Roger Rabalais

👋 Hello world! a life update. After nearly five years working on Netflix’s studio finance infrastructure, I left in March to start a new venture. Together with Claire Illmer, a longtime seller and fashion enthusiast, I co-founded Future Reference (https://lnkd.in/edr2Z53t), a luxury resale marketplace that eliminates listing friction by digitizing product and purchase data. Resale is booming, projected to reach $350B by 2030, yet the process remains cumbersome. People don’t know when and at what price to sell, and the ephemeral nature of product data makes it tricky to craft high quality listings. By archiving and verifying your purchases over time, Future Reference lets you monitor the value of your closet and makes resale seamless and secure. E-commerce product data is fascinating. Its SEO-first structure makes it easy to read and understand, but as seasons and evolving trends push products off the shelf, your favorite brands’ historical catalogs are lost to time. It becomes nearly impossible to retrieve size charts and details for items bought even just months ago. In our time together, Claire and I have built a tool that reads normalized product data from any URL and estimates its resale value a year from purchase. Behind the scenes, we’re building a bot that retrieves purchase history from your email receipts and proactively nudges you to resell, maximizing your wardrobe value. From a technical perspective, this project is a dream. I’m obsessive about user experience but love diving into third-party data. At Future Reference, we’re building a complex database, training machine learning models, integrating with a variety of APIs, and packaging it all in a smooth web app. Having mostly worked at large organizations, I’m constantly facing new problems with no one to delegate them to. My meeting schedule is now full of user research calls and solo “learn machine learning” sessions. Future Reference celebrated its first sale a couple weeks ago. Building it with Claire has been exhilarating so far and I look forward to our next hundred, thousand, and million sales. Interested in resale, e-commerce, or anything else we’re working on? Please reach out! Bought something recently? Check out what it’s worth: https://lnkd.in/eRwdMWdc

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Vijen Patel is the founding partner of The 81 Collection, a VC fund that invests in unsexy industries. Before that, Vijen founded Pressbox, a dry cleaning startup, in 2013 and sold it to Procter & Gamble in 2018. In our conversation, Vijen shared: → What defined his upbringing → Journey with Pressbox → Building The 81 Collection → Investing in Hard Industries → The Power of Patience and Purpose → India opportunity → Sports & family & much more! Listen now 👇🏼 Youtube: https://bit.ly/3XujEs2 Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Tjeah5 Some key takeaways: 1. Breaking the Mold: Coming from a family of physicians, I chose a different path—entrepreneurship. Sometimes, success means stepping out of the expected and embracing your unique journey. 2. The Power of Risk-Taking: American culture's risk-taking spirit played a crucial role in my career. Being the first in my family to venture into technology, I realized that risk is often the bridge between dreams and reality. 3. From Actuarial Science to Building an Empire: My entrepreneurial journey started with a failed attempt at being an actuary. Yet, that experience led me to finance and eventually to founding a dry cleaning startup that grew to 1200 locations. Don’t fear pivots; they might lead you to unexpected success. 4. Investing in ‘Unsexy’ Industries: While many chase the next big tech startup, I found value in overlooked sectors. Investing in what others ignore can yield the most significant returns, both financially and socially. 5. Purpose-Driven Success: For me, entrepreneurship isn’t just about profits. It’s about creating jobs, lifting communities, and making a lasting impact. When your work aligns with a deeper purpose, the rewards are far beyond financial. What risks have you taken that changed your life or career? Share your thoughts below! #investing #entreprenurship #indiandiasporas

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Welcome ecoLocked to the Climentum Capital portfolio! We are proud to have led the €4M funding round together with Matterwave Ventures, and delighted to have existing investors Counteract, Startup Family Office, Sabancı Building Solutions, and VOYAGERS.io joining the round. The investment will support ecoLocked’s mission to revolutionize the construction industry with carbon-negative building materials. Concrete production accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions, making innovations in this field crucial for achieving net-zero goals. ecoLocked is leading the change by converting carbon captured from biomass into functional, carbon-negative building materials. This funding will accelerate ecolocked's efforts to turn buildings into carbon sinks, scaling their innovative biochar-based solutions and enabling 1Gt carbon removal by 2040. Doerte Hirschberg Morten Halborg Stefan Maard

