S6E6: Andrew Savage and Suma Brands are Guiding Retail Brands on Amazon to Their Full Potential

Welcome to The Room Podcast. I'm Claudia Laurie, co-CEO and founder of Pryve.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, partner of seed stage investments at Defy VC. Claudia and I are friends first and and business partners second. Living in the heart of Silicon Valley, we know what it's like to be on the inside of innovation, having worked at flagship companies like Gap Inc. and Uber. Now in our roles as a founder and a funder, we're changing the face of technology through our mission to bring more people into the room where it happens.

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What's next? What if? Now what?

Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't, which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next.

Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first institutional venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world. The firm has 60+ years working with VCs, helping form managed funds, make investments, and to handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. Welcome back to another episode of The Room podcast. We are so excited to share another inspiring conversation with the founder of Summa Brands, Andrew Savage. Summa Brands finds, acquires, and grows successful Amazon and D2C brands across a variety of categories. Summa focuses on differentiated brands that have loyal followings and unlocks further expansion for these brands. Suma is part of the explosive Amazon aggregator space, which has collectively raised $11 billion in funding in just 2021 alone. We have chatted to many brand founders on this pod as well as venture investors, but Suma is the first startup we have chatted to that has this unique MO of acquiring and helping grow other brands, which is very much a theme around e-com consolidation that we've chatted about. Prior to Suma, Andrew was a product leader at Amazon, incredibly relevant for the space he's operating in, as well as COO of online fashion brand Dolls Kill. On this episode, we discuss why the Amazon acquisition space is so popular right now, when and why founders might want to exit and sell their business, as well as the future of consolidation in the e-com space. Let's open the door.

Andrew, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming on The Room today.

Likewise, thank you for having me.

We're excited to have you here. We always like to start at the beginning with our guests, which for many people is starting with where they grew up and how that shaped your view of the world.

I grew up, I'm right now here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I grew up in this area in the western exurbs of the Twin Cities. Spent my childhood and high school years here, went to a school down in Oklahoma at the University of Oklahoma, and then have spent time living here in Minneapolis and then in various places on the West Coast, Seattle and San Francisco since then. In terms of how growing up here has shaped my view of the world, it's a good question. You hear about Midwestern values, and I think those exist, and they tend to be like family, friends, relationships are really important, being part of something larger and part of a team. And I've always hypothesized it's because of the weather. Honestly, the actual temperature here today as we speak is -18°C, and I went out and shoveled this morning, and it's like just brutally cold. And so I've lived on the West Coast where you could fall asleep outside It'd be chilly when you woke up in the morning, no big deal. And this is a place in the winter, if you're outside and you're not prepared and you need help, like, you can die. And so I think that this idea of getting a group of people around you that care about you and you care about them and working actively together to get through the day and the week and to make things better, I think that to me is a lot about what, what growing up in the Midwest is about. That's something that's followed me through my life and my career and is part of what we're building at Summa. But really this idea that any one of us is not nearly as strong as many of us together. Cherishing that idea of being part of a group and not always having to be the smartest person in the room or the brightest star in the bunch, but playing whatever role you play in that group and on that team. And that role changes for us depending on the context, right? Whether we're doing something in our personal life with our friends or in an organization we belong to or at work, like, we all have different roles in every group. And I think it's really important to understand what that is and to have everybody pulling in the right direction and headed into the same place and really caring about each other and about what they're doing. That's probably what I would take away from, from my childhood and kind of upbringing here.

That's wonderful to hear how the ways in which being a part of a close-knit community that needed to, for some functional reasons related to the weather and otherwise, be there for one another early in life taught those skill sets of being a part of a community, both as a leader and as a participant. I lived in New Hampshire where it was frequently -0. I did have to learn how to rely on people shoveling the walkways and not tripping and falling, which is a rude awakening coming from Seattle where it's typically not that chilly, although rainy. We're in this midst of upbringing and coming through. Did you always think you were going to become a founder? Was that always a part of what you thought your story would be?

