Daniel Anderson

Daniel got his start in ecommerce as a teenager, flipping Litter Kwitters (a kit that trains your cat to use the toilet) on eBay. That early hustle stuck. After studying engineering at Cornell, he landed at J.P. Morgan as an investment banker but kept experimenting with dropshipping on the side. Eventually, the pull of ecommerce won out and he left finance to build his own brands full-time.

Over the next decade, Daniel built and scaled multiple stores in the apparel and supplement space, generating tens of millions in revenue. At peak, he was running five stores with a team of fourteen. Today, he still operates an apparel brand on Shopify and is full-time on Carti.

The idea for Carti came from a pattern he kept seeing in his own businesses. As his stores scaled, conversion rates dropped. Most of the support tickets coming in were simple questions already answered somewhere on the site. One day he exported his Zendesk data and cross-referenced it with purchases. The result was eye-opening: even the customers who got quick, helpful responses rarely came back to buy. The opportunities were lost because no human team, no matter how responsive, could answer fast enough to keep a shopper in the moment.

Existing chatbots were designed around support deflection, not sales. Daniel wanted something different: an AI that knows the catalog, recommends intelligently, and actually closes. That's what Carti is.

He's based in New York City and believes ecommerce is one of the most defensible spaces to build in right now. The AI revolution may reshape white-collar work, but people will always need physical products.