Live Shopping is Back

Drip (dripshop.live) is a livestream shopping platform and community

Published in

Start-up Society

4 min readFeb 8, 2023

Welcome to the 110th edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

Shopping online has exponentially become more integrated into our society over the past twenty years and even more so in the past three. Several new trends have emerged in how people interact with online buying habits. A new trend that has emerged is online shopping via live streams. This is a re-emergence of what was a trend earlier in the latter half of the 1900s when hour-long advertisements covered multiple products and called the audience to purchase the products live. Let’s dive into how this concept is being reinvented for the modern era.

DripShop

HQ: San Fransisco, CA

Founded: 2021

Total Employees: 33 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

DripShop is a live shopping platform and community focused on collectibles and NFTs. The platform enables streamers to build a community and earn a living around the collectibles they love. They are building the first live stream platform integrated with Crypto and NFT technology.
The company also allows users to embed the livestreams so they can capture their audience and allows for developers to build on top of the DripShop ecosystem.
DripShop raised a $23M Series A in May 2022 led by Base10 Partners, Eniac Ventures, Harlem Capital Partners, and Kindred Ventures.

MEET THE TEAM

Javaughn Lawrence, Co-Founder & CEO

Previously, Javaughn started his career as a start-up founder of The Vinelist — an e-commerce infrastructure platform for emerging markets, and thenewdiscussion.com — a livestreaming media platform.
He then spent two years at Bain & Company and over a year at LinkedIn in Strategy and Operations.
Javaugn then spent two and a half years at Eniac Ventures from 2017 to late 2019 as an investor. He then became an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at the company until 2020.
Also in 2020, he joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a Scout Investor for two and a half years where he led five early-stage investments.
Javaughn earned his B.A. in Economics from Yale University.

Sameep Sheth, Co-Founder & CTO

Previously, Sameep started his career as an engineer at Microsoft where he spent over four years building backend services.
In 2013, he joined Goldman Sachs as an engineer where he managed and owed the trade flow for the trading desk.
He subsequently cofounded SenseiHub and served as CTO for two years. The company focused on applying artificial intelligence to research data.
In 2017, he founded TetrusTech and served as CEO for almost three years. The agency focused on Mobile App, Web, and Blockchain Development.
Sameep received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from The University of Memphis and his Master’s in System Engineering and Computer Science from Boston University.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Live commerce is most popular in China where sales are expected to hit $423 billion in 2022. That compares to the U.S. live commerce market, which is poised to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024.
Older U.S. consumers have grown up watching QVC (among other shopping channels) on TV and this mentality has translated to the newer generations who have come to appreciate shopping as entertainment.
Importantly, the U.S. government imposes far fewer restrictions on individuals and companies involved in online commerce than other governments.