What does the inside of an artist merch drop actually look like when 100,000+ orders hit in an hour and bots are racing real fans to the checkout? In this episode of In A Pinch, Arthi and Jayan sit down with Michael Rasile, founder & director of customer experience at Front Row and a partner at Ceremony of Roses, for one of our most candid conversations yet.
Michael spent more than a decade as a touring drummer before transitioning into artist management, tour marketing, and merchandise operations. At Manhead, he helped scale e-commerce from $2M to $20M in gross revenue and managed merch operations for some of the biggest names in music, from Harry Styles to Michael Jackson to Pink. He’s also Pinch’s very first customer.
Unlike most of our previous guests, Michael isn’t a fraud vendor or a risk theorist. He’s the person actually in the war room when drops go live, bots hit checkout, and someone has 60 seconds to decide what’s best for the artist, the fans, and the bottom line.
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Michael Vergara
When is fraud really abuse, and when is abuse just a customer taking advantage of a policy you left open? In our latest In a Pinch episode, Mike Vergara (veteran risk leader across RSA, PayPal, Blackhawk, and now Trustly) makes the case for a product-first approach to risk, unpacks the rise of first-party abuse, and shares the origin story of "human-in-the-loop" at PayPal a decade before the term existed. A must-listen for anyone building in fraud, risk, product, or fintech.
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Philipp Barthold
We sit down with Philipp, CTO of Lux Experience, the parent company behind iconic luxury fashion retailers Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, and Mr. Porter. Philipp shares his journey from building neural networks for payment fraud detection in 2004 to running technology for one of the world's largest luxury e-commerce operations. The conversation dives deep into the unique fraud challenges of high-end retail (including a wild fake FedEx truck heist).
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Tushar Shah
What does human-led AI actually mean in practice? In our latest In a Pinch episode, Tushar Shah, CPO of Uniphore, breaks down why humans must set the goals, values, and guardrails for AI - and what's at stake when they don't. From fraud detection to agentic commerce, a conversation packed with hard-won insight from PayPal to Silicon Valley.
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