Eduardo Vivas had done what a conscientious shopper is supposed to do. He had researched the gear. He had spent the money. He had bought equipment with the sort of specifications that make a beginner feel briefly like a professional. Then he went into the snow with his friends and had a miserable time keeping up. The shopping had gone beautifully. The skiing required further discussion.
Vivas was from Florida and had not grown up skiing. An instructor eventually spotted the problem: his expensive equipment was meant for someone with considerably more experience. Switching to beginner gear changed the trip. The embarrassment came with a useful discovery. Somebody knew what he needed. He had simply failed to meet that person before reaching for his wallet.
That episode became part of the origin of Curated, the company he co-founded in 2017. It also offers a way into his larger career. Vivas has repeatedly worked on the gap between having many choices and making a suitable choice. Sometimes the missing ingredient was better matching software. Sometimes it was a conversation with somebody who had already made the mistakes.
Before the mountain, a matching problem
His route into technology began without the customary graduation photograph. Vivas left high school and bootstrapped an advertising technology business because he could not raise venture capital. After six or seven years, he realized that success had carried him into work he did not particularly love. He sold the business and moved toward a problem he cared about: helping employers identify people they might otherwise overlook.
Bright.com, where he was co-founder and chief product officer, applied data and matching technology to hiring. Résumés and job descriptions contained information that could help connect an applicant with an opening. A person did not have to look obvious at first glance to be a plausible fit. That premise gives his own unconventional education an interesting echo, although the business stood on its technology rather than its founder’s biography.
In February 2014, LinkedIn announced an agreement to acquire Bright for approximately $120 million. The announced consideration was roughly 73 percent stock and 27 percent cash. Bright’s engineering and product expertise would enter a much larger professional network. For Vivas, an acquisition also became an apprenticeship inside a company operating at a different scale.
He led product for LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions from March 2014 to April 2017. The job connected him with colleagues who later became Curated’s co-founders: Alex Vauthey, Peter Ombres and Annabel Liu. In a career built around matching, the people he met at work became one of its consequential matches. Their next company would bring recruiting experience into an unexpected setting: the shopping cart.
A customer who had bought himself a problem
The gear story is funny because the error is so recognizable. Price supplies an answer when experience has not yet supplied a question. The expensive version seems like insurance against choosing badly. Yet a technical product can be excellent at a task its owner is not ready to perform. The receipt certifies ownership; it cannot certify suitability.
Vivas’s account of the trip also contains a small act of surrender. He hired an instructor. That opened the door to advice about the equipment as well as the activity. The founder’s eventual product began with his willingness to be a beginner, a position that technology entrepreneurs are not always eager to advertise.
Curated made this situation its business. A shopper considering skis, a snowboard or golf clubs could answer questions, meet an expert, discuss the purchase and receive recommendations. Buying still happened online, but somebody could explain the reasons behind a choice. The ambition was to bring the useful part of a specialty store into a digital transaction.
The distinction mattered particularly for purchases that demanded thought. In his 2020 discussion of the model, Vivas emphasized how generic shopping lists become less helpful when products are personal and expensive. A ranking can tell you what many people like. Your own skill level, budget and intended use still have to enter the decision. His snow trip had provided a rather thorough demonstration.
The conversation helps the customer choose.
The people behind the purchase
Curated’s marketplace connected three groups: consumers, experts and brands. The expert occupied an unusual middle position, interpreting products for the customer rather than leaving the customer alone with a catalogue. That made the quality of the expert relationship part of the product itself.
By April 2021, the company had around 1,000 active experts and had connected more than one million consumers with experts since its public launch in 2019. Those are dated milestones, rather than a description of its size today. They show that the idea had moved beyond a founder’s anecdote into a repeatable experience involving many other people.
The experts did not all come from shop floors. They included people with other occupations and a serious interest in a sport or hobby. In December 2021, Vivas discussed a compensation model involving commissions and tips. He also described experts helping with work beyond the initial sale. Knowledge could travel farther than a local store’s opening hours or postcode.