It isn't a strong goal that I've had from the beginning. I think as I progressed in my career, it became clearer and clearer to me that I wanted an opportunity to build an organization and a business and a culture in the way that made sense to me as a leader. And so I think for me it became a goal as throughout my career I learned more and more about what I thought worked well, what I thought didn't work well. My values became more established, and I just got progressively closer to that point where I felt like I was ready and really wanted the opportunity to steer a ship, if you will. I wouldn't say from the beginning of my career, or certainly early in my life, this was ever a goal. It's something that I feel like I grew into and was the natural next step based on the progression of my career.

I want a list of all of our guests who've been on and what they thought they would be and then what they ended up being.

I don't—

I think you're our first bass fisherman.

There we go. Yeah, I was really into it and I still really like fishing. I don't have a lot of time to do it, but like I said, not the path I ended up on.

It's always healthy to have some good type 2 fun that you can turn to on the weekends. You did find yourself at University of Oklahoma. Where you went on to have a career in retail, specifically working within e-commerce at companies like Target and Amazon. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

I really wanted a different geography and surrounding from where I grew up to, to experience something new. I came away from it a huge football fan. Go Sooners! I had no real awareness of football growing up, but became a big fan there. That's something that I follow to this day. I've always been really interested in e-commerce. It started In college, I was learning to play guitar, which I'm also not very good at, by the way, but enjoyed doing. And I was like looking for certain tablature books to try to learn new songs. And this is just when Amazon was getting going. And I just remember being like blown away by the idea that like, oh, I can go to this one place like from my living room and find this thing I'm looking for and someone will bring it to me. Like, that is amazing. And I just saw the potential from the beginning and wanted to be part of it. I'm also a weird size, so like clothes shopping in person is like a defeatist experience for me. I'd go out and I'd never find anything good. So extended sizes and catalog and stuff for e-commerce, like, so it was just a good fit for me as a customer. And I was professionally very interested in technology as well as like retail and brand development. Started with Target after college here in the Twin Cities. They were just getting going with target.com. Felt like a really great experience to be at a company that's best in class for retail and brand, but also get to build something new. On the e-commerce side and work with a company. At the time, we were using Amazon to run the target.com website. And so work with like best-in-class e-commerce. And it just felt like a great learning experience. So I did that, I think for 7 years and then moved out to Seattle and spent some time with Amazon. And while they were scaling up rapidly and did some vendor management, helped launch the toys category when they moved away from Toys R Us and did some product management work as well. And Amazon was much more entrepreneurial than Target. And so following that trajectory and talked earlier about leading up to being a founder and really wanted to join like a true startup next. So spent time in San Francisco with a company called Dolls Kill, joined as a COO there, and we built a pretty impressive business from a very early stage. And that was just a fantastic experience of like how to build a company, manage more scope, being closer to that CEO type leadership role. And then that led to Summa. In terms of Summa and what we're doing, I realized what I do really well and what I like to do is take things and make them bigger, better, faster. I love to scale stuff. I'm a little bit less of a white space person where I would go off in a room and conceptualize like the next totally new idea and will it into being. I am like in awe of people that can do that, but that's not me. But I'm really good at operating and taking things that are small and making them big. And so I got obsessed with the idea of buying a business. And so decided like instead of buying one business, let's buy 50 or 100 small product brands and scale them. And so that's, you know, what we're doing at SumUp.

I did not realize that Target started its e-commerce business selling on Amazon. It reminds me of when I was at Gap, kind of hearing about how the early days of Gap selling online got started with people faxing in their orders to the contact center. And then ultimately there being a website. I don't even think you could purchase on the website, but you could call the contact center and they would help kind of like a catalog, but you could at least see it on the internet before you could actually buy. So interesting. What were some aha moments in those days of figuring out how other retailers were going to work within this new ecosystem?

