Unilever will buy Dollar Shave Club for one billion dollars. Erin is e- commerce back? E- commerce is not back. This is a great deal for Dollar Shave Club and for their investors. Sure. But I do not think this signals a c change. And the sentiment around e- commerce so maybe between 2010 and 2013, e- commerce was super hot. All of VC's, they all had fear of missing out. They are all raising the poor money into e- commerce company is that huge valuations That didn't work out. Gilt group was a big failure. Fab was a big failure. One kings lane was also a big failure and a lot of investors got super skittish about e- commerce. They're still gonna feel that way even though dollar shave club just had a big exit. Erin, times have changed. Times have changed. The market has changed. Things are different now and the only people who should have [ UNKNOWN ] really are the venture capitalists who wish they didn't do more deals like this when this deal was announced. Honestly, we're talking about consumer packaged goods here. I wouldn't be surprised if more companies in this category, their evaluations were ticking up because lets be honest, companies, they're scared. They're scared of being disrupted. They want to acquire their disrupters before they, themselves are disrupted. It's pretty telling in my view that Unilever approached Dollar Shave Club to do this deal and not the other way around. So the way I see it, it's pretty good business to attract these big companies. Yeah, well the problem here is that Dollar Shave Club is not Typical compared to all of the other tiny little startups that are selling their own version of CPG products. So Dollar Shave Club got its start with this viral video that went everywhere and got it tons of free and earned media. And then That lowered their costs of acquisitions basically for their customer acquisition, basically for life, and I don't think that other companies can really imitate that. Dollar Shave Club has a really unique value proposition also in razors, which were totally overpriced and so I think that this is the unique situation. Yeah, but at the same time, I mean look at the deal, right? One billion dollars. Somebody was willing to pay a 5x multiple on the predicted revenue for the year for Dollar Shave. I mean, that's pretty good. Usually in consumer packaged goods, you'll see what, one to two? Something like that? Even when Amazon purchased Zappos, that was a $ 1. 2 billion deal. That was within that range, so Clearly somebody wants to spend that kind of dough. That's true, and I think it says a bold statement from Unilever to say that okay we're gonna spend a billion dollars on this company, but at the same time I don't think that they're, Unilever has that many one billion dollar deals in it. If these big CPG companies that you know they don't have super high margins And they don't have a ton of cash on their balance sheet, unlike tech companies, they're not gonna be blowing a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there. I think this is a kind of one off situation that other deals in this category are gonna be smaller and smaller. That's a fair point. For one show that's always razor sharp, come to Fortune. com for more Tech Debate.

E-Commerce Is Not Making a Comeback

Despite Unilever’s acquisition of Dollar Shave Club
