Ulta ($ULTA) podcast mentions
I would have given you my left arm, and I am left-handed, to be carried at Sephora, Nordstrom, Ulta, Anthropologie. I mean, I was, I was pitching to everybody, QVC, and they, they didn't really see the vision of, of what I was creating. There were many days where we had no sales. Having a $150 Revenue day, I felt like an absolute baller. And so I was— I was funding the production through working my full-time job and I wiped out my entire life savings.
Karissa Bodnar · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Thrive Causemetics: Karissa Bodnar. How $150 a Day in Sales Turned into a $150 Million Beauty Business with a Mission · 2026-09-14Yes, I would've given you my left arm, and I am left-handed, to be carried at Sephora, Nordstrom, Ulta, Anthropologie. I mean, I was pitching to everybody, QVC, and I just think at the time they didn't really see the vision of what I was creating.
Karissa Bodnar · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Thrive Causemetics: Karissa Bodnar. How $150 a Day in Sales Turned into a $150 Million Beauty Business with a Mission · 2026-09-14I know the truth is out there somewhere. You're watching This Week in Tech, our show today brought to you by Scribe. Think about how much your team has figured out on their own shortcuts, fixes, better ways of doing things that have never actually been written down anywhere. That's the gap Scribe was built to close, and that's what today's sponsor Scribe does best. Scribe is a specialized intelligence platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500. You just do the process as you normally would, and Scribe captures it in real time, turns it into documentation automatically. There's no manual more writing, no manual screenshots, no starting from scratch every time someone new joins the team. Scribe automatically redacts sensitive information—names and account numbers and emails. As an admin, you can enforce this across your entire team, and nothing is published without human review. Feel confident nothing slips through the cracks. Anyone following this process can launch real-time on-screen guidance showing them exactly where to click inside the actual tool so critical processes get done right every time. And that context can power your AI agents too. Most AI was trained on the internet, not your company. So Scribe helps agents operate on how work actually happens, not guesses. To see what Scribe could look like for your org, head to scribe.how/twit and mention Twit for your first month of Scribe Capture free. Free on select plans. That's scribe.how/twit. We thank them so much for supporting This Week in Tech. It's really interesting how many of our advertisers these days are, uh, are AI companies. I think 100% or close to it. It's a really interesting time. Um, as long as we're talking privacy, LG TVs, The Flock backlash is everywhere. City governments are being told, take down those cameras. Although apparently in many cases they're replacing the cameras with cameras from Axon. So it's not Flock anymore, but it's still watching you. And now retailers are putting it in. Ulta Beauty, which is a beauty store, we have one in Petaluma. Turns out, according to Rachel LaPointe, who is a Substack newsletter writer, turns out to be Flock's biggest commercial customer. I mean, there's no license plates inside an Ulta, I don't think.
Leo Laporte · This Week in Tech (Audio) · Adversarial Clothing - The Dramatic Calls to Regulate Artificial Intelligence · 2026-09-14There's a lot of shoplifting inside an Ulta though. I guess so. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison-Touhy · This Week in Tech (Audio) · Adversarial Clothing - The Dramatic Calls to Regulate Artificial Intelligence · 2026-09-14Stig Brodersen: Just to double down on those points you quickly made there about what could further drive Uber's margin higher, I think you firstly mentioned advertising, and Uber's ads business didn't exist just a few years ago, and now it's a business with more than $2 billion annual run rate. So growing more than 50% a year, and ad dollars are, as we all know, nearly pure profit compared to the core business. That's why we own so many businesses that at least expanding into the advertising space. I mean, MercadoLibre, Amazon, all of those companies, right? And these are the ads that can be shown on devices in the back of drivers' cars, in-app ad placement with even just having your restaurant positioned more prominently on the Uber map while people just check on their ride status, for example, right? So you could even have search-based ads where restaurants bid to be the first result when you search something like Chinese food near me in the Uber Eats app. And I still remember standing, I think it was in Lisbon, last year ordering an Uber and basically discussing how you could best place ads on the map. And it looks like that's what's now happening. And then as we've alluded to, Uber Eats is no longer just eats. It probably needs, I don't know, a sort of rebrand. I mean, you can now order a whole lot more than just food. And honestly, they're stepping to some extent at least on Amazon's toes here. I mean, Uber can bring an urgency to delivery that Amazon at least currently is not designed to match. I mean, I don't know, let's say you run out of makeup and you have a party in 2 hours, right? And you might not have enough time to actually run to the store, but you also have to do all the other stuff that you need to prepare to go to a party. Well, then you can just call an Uber driver to pick your order up from, let's say, Ulta Beauty and bring it to you in 45 minutes' time. And I use that example, not necessarily because you or me just love wearing makeup, but because Uber literally partnered with Ulta Beauty not too long ago. So this is something that is happening right now in the real world.
Stig Brodersen · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum — Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-06Well, it's also a great example too, because Ulta was actually our first holding in the Intrinsic Value portfolio. It was the first company we ever invested in, and we did very well on the stock before selling. We thought the valuation got a little rich for our taste, but it is a fabulous business. And yeah, I was really excited to see them partnering with Uber. And to your point, Uber has over 1.5 million merchant partners globally, and that ranges from A lot of that is restaurants, but grocery stores, cosmetic stores, sporting goods stores, alcohol retailers, florists, and really everything in between.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum — Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-06One big thing not related to AVs or Delivery Hero is that Kroger, the second largest grocer in America, added roughly 2,700 stores onto the Uber Eats app nationwide in January. And then we mentioned Ulta Beauty earlier, and they've also partnered with some other familiar names like GameStop. And you know, I haven't been as excited about grocery long-term because I can imagine a lot of big grocers, I'm thinking Walmart and Target in particular, will want to control the relationship with their customers directly. So they won't want to have a middleman like Uber in the way. And so they may have the resources to build out their own version of the delivery service, sort of like what Amazon has with Whole Foods. And so that was my worry. But again, what has actually happened, at least so far, is that Kroger, a company with every resource to go it alone, has chosen to plug into Uber's network instead.
Preston Pysh · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum — Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-06