The Story of Veeve: Building the Future of Autonomous Retail
Sometimes the most powerful innovations come from moments of rejection. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Veeve founder Shariq Siddiqui revealed how being turned down by Goldman Sachs led him down an unexpected path to revolutionizing retail technology.
From Pakistan to Silicon Valley Landing in America with just $700 in his pocket, Shariq’s father had told him: “You will literally be on your own, but you can always come back.” This was more than just startup capital – it was a lesson in self-reliance that would shape his future entrepreneurial journey.
The path wasn’t straightforward. While his friends landed coveted positions at Goldman Sachs, Shariq faced rejection. “I was so heartbroken with that incident that I kind of wasn’t sure where things are going to go,” he recalls. “I kind of had a moment of realization that I’m not good enough. I need to do something different.”
The App Store Opportunity That moment of rejection became a catalyst. When Steve Jobs announced the opening of the App Store, Shariq saw his chance. He built an early version of what would become like Yelp, catching the attention of both the Wall Street Journal and Michael Bloomberg. This led to his first acquisition and eventually to Amazon, where he’d spend nearly a decade building various products.
The Amazon Go Insight It was at Amazon where Shariq spotted the opportunity that would become Veeve. While testing Amazon Go internally, he noticed a fundamental scaling problem: “I couldn’t wrap my head around how Amazon Go can be scaled into a full-on enterprise solution… primarily because of the return on investment.”
This observation led to a crucial insight: “Wouldn’t it better if you just basically put these cameras on a shopping cart? Because when you walk into any grocery stores or any large format stores, shopping cart is like the first thing you grab.”
Pivoting Through Crisis When COVID-19 hit and tripled raw material costs, Veeve faced a critical moment. Rather than maintaining their original high-cost smart cart design, they innovated: “We figured out how to basically take an existing shopping cart and embed a wing scale in that. So that allowed us to reduce our cost by almost 90%.”
This pivot wasn’t just about survival – it opened new opportunities. Veeve evolved from a smart cart company into a comprehensive retail intelligence platform, giving retailers “the ability to think of their stores like an ecommerce website.”
The Future: Building the Retail Operating System Looking ahead, Shariq envisions Veeve becoming much more than a smart cart company. “When you have the ability to have eyes, these cameras that are basically recording in cart sessions, in aisle sessions, what’s on the shelf, you can digitize all of these things,” he explains.
The goal is to build what Shariq describes as “the retail operating system, where they can plug and play into these microservices so that they can deploy other hardware, they can deploy cameras, and then they can kind of monitor how their stores are performing by just basically having access to a dashboard across multiple different retailers.”
This vision represents a fundamental shift in retail technology – from point solutions to a comprehensive platform that gives brick-and-mortar stores the same analytical capabilities as e-commerce. For Shariq, it’s about more than just technology: it’s about giving retailers the tools they need to compete in an increasingly digital world.
From a rejected Goldman Sachs applicant to pioneering the future of retail technology, Shariq’s journey embodies a crucial lesson for founders: sometimes your biggest setbacks can lead to your most significant opportunities – if you’re willing to look at problems differently.