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What an extraordinary Venture Capital Conference. I gained powerful insights of the investment and entrepreneurial ecosystem in the netherlands and europe. 🚀🍀 It is also great to be member of the Financial Study association Rotterdam (FSR). #Slinghot #FinchCapital #NosuchVentures #venturecapital

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Random Sunday Thoughts #121 1. I have been posting often about the macro economic and VC climate. As a recap, 2023 was a challenging year for VC's, maybe one of the most statistically off years I can remember, and their portfolio companies felt the ramifications. The most valuable exact match, category defining domain names that we invest in/advise on also were affected, especially brandable domains, largely acquired by these venture backed companies that are either looking to rebrand, have their global address match its brand (ie: HelloPublic becoming Public*com) or upgrading from a much riskier, less effective secondary TLD (ie *io) to .com. With that said, the end of 2023 and Q1 2024 were record breaking for us at Hilco Digital Assets. We oversaw 5 of the most valuable domain name transactions of all time. For maybe the first time since 1998, venture backed companies are open to, and even pushing, equity as part of the payment for domain name acquisitions. Usually, equity is held on-to like a dog holds its bone. This past spring, we did a deal that involved Series A equity, and recently we have had multiple negotiations where equity is being offered. From 2020-22, exact match domains were selling at the strongest prices and fastest pace I ever recall, but now, there are instances where companies are waiting for sunnier, more certain days, lower interest rates, freer flowing VC funds, more robust valuations, and the resolution of the election. I often use the term "marinate" when it comes to domain names. We speak with hundreds of companies monthly on relevant domains and just because they are not ready to acquire today, does not mean they will not do so when the timing aligns. I can share countless case studies of just this, including Gold*com, which I speak about in my keynotes and podcasts, https://lnkd.in/en92WFSG. I have never had more conviction that the most premium exact match, category domain name assets are more strategically important now than in any time in history, which some of our use cases reflect on https://lnkd.in/eFS_NYXp. All of the domain assets we own or oversee are at HilcoDigital.com/domains. 2. Last week I mentioned I was so excited to visit with my great friend Yinan, who was visiting the US for the first time. After years of Skype, it was so fun meeting him and his  amazing family. Next time in Beijing! 4. I ended up in 47th place in the DraftKings Inc. Milly Maker for The Open, not the coveted 1st I continue to chase but, a great outcome nonetheless. And, I  qualified yesterday for another  $4,444 ticket for the BMW Championship playoffs in August! More on that down the road. This past week, I completed my 750th SoulCycle Inc. ride, which I celebrated with my amazing community of Soul friends. Last but not  least, Friday would have been my brother Scotty's 57th birthday. Those who knew him do so as a legend.. Until Next Week #domainnames #digitalassets #digitalmarketing #Soulcycle #Draftkings

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🚀 Join Us Today in the SF FIDI at Club Quarters Hotels! 🚀 Are you a tech professional with vested stock from companies like Google, Amazon, or Apple? Curious how you can leverage those assets to become a Limited Partner (LP) in a venture capital (VC) fund? Join us for exclusive Office Hours today, where we'll walk you through converting your vested stock units into VC investments. Learn about in-kind securities, unique opportunities for Employee LPs, and how you can diversify your portfolio while backing innovative startups through VC investing with Musa Capital, bring your laptop, and #Colearn with us! 🌟 What You’ll Discover: - How to use vested stock as LP investments. - New opportunities for Employee LPs in VC. - Benefits of portfolio diversification in venture capital. - How Musa Capital is opening doors to venture investing for tech professionals like you. Whether you’re a VC newcomer or looking to maximize your equity, this event is packed with practical insights. Don't miss out on how your stock can work harder for you outside of tech! 💡 ⏰ Event Details:  RSVP https://lu.ma/68x9ydt9 now to start your LP journey today with Musa Capital.

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