Posts by Liam Redmond
LTL Freight: 5 Ways Merchants Cut Heavy Shipping Costs
ShipStation has pulled less-than-truckload shipping into its main platform, so small and mid-sized sellers can quote, book and track LTL freight in the same place they already handle boxes. If you sell anything heavy, that single change removes a tab you have been switching to for years. I used to tell founders that heavy products…
Read MoreWhy Startups Fail: Record Funding, Record Shutdowns
SimpleClosure, a firm that handles company wind downs, has published its shutdown data for the first half of 2026, and the picture is more useful than the headline suggests. Anyone asking why startups fail will find the answer sitting in a bank balance rather than in a market thesis. The data covers US companies the…
Read MoreMerchant of Record Push Opens Emerging Markets Faster
Payments company dLocal has launched dMoRe, a merchant of record service aimed at companies that want to sell into fast-growing consumer markets without opening an office there. The announcement landed on August 26, 2026, and it targets a bottleneck founders know intimately. Here is the growth angle. Most teams do not stall in a new…
Read MoreBuild vs Buy Flips as AI Lets Companies Ship In House
Roughly a third of organizations have turned down at least one software purchase and written the thing themselves with agentic coding tools, according to McKinsey’s latest global survey of business leaders. The build vs buy question, settled for most of the past decade in favor of buying, is open again. That matters to anyone selling…
Read MoreYouTube Affiliate Marketing Now Includes Amazon Tags
YouTube has brought Amazon into its Shopping affiliate program for creators in the United States, and the change lands right in the middle of every small brand’s influencer budget. For anyone treating YouTube affiliate marketing as a revenue line, the effect is concrete, because creators can now attach Amazon product tags inside long videos, Shorts…
Read MoreThis L.A. shop was cute before cute was cool. It launched on TikTok, and things got ugly
The little L.A. shop was a destination for Hello Kitty fans for decades when it decided to dive into a massive new wave of e-commerce — peddling its products live on TikTok. The first floor of the JapanLA store in Fairfax is full of stuffed toys. It houses shelf after shelf of cute Japanese characters…
Read MoreTrump reacts to ‘true warrior’ Maria Bartiromo leaving Fox News
President Trump praised Maria Bartiromo as a “true warrior” and predicted that fans of the longtime Fox News host “will not be happy” after she was abruptly axed from the cable giant. Bartiromo’s sudden exit after a 12-year run at the network with no explanation left the president shocked Thursday night. “I can’t believe Maria Bartiromo…
Read MoreTrump reacts to ‘true warrior’ Maria Bartiromo leaving Fox News
President Trump praised Maria Bartiromo as a “true warrior” and predicted that fans of the longtime Fox News host “will not be happy” after she was abruptly axed from the cable giant. Bartiromo’s sudden exit after a 12-year run at the network with no explanation left the president shocked Thursday night. “I can’t believe Maria Bartiromo…
Read MoreTrump reacts to ‘true warrior’ Maria Bartiromo leaving Fox News
President Trump praised Maria Bartiromo as a “true warrior” and predicted that fans of the longtime Fox News host “will not be happy” after she was abruptly axed from the cable giant. Bartiromo’s sudden exit after a 12-year run at the network with no explanation left the president shocked Thursday night. “I can’t believe Maria Bartiromo…
Read MoreFraud Prevention Draws $156M as Socure Buys Fravity
A quiet corner of financial infrastructure just repriced, because Socure raised $156 million at a $5.2 billion valuation and acquired an AI startup on the same day. Summit Partners led the round, with Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Wells Fargo and Docusign participating. Numbers this large can feel remote from a ten-person company. The mechanics underneath are…
Read MoreAgentic Commerce: 5 Ways to Get Picked by AI Agents
Shopping agents stopped being a demo this year, and Google now completes checkout on merchant sites for shoppers through Search, AI Mode and Gemini. A buyer sets size, color and a price ceiling, then confirms once, and Google fills the cart and pays. Agentic commerce changes who you are selling to. Your next customer may…
Read MoreAI CRM Shifts as Salesforce and Anthropic Ship Claudeforce
Salesforce and Anthropic have deepened an existing relationship, and the two companies announced Claudeforce on August 26. The arrangement runs in both directions, putting Claude inside Salesforce products and Salesforce inside Claude. For founders, the detail worth tracking is not the branding. It is that a major software vendor has now picked a default model…
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