It's funny, like you said, for a while catalog businesses and e-commerce were like connected for some reason, similar kind of remote purchasing patterns. But yeah, that, that was definitely a thing early on. And what's really interesting, I don't know if it's still around, but there used to be the Wayback Machine website and you could go and look at like really early archives of e-commerce sites, like, it's entertaining and fascinating to look back at where that started and then think about where that is today. So really cool stuff. But early on, it was really understanding the fundamentals and what makes the e-commerce channel unique and really adds a ton of customer value. And it's still things that we're seeing today, like selection is huge, and that's the core of Amazon's growth engine. But this idea that one of the limitations of physical retail is you have limited shelf space. You don't have that online. And so figuring how do you expand your product offering in a way that offers customers more choice and how do you adapt your technology in a way that helps them navigate that much broader assortment effectively to find the thing that's right for them. E-commerce has been an evolution of those two concepts, like all the way to this date. It's just like, how can you offer a larger and larger universe of possible things you could buy, but how can you make it feel for you or for me? Or for any other individual, like that individual seeing just the set of things that matter to them. And so it's like their own personalized store. Those themes were coming out in the very early days. Catalogs were a similar thing versus brick and mortar in terms of having an analog there. But yeah, it has really continued to this day, just companies getting better and better at doing those two things.

It's funny you mentioned the Wayback Machine. I feel like Madison McIlwain and I are both fans of e-commerce. I feel like we would probably have a coffee table book or like an Instagram channel dedicated to vintage e-commerce sites. And just what that experience looked like in the early 2000s.

That would be so cool. I absolutely love the idea of that being a coffee table book too, like that it's printed out.

Very meta.

That would be so cool. You should do that. If, if you do that, I want to make sure I'm on the list. I want to—

You've heard it here first. We chatted a little bit about what it was like working with Amazon in the early days and how some other brands leveraged the platform. Tell us a little bit more about what it's like to work with the Amazon ecosystem today?

Different experiences. You can interact with Amazon as a customer, you can interact with them as a team member, an employee, and they have a lot of those now. You can interact with them as a third-party seller and in a lot of other ways. And so there's all these sort of different frames that you can put around that company. I think working with them in any of those frames, I've been in all three now. The thing that really stands out to me is like they preach focus on customer and being customer-centric, and they absolutely walk that walk. And customer isn't a narrow definition, like it's just the end consumer that's buying a product. They think of third-party sellers, like that's a very important customer set for them, and they've invested heavily in making their platform easy to start a physical product business and to monetize a great product idea that you have. And, you know, at Summa, we're fortunate, like those are the types of businesses we look for, and we wanna find those product-obsessed founders who got their start through this path of least resistance to monetize that idea. And we want to reward them for what they've built and then help them scale that over the next tranche of growth, get their product into the hands of more customers, you know, prove the quality, amplify the content and voice and inspiration that comes with their brand. That's one thing that has been consistent for me interacting with Amazon through all those frames is they really do make a conscious effort and are very focused on understanding who is their customer, what's important to them, how can they serve them with a better experience. And that's something that's carried through in all the places I've worked, and certainly at Suma. You want to be competitively aware, but real lasting value comes from obsessing over your customers and delivering really great things for them. And I think Amazon does that better than probably most other companies in the world.

Let's chat a little bit more about Suma and really the aha moment that birthed Suma. You mentioned a little bit about wanting to own and run a business, why not multiple? Tell us a little bit more about that early journey.

