successful. Man, I love that so much because what you what I think you the the the thing that you've uncovered in the conversation is really around the change management aspects of how companies behave. And I wrote down, like, there are companies who are used to certain business processes working and maybe a waterfall way and we're deeply planful and these things take months and then we deal with the implications.

And in this world that you're helping companies get ready for, it's gonna break their operating model. It's gonna it's gonna allow them to rapidly iterate and prototype. And so I think the value that you bring to the conversation, Paul, is this whole disciplined approach around readiness for the future. Because what we what we certainly didn't go deep on, but we all lived through a bunch of things that went really well, mobile and social and marketplace is the same list as before. But there's a whole bunch of things that that didn't work, as well.

And so just being ready for either of those outcomes so you get this new level of business agility is probably not being talked enough about. So let's let's do this. So, I would love it if you could talk just briefly about, you know, this con the pod concept is called Commerce Famous. And one of the things we wanna do with this is basically use our guests to tell us who they think is Commerce Famous and who we should invite to have on the pod. So I'll start with you, Arvin.

Who do you recommend that, we reach out to and try to get us on this conversation around Commerce Famous? In your mind, when I say Commerce Famous, you gotta have someone come into mind. Who is it? So from web scale, I would say Jay. Like Jay Smith?

Yeah. Jay Smith and Adrian. And outside of web scale, I would say, BlueJeans CEO, Raj. I think he Oh, yeah. Good dude.

Yeah. And so he's, I think, one that comes to my mind. Yeah. Why? Why those two people?

Why are they commerce famous? Yeah. Look. Jay had built something incredible for past tech. Right?

He basically changed how the hosting can be done, for the ecommerce merchants so they can operate the business, on the commerce side of it. Right? And then we take care of infrastructure. Right? He has this deep data that we understand about the commerce that nobody understands, just like the web scale does.

Right? And that really will help us to build some incredible AI agents and workflows for merchants, who are struggling to automate a lot of these workflows complex workflows when I say that, especially when it comes to b two b, they're much more complex. Right? That's one. And this, why I think Jay would be really good, to be part of this, podcast where he can talk about, some of his understanding deep understanding about the data.

Right? And the other side, I think Blue Ridge CEO, I believe that, you know, has changed how the commerce experience is done, on various aspects, from the traditionally, they started, with personalization, recommendation, search, write some of the things. But now they're, they're taking that experience into putting into agentic, problems that can be solved for exactly that what what I was talking about. A searcher was a seeker. Right?

They're trying to solve some of the interesting problems there. I think it's good to have him, for for the community to hear about how he is thinking about, it will change and what kind of way the levers that are going to be driving that, innovations, Jason. Thank you. Alright. We will reach out.

I, I know both of them. Paul Briscoe, let's go to you. Same question. Who in your mind is commerce famous? So, like, the first thing that I thought about this is funny because, like, the the people that are commerce famous for me, I think about, like, in the past, I'd be, like, on Stack Overflow.

I'm, like, trying to figure out, like, who's done this? What do I what am I doing? What do I gotta to do? And the the first person I thought of was Ben Marks. And I know that he's already been on the the podcast before.

Well, he was the former host for the last two seasons. He did. He is he is why we came up with the concept, Converse. Ago. So already famous.

And then I was, like, looking through all the episodes that you have. You guys have, like, so many Commerce Famous people on here. You got Roy Rubin. Steve, that was, I guess, episode one. Or, Yeah.

I mean, you guys have a lot of people. I don't know if on there that I've seen some of, like, the the people that I do, like, have have seen, you know, on forums in the past or and and I think maybe I've met him, like, maybe once or twice, but there's a Mark Schust. Yeah. I know. I've met Mark once.

Yeah. And so I would nominate him just because I think he, he does a lot of really good tutorials and and trainings and is really, like, developer focused, and and I kinda like that. And then, another person maybe I would nominate, and, I don't know how commerce famous they are, but has been in in the weeds and and a developer in the ecommerce space for a long time. His name is Chris Naninga. So, those would be the two people, I guess, that I would nominate.

Might need an intro to the lab the second one. So I think I've got a connection to Mark. So fabulous. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the pod. Thank you for being the first episode of season three and the first episode where I'm the host.

So, anyway, really enjoyed the conversation, the walk down memory lane, and the kind of look forward. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Likewise, Jason. Thanks a lot.