“If someone can do the same revenue in 12 hours, basically out of nowhere, it does lower the value of brands.”
What does the collapse of traditional brand equity mean for founders still building toward an exit?
Roman Khan (Co-Founder & President, Peak21) joins Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) and Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case and Lomi) to make one uncomfortable argument: the playbook for building and buying ecommerce brands is broken, and most founders haven’t figured that out yet. After three years acquiring DTC businesses, Roman stopped. The reason cuts to the heart of where dropshipping, ecommerce logistics, and brand valuation are all heading.
His Hong Kong summit surfaced the shift in real time: Meta partnership ads back at the top of the stack, Applovin minting operators spending six figures a day, and TikTok-first brands doing $12M months on skeleton crews. The conversation covers why dropshipping from China is nowhere near dead, how Quince is building the AWS of ecommerce logistics, and the one thing Roman tells every founder under $100M in revenue: take out dividends, stop waiting for a buyer, and get honest about what your company is worth.
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Northbeam
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Saras Analytics
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Postscript
https://9ops.co/postscript
Chapters
00:00:00 Move To Hong Kong Now
00:06:46 Dropshipping Isnt Dead
00:13:15 Chasing Bigger Deal Sizes
00:20:42 Is This Sustainable
00:26:29 Cheap Public Targets
00:33:56 Supplements Win TikTok
00:40:01 Going All In On AppLovin
00:45:48 The AI Creative Explosion
00:52:17 Meta Vs TikTok Ad Wars
00:58:23 Inside The Quince Machine
01:05:07 Everyone Is An FBA Seller
01:11:17 Cut Costs Pay Yourself
E120: The Performance Creative Director Hire: Operator vs. Ideator
Operators Titans E019: $450M, 6 Brands & 4 Countries: Why Sunil Agrawal Refuses to Stop