Sumo is like an intersection of a personal sort of goal and stage and realization, and then something that's always driven me, which is creating more smiles in the world, creating more happiness in the world. And I think the way that those two things come together at Sumo is I've been through all these stages in my career, taking on progressively more and more scope at progressively smaller and smaller organizations and building more and more from early stages. and I just was at the point where I felt really ready in terms of what I had learned to effectively lead and grow a company. I got to that point where this is what I wanted to do. I wanted the opportunity to do that, and it was the right point in my life and my career to do it. And so that was thing one. And thing two was again, the realization that perhaps buying a business was my path to being a founder analog and a CEO and scaling something from very small. And then reacquainted myself with what was happening in the Amazon marketplace. And realized that there's millions, like literally millions of people out there starting, that have started businesses on Amazon. Many of them are very product and customer focused. Like they set out to build a better mousetrap to solve this customer problem, often because they're a member of that set and they're like, there's just nothing here that's working for me. And Amazon third-party marketplace provided the way for them to monetize that. And so when I started thinking about that and like the profile of those entrepreneurs, they built amazing, and in awe of that, they've started like a kernel maybe of what can be an inspiring consumer brand, but they very often lack the capability or the interest or the risk tolerance to make the investments that it takes to then scale that out of its birthplace on the Amazon marketplace. So I got like really obsessed with this idea of all these brands potentially being underutilized, like never getting out there and getting into the hands of enough customers, and got really energized and motivated by the idea that I know how to do that. I know how to build organizations that can do that. I know how to build the platforms. And so I can really add value to the world and create more happy moments in people's everyday lives by finding these great products, acquiring those businesses, and surrounding them with the cross-functional enterprise-level infrastructure that we know how to build, and thereby getting those products into the hands of more people that have more of those good moments. And everybody does— when you find a great product that makes you smile, like, you tell your friends about it. And I think that the accumulation of those little moments in day-to-day life, like it adds a lot of depth and value to our existence. And so that's our sort of small way of trying to contribute to that just volume of happiness and well-being and like inspirational moments in the world.

Very clear that you guys are a mission-driven team. Quick random question, tell us a little bit more about your name. How did you come up with it?

It's really hard to name stuff, as it turns out. I've named two daughters now. My wife and I named our daughters. That was very hard. And naming Suma was very hard. We really liked the idea of a, like the visual of something growing out of the Amazon, like the rainforest, because it parallels us acquiring brands in the Amazon marketplace and scaling them out of that. I took liberty with the Portuguese name for the kapok tree, which is sumaúma, and I just shortened it to Suma. But it's a very tall tree that grows in the Amazon and frequently grows above the canopy. And so we thought that was a nice visual. You can see the little tree here on the hat. we joke our leadership meeting is called the A-Team meeting, and not because my name is Andrew, but because we're arborists tending these Suma trees. So there's a whole bunch of lame ways we use that throughout the org. But yeah, that's where the name came from.

I love that. That's like such a beautiful analogy, and we need to make sure that we capture a photo of you and your hat for this podcast. Since launching in May 2020, Suma is part of this explosive Amazon aggregator space. Which has collectively raised about $11 billion in funding in 2021 alone. Tell us a little bit more about what it means to be an aggregator, and is that even the right term to be using when thinking about your business?

I wouldn't describe us as an aggregator, but I think it's a useful term, and certainly part of what we do is aggregation. Like, the broad definition of an aggregator in this Amazon context, you know, there are companies that are acquiring lots of individual third-party sellers and operating those together. The thing about the third-party space is it's just massive. A lot of people, including myself when I came back to look at it, don't realize how big it is and how fast it's growing, but it is absolutely the best space in e-commerce and retail. $300 billion in gross merchandise value flowed through it in 2020, but growing at a CAGR that's like double the e-commerce space. So it's just a fantastic space and it's a literal ocean of third-party sellers and of GMV and EBITDA. And so there's certainly been a lot of capital moving into the space, but collectively it could acquire just a minuscule fraction of the total space. And so it, it's not something that feels crowded yet, but an aggregator, as mentioned, part of what we do is aggregation. We do buy a lot of individual brands. I think there's different takes that companies are applying to this. One is the accumulation of Amazon storefronts and maintaining a very Amazon-centric business. And it's more about diversification within that channel. They're potentially looking at commodity products, etc. We really want to continue to be a huge seller on Amazon to drive more traffic and revenue through that channel. But as mentioned, we're also interested in building relationships with customers and helping bring them more customers to Amazon in some cases, like through those relationships. So our focus is more on finding great product, great brands, things that have those underpinnings of value and are less focused on the aggregation part. Part. I'm more focused on the brand building part, but aggregation is part of what we do.

We're going to dive a little bit more into kind of what your guys' framework is and finding and evaluating businesses that you want to bring into your family. There's just like a ton of brands on Amazon. There's a lot of players going after this space. There's been a lot of funding and fundraising for other aggregators, although not a perfect word. Tell us a little bit more about what the Summa differences.