There is a modest social insight here. People accumulate expertise in pursuits that may never appear in their job titles. Someone’s day job can tell you very little about how much they know about ski equipment. Curated gave that otherwise informal knowledge a commercial setting. The challenge was to make the enthusiasm useful to a stranger with a particular need, rather than merely entertaining to fellow enthusiasts.
What the investors were buying
The business attracted Greylock, Forerunner Ventures and CapitalG. Its funding progression included a $22 million Series A in 2019, a $39 million Series B in April 2021 and a $75 million Series C later that year. The November financing brought total funding to approximately $142 million. Each round financed a company trying to organize a service around a transaction.
In its 2021 investment explanation, CapitalG described customer ratings averaging 4.96 stars, return rates of one to two percent, and more than 80 percent of customers voluntarily tipping their experts. These were historical figures presented by an investor with an interest in the business. They remain useful for understanding the proposition that persuaded it: suitable purchases could produce satisfied customers and fewer returns.
A tip is a particularly revealing detail in an online shop. It means the buyer has noticed a person’s contribution. It gives a conversation a visible economic consequence beyond the product’s price. It also makes the marketplace more complicated, because the expert’s income and the customer’s confidence have to survive the same encounter.
Funding figures are easier to display than that relationship. They fit neatly into large type. The actual work is less photogenic: the questions asked, the explanation offered, the customer who changes their mind, the recommendation that fits a budget. Vivas had chosen a business in which those small exchanges were the machinery. An investor could finance the machinery; customers still had to want to use it.
“We want Curated to be the place where you buy everything that matters.”Eduardo Vivas · 2021
Company transaction values. Different deals and consideration; these figures do not represent personal proceeds.
A taste for decisions, and the people who make them
Outside his operating roles, Vivas has been an angel investor. His 2022 podcast introduction listed investments including Telegram, Truebill, AppLovin and Dollar Shave Club. The range suggests an interest in consumer businesses as well as the infrastructure behind them. Investing put him on another side of the founder’s conversation, where confidence in a team has to coexist with uncertainty about the outcome.
That same podcast named Predictably Irrational as his favorite book. The choice makes an apt companion to the snow story: a careful shopper can still make a decision that defeats his own purpose. Vivas’s work has often occupied that untidy space between the information available and the decision a person actually makes.
His public reaction to an Outside feature about Curated was also telling. He praised an account of the experience with its experts and wrote, “Hard not to smile after reading this.” It was a brief response, but its subject was the experience of using the product. The person receiving advice remained the point of the exercise.
For Vivas, the aspiration extended beyond completing a purchase. In 2022 he described a future in which an expert could help with a ski trip after selling the gear, or explain how to make coffee after a customer bought a machine. The transaction could begin a relationship with continuing practical value. That was a stated ambition, rather than a catalogue of promises already delivered.
The stock deal, and the chapter after it
In July 2024, Flip announced its acquisition of Curated for $330 million in stock. The announcement said Curated would operate independently and that Vivas would join Flip as chief operating officer. Flip’s shopping model revolved around user-generated videos; Curated’s revolved around personalized expert advice. Their combination placed two forms of human participation under one company.
Vivas had publicly explained that he and Flip founder Noor Agha had spent time exchanging ideas and discussing commerce. Their common belief was that shopping was social and that people’s knowledge could have economic value. This was the rationale for joining forces. An acquisition announcement expresses an intention, however, and the price of a stock transaction does not tell the rest of the story.
The later chapter was difficult. Humans, Inc., the company behind Flip, shut down in 2025. Vivas’s chief operating officer tenure ended in September of that year. The outcome belongs beside the acquisition in any account of his career. A founder can identify a real customer problem and still participate in a business whose future fails to arrive as planned.
By 2026, his public record included his continuing position as an independent director of AppLovin, whose board he joined in August 2018. The sequence spans founding, product leadership, investing and corporate governance. Curated remains part of that history, but calling him its current CEO would freeze the story several chapters too early.
The mountain episode survives those changes because it concerns something smaller and more durable than a company valuation. Vivas had purchased a solution that did not suit him. A knowledgeable person corrected it. The beginner gear made the day better. For all the financing, software and corporate transactions that followed, his starting question remains refreshingly ordinary: who should I talk to before I buy this?