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Evgeny Grigul is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Virto Commerce, and Sasha Siniouguine is the company's co-founder and CEO. Between them they have spent more than two decades building B2B eCommerce platforms. Sasha built his first eCommerce store in 2002. Evgeny spent years running one of Alibaba's largest foreign partner marketplaces. Since founding Virto in 2011, they have built enterprise commerce systems for companies like Heineken, Bosch, and Volvo.
Justin King sat down with Evgeny and Sasha to talk about the problem hiding underneath most digital transformation pitches: reducing friction and speeding up orders sounds simple, but for manufacturers and distributors, going digital doesn't remove complexity. It just moves it somewhere else.
Evgeny explains why copying a B2C shopping experience into a B2B environment almost always fails, and why the real starting point is treating B2B as self-service built around what actually slows a customer down. Sasha walks through what happens when that complexity resurfaces, whether it lands in a company's workflows, its intellectual property, or scattered across departments, and why the goal isn't removing complexity but keeping the technology from adding more of it.
They also get into where complexity actually lives in a commerce platform: the edges. Custom pricing, partial shipments, credit limits, and the exceptions that never show up in a sales demo. Evgeny breaks down Virto's atomic architecture, built so any piece of the platform can be replaced without disrupting the rest, and Sasha explains why unhandled edge cases are where project budgets quietly balloon, sometimes by ten or a hundred times the original cost.
Key idea: Digital transformation doesn't eliminate complexity. It relocates it, and the platforms that win are the ones built to absorb wherever it lands next.