A few things that differentiate us: we have a really operations-focused team. A lot of aggregators came at the space from capital allocation backgrounds because there's some cool sort of financial engineering behind the model, but we came at it from the backgrounds of having spent decades building e-commerce businesses and consumer brands. From our leadership team down, we have people with operations in their DNA. Like, we love being in the weeds of these businesses, testing, learning, pivoting, iterating, scaling, like really understanding from the ground up how this creates value for customers and maximizing that. That's pretty unique in the space. Founders in the space tend to skew more toward capital allocation backgrounds, and that's not us. That's one thing that makes us different. We've also spent a lot of time building what we call off-market deal flow, and we talk to brokers a lot and work with brokers and look at broker deals. But the deals that are the best fit for us tend to be sellers who are a little bit before they are ready to sell. We spend time building a relationship with them. They tend to see us as the buyer of choice because we have a long history operating and growing brands and we care about these brands and the types of businesses we want to buy have founders that care about what happens after and they care about who's taking that next chapter of the story. We've really built the infrastructure to find those types of businesses and those are the types of acquisitions that we make, which I think is differentiated in this space as well. And then the third thing related to our operating backgrounds is we absolutely want to grow and scale an Amazon business, and we want Amazon to love us and what we're doing. But we're also interested in finding ways to get the brand into the hearts and minds and the product into hands of customers through different channels. And so we have a long history building and scaling DTC businesses, deep networks, retailers around the country, experience with other marketplaces. And so, you know, we are certainly always thinking about how do we build this brand and not just about how do we aggregate Amazon storefronts.

That makes a lot of sense. It's such an interesting ecosystem and there's so much knowledge that can be built from building and operating a D2C storefront to Amazon to physical to what commerce looked like 15, 20 years ago. It's clear that you guys have an incredible team to tackle this problem and help other businesses scale and grow and succeed.

It's not a winner takes all space. It's so huge. And I don't think Amazon would want it to be a winner takes all space. What we're doing is really exciting and I believe in it and our team believes in it. And like I said, what gets us gets out of bed in the morning is like helping to get great products into the hands of more customers. But there's a lot of interesting approaches being taken out there, and I think many will be successful. From a customer perspective, it benefits customers. Some aggregators are going to be really good at optimizing like the commodity purchase experience and quality and pricing of those products on Amazon, and that's going to add value to customers. Some will be really deep in like a specific product vertical, and that will add value in its own way. And so it's a cool space to be in too, where there's certainly competition like anywhere, but you're able to root a little bit more for everybody to raise the level of the customer experience in the game and the value in the marketplace because there's just so much space and there's many different paths that will work. And so it's a nice space to be part of from that perspective too.

We talk a lot about kind of firsts on this podcast, especially from the perspective of founder. I think a lot of the folks that we've had on this podcast are definitely not in the space in the space of buying other businesses. Tell us about your first check-in from an investor standpoint for SumUp.

Our seed investor was a fund called Material. It's led by Matt Salzberg, who's also one of our co-founders. He founded and scaled Blue Apron from an idea into a category-leading public company. And they were our first check-in. Like, they'd been thinking about the opportunity from a different angle, and we got connected through a mutual friend. And I'm always on the lookout for people that make a stronger team. I believe that we can be stronger together, and Matt and his team at Material brought some really great things to the table that I felt like I wasn't as strong at in my background. It would be important in this model, and I brought things to the table that they didn't have. And so it was a great partnership. They're active in the business and have been fantastic day-to-day partners as well as advisors and investors. So that was the first check-in. Really happy to be working with and partner with that team and Matt in particular.

So you have the thesis of how you can be playing in the Amazon ecosystem and growing and evolving that for brands. You have the partners, both on the team side and on the capital side to help you do it. Sounds like you just need a brand. Who was the first brand that said yes to Suma?

