Sequen personalizes a session without tracking user identity

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:56

   How do you respond to folks who kind of see that as like, you know, going deeper into this like surveillance capitalism kind of rabbit hole and like extracting more data about folks, you know, as they're trying to do pretty pedestrian things like, you know, that whole, I'm sure you've encountered that. Oh, yeah. I hate it. I hate it. I'm very, I'm one of the people that's probably the most vocal opponent.

2. 16:26

   of that kind of, I love what you called it, surveillance capitalism. No, I absolutely hate it. And we don't do that. And for several reasons. One, and this is what distinguishes us from social media companies. We're not trying to create addictive experiences whatsoever. We're not trying to get people addicted to anything. We don't store people's information. It's all an a live transaction and i i cannot tell you the number of times even i've been online um and i'm just trying to find well now i have a kid and i'm trying to find toys for my kid but before i try to find toys for my kid my my friend's kids and it's insanely difficult to do that right and i can actually i'm good at verbalizing what i'm looking for and it's still difficult to find that that thing that inspires you. And so what makes us different is that, you know, we're not

3. 17:24

   surveilling people. We're not like chasing them from site to site to site. We're not doing any of that. You already have intent, which is why you're on Wayfair.com. You're on it already because you want to do something. We just make it easier for you to actually get to the thing that maybe you can't even verbalize to create moments of inspiration for you, spontaneous inspiration for you. And so it does, yes, you know, Priceline ends up making a lot of money, Wayfair ends up making a lot of money, but the customers end up walking away happy.

4. 17:58

   We're not doing anything like price gouging or like weird stuff. If anything, the difference is like maybe cents on the dollar per transaction that we're able to increase. In a sense, it's like you're using the data that's available through that interaction, like a salesperson might in a store. I noticed you were looking at that cell phone a little bit longer. I'm going to kind of steer you to things related to that.

5. 18:23

   And maybe, maybe you actually, you know, you're looking at the cell phone. What about this case also, you know? And, but we actually don't care about the identity of the user. We don't care about your name. We don't care about your last name. We don't care about your location. We don't really care about, like, you know, we really care about that interaction, the live interactive component. You mentioned MLOps several times.