Commerce Symposium:
This Is Water
An afternoon for commerceoperators who want to cutthrough the noise.
With the support of
Commerce is running faster than ever. Butwhat’s the destination?
Commerce has always run hot. The market shifts, consumer behavior swings, a channel changes the rules overnight… Every problem needs to be fixed yesterday. Then, AI made it both better and worse: new vendors launch by the dozen, each promising performance leaps that show up in the pitch long before they show up in the numbers.
At some point, this frantic pace became the default we stopped noticing. It’s how entire quarters, then entire years can go by without anyone at the brand thinking about the long term.
Commerce Symposium: This Is Water is an afternoon to step back. No FOMO-laden keynotes about the one tool, tactic, or marketing channel that will save you, and no trading tomorrow’s sanity for today’s gain. Just a room of commerce operators we admire: people who are putting in the work, have the scars to show for it, and are not afraid to tell it how it is.
Together, we’ll learn to separate what matters from what’s loud, spend our attention where it counts, and run a brand on intention instead of reflex.
Speakers
Alessandro Desantis
Partner
David Cost
Chief Digital Officer
Zach Feldman
Staff Software Engineer
Daniel Pardes
CTO
Austin Goldman
CEO
Jeff Bobula
VP of Product
Oren Halperin
VP, Digital & Merchandising
The Venue
Enter The Standard, High Line
The Standard, High Line is André Balazs's glass tower on stilts, straddling the elevated park it's named for in the Meatpacking District. Floor-to-ceiling windows hand you the Hudson on one side and the Manhattan skyline on the other. Le Bain and the old Boom Boom Room crown the top floors; the Standard Grill and a biergarten sit under the tracks below. It's modernist, a little theatrical, and impossible to ignore. Walk in and you're already paying attention.
Agenda
4:00 PM
Check-in & refreshments
Doors open, names get checked, and a drink finds your hand before anyone asks you a hard question. Thirty minutes to arrive properly, say hello to the people you already know, and meet those you don't.
4:30 PM
What the Hell Is Water?
Commerce has never moved faster: more tools, more vendors, more dashboards, more AI, and somehow less certainty that any of it points at the right thing. This is the question the afternoon opens on. What’s the water you’ve stopped seeing, and what changes the moment you look straight at it? A short, honest talk about attention as the scarcest resource an operator has, and how to start spending it on purpose.
Speaker
Alessandro Desantis
Nebulab
5:00 PM
Know Thyself: The Arcane Art of Understanding Your Customer
The better we know the customer, the better we serve them, the more money we make. That’s one of the fundamentals of commerce (and the promise printed on every CDP ever made). But what does it even mean to know the customer? Two brands here have gone in opposite directions: one watches behavior at an enormous scale and responds in real time; the other talks to its customers directly, and they talk back. Both of them work—which suggests the useful question isn’t how well you know the customer, but how well you know yourself.
Moderator
Alessandro Desantis
Nebulab
Panelists
David Cost
Rainbow Shops
Zach Feldman
Framework
5:30 PM
Break & refill
Fifteen minutes to refill your glass, answer the one message you’ve been ignoring, and let the last hour settle. The best conversations rarely show up on the schedule, so go wander a little.
5:45 PM
Fast, Right, or Both? A/B Testing in the Age of AI
Every e-commerce team knows the tradeoff. A/B test properly and you unlock real insights, but slowly. Ship on instinct and you move fast, but you may also be wrong. By rolling out faulty A/B testing programs, most brands end up with neither rigor nor speed. AI was supposed to break the deadlock—and for some brands, it has, but not without handing those teams some harder problems in return. In this panel, we’ll talk about how AI is actually changing A/B testing, where human judgment is still needed, and how brands can keep up.
Moderator
Alessandro Desantis
Nebulab
Panelists
Daniel Pardes
Away
Austin Goldman
Shoplift
6:15 PM
Out of the Box: How Brands Create Lasting Value Beyond the Product
A strong physical product may earn the first order, but a strong digital product keeps the customer coming back. A subscription that adjusts to your preferences before you even ask; a mobile app that keeps you entertained; a loyalty program that rewards you in original and meaningful ways. None of this is easy to build, which is precisely the point. Executed well, digital product can be an incredibly strong retention lever—but in a marketing-dominated industry, it’s also the hardest to justify. In this panel, we look at how brands decide what to build, how far to go, and how to tell real value from added cost.
Moderator
Alessandro Desantis
Nebulab
Panelists
Jeff Bobula
Cometeer
Oren Halperin
AJ Madison
6:45 PM
Aperitif & afterparty
The program’s done. The good part starts. Head out to the terrace, argue about everything you just heard, and let the evening run long. Nobody ever regretted the conversation that happened after the panels.
Come for the panels. Stay forthe conversations.