One thing that's been really fun about this is we tend to acquire brands that we feel really strongly about the product, and we have this kind of unwritten tenet that anything that we're helping scale out there in the world, we would want to recommend without hesitation to the people that we care about. And the first brand that said yes to us in our first acquisition is called Thermaquik. It's one of the leading golden milk powders on Amazon, and I absolutely love it. And I encourage you to try it if you haven't already, but it's a turmeric drink. The traditional way to make it is with steamed milk. I put it in my coffee and it's amazing, and like lattes. You can use it in cooking and recipes. We tried to make popsicles with it the other day. I haven't tried them yet, but I imagine it's going to be at least interesting. It's just a really fantastic product. I use it every day. It's something that tastes great and has the added benefits of turmeric. And they were the first brand that we acquired, and the founders have been amazing and remain partnered with us. That's been the cornerstone for what we've built from there.

Once you found Turmeric Quick, what patterns did you start to recognize in the other brands that you began acquiring and ultimately getting to the decision of when to offer a brand to join the Sumo family?

One of the advantages of this space is like there's really standardized data sources. You're dealing with Amazon Seller Central data, Shopify data. And so from the early days and the first acquisition of TermiQuik to where we are now, we've just continued to iteratively improve that. But we have a set of fundamentals that we look for that are measurable in the data. They relate to the quality of digital real estate, ratings, reviews, rankings, etc. They relate to financial history and growth trends and unit economics, etc. Et cetera. But really at the end of the day, we run that screener and then there's some qualitative points in our process where we're really looking more at the product and the brand and where do we see opportunity for growth based on what we do really well. Is this something that we would use ourselves, recommend to our parents and siblings? And so we layer that on top of it. One of the interesting patterns that we found in his qualitative input to our screener is like, how strongly does the founder still believe in their business? And we want to find people that they still really believe in the path forward and they're as passionate or more about their product than they were on day one. They want to remain involved for some reason, and that can vary based on the deal that we're doing, but they love what they're doing. They love what they've built and they want to find the right partner for it. And we see that as like a really strong signal that that's a great business. And you see a lot that are the other way where they want as much cash out of this deal as possible and walk away. And that's fine too, but we really like to find the brands where we feel like the founders are still really bullish about it and and they love it so much that they want to remain involved and they want to be part of the next chapter in some way.

It sounds like you've been able to find a number of those founders and teams that have come into the Summa family. I alluded to earlier that before joining the venture world, I was actually at Gap working as a product manager, and I worked under Gap Inc., which interestingly is almost one of the OG aggregators because they, while Gap brand started back in the '60s, they bought Banana Republic, I want to say in the '90s, they started Old Navy, and then they bought Athleta in the early 2000s. And have been able to, with scale and supply chain, grow each of those brands into almost individual standstill billion-dollar companies. So I have a little bit of a reference point for what it looks like to work within an ecosystem of many brands. One question I had while I was at Gap Inc. was, is this a retail company or is this a technology company? Because we were doing so much on the technology side to disrupt what was happening and how we delivered our content to our customers and met them at their doorstep or met them in store and so on and so forth. When you think about Suma, do you think of it in the context of being a retailer or the context of being a technology company or something else entirely?

If I were forced to choose one, I think I actually think of us more as a consumer products company. We have retail channel partners, Amazon being the largest of those, and they have world-class technology and distribution services. And that's been a huge component of the aggregator model. An advantage for customers is that as an Amazon customer, you know what to expect from the website and their app and the delivery experience, and they do that better than pretty much anybody else out there. And so we're able to leverage that. Any retail or products business at this point in time is naturally a blend of technology and products and content. On that spectrum, we would tend to index more toward product and content and less to technology outside of our data architecture and the tools that we use to optimize the operations of a brand and to optimize our acquisition decisions that has technology behind it. But from a front-end perspective, Shopify is a fantastic stable platform. It's a really great canvas to paint product stories on. Amazon third-party marketplace, like we said, is the best place in retail to be. They do a world-class job of delivering for customers. And so we are thinking a lot less about front-end technology, and even in most cases, like distribution technology, than I think you would have had to do doing this model 10 years ago. And that allows us to really focus on the quality of what we're selling, the breadth of what we're selling, and understanding our customer sets, where to find them, and the type of content that will connect with them and be inspiring and resonate and add value to that overall purchase and usage experience of the products. So I really think of us more as a product and content company that is fortunate to have access to the platforms that are out there from a front-end technology and like distribution services perspective.

You have this unique vantage point of all of the different facets that are happening across the e-commerce ecosystem. What are some trends that you're seeing in the e-commerce ecosystem that you think are going to continue to gain traction over the next few years.

What I think is really interesting, and I see companies taking different approaches to this, but what does being a brand mean and what is a branded shopping experience in the age of Amazon? I love Amazon as a customer. I like shopping on the site. I like the predictability and quality of the experience, and I want our customers to have access to that. And so I don't think we would ever try to artificially create a walled DTC experience where We held our customers to that purchase channel only, but I know some companies are trying to do that. I think one of the big interesting questions out there is what does it mean to be a brand in a digital space where you have a platform like Amazon that is in a dominant position and has very broad reach and a large group of customers, and they're doing a great job at what they do. And so we're always thinking about how that evolves, and I've seen some interesting takes layering onto that. And so that's something that I think is a question that, that hasn't been fully solved and that there's probably some businesses out there thinking about from new and novel ways and that we'll see coming into play shortly.

Andrew, I'm curious. We chatted a little bit about the future of the e-commerce ecosystem, about Summa. What's next for you personally?

I'm very much enjoying what I'm doing at Summa and looking forward to building a next generation house of consumer brands. I'm super proud of the team that we've built and the culture. Right now I'm focused on balancing a family life. Like I said, I have two young girls who are very entertaining and very exhausting at the same time, and who I absolutely adore. And so balancing that and being productive and good parent to them and being like a productive and good leader at Summa and helping to build our family there and the team and making sure that we're doing things that we want to do in the right way and that we're proud of the journey no matter where it ends and what we're doing day to day. And so those are the two things that I'm really focused on. And for now, that's more than enough for me. Hopefully someday I'll get back to thinking about bass fishing.

As we come on time, we'd love to ask you our hero question for the podcast, which is the question that we ask all of our guests. Who is a woman that has profoundly impacted you and your career?

My whole career and professional development and most of my personal development has been shaped by women. I have had the great fortune to work for a string of amazing women throughout my career, really up until Dolls Kill. Everybody that I worked for was a woman and I took different things from each of them, but I would say collectively, I wouldn't be who I am today as the business person or a leader without that string of strong influences. And I think it's a collective answer for me. I don't know that I have one that I would pick out and say like, this person had a far greater impact than the others, but collectively, like I learned something from everybody I worked for. Had many who weren't afraid to, to give direct feedback and help me realize when I was being a dumb young kid and needed to realize how to course correct early in my career. I had others that helped me become a more nuanced and effective leader, a better reader of people that have helped amplify my EQ and my focus on EQ and, and not just the business problems that we're solving and have worked for just some absolutely wicked smart, intimidating, impressive minds as well along the way. I give all the credit to that. I think when I started my career as good raw materials, probably I'm, I'm fortunate there, but I certainly needed a lot of shaping and guidance and And yeah, I just don't think that I would be where I am today without all of those women along the way.

Thank you so much, Andrew, for sharing that and also for sharing just your story founding Suma and all the incredible things that you're doing. Listeners, if you love a product on Amazon, it could be powered by Suma, or at least it's powered by the ecosystem. And I'm definitely going to check out that turmeric drink company that you mentioned.

I highly recommend it. And just for your listeners, if you're a seller on the platform, if a seller's on the platform, we always love to chat. We always like to share notes and build relationships. So you can find us at sumobrands.com. You can email us at info@sumobrands.com and always feel free to email me directly as well. I'm just andrew@sumobrands.com. We'd love to chat with you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Andrew, for being on the podcast today.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us in The Room podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, inspirational guest, Tuesday, June 21st, 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room. Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. Which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next.

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All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison McIlwain of Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.