Consumer VC

Thank you Rick Desai for introducing me to today's guests Callie Christensen and Kelly Oriard, founders of Slumberkins. Slumberkins is a leading children’s educational brand on a mission to promote early emotional learning through a combination of creatures and story telling. We're going to learn what they believe was missing in a child's development, how they scaled organically, and maybe the most creative way I've heard to successfully fundraise as well as lots of other amazing parts to their journey. Without further ado, here's Callie and Kelly.

Some of the questions I ask Callie and Kelly:

1. How did you both know each other and meet?
2. What did each of you think you wanted to do with your lives professionally?
3. How did you blend these two loves physcology and teaching
4. What was the insight that led you to founding Slumberkins?
5. What were the early signals that this could be something?
6. What was your initial approach to distribution?
7. Authencitiy in the brand
8. How did you approach raising capital and why did you feel the need the raise capital?
9. Early on, you had a tough time finding a lead investor what was your strategy in order to land a lead?
10. I know it was a few years ago, but what was the biggest learning from Shark Tank and how was your overall experience?
11. What's your approach to finding an investment partner?
12. How do you think about scale and what's your vision for the brand?
13. What's one thing that you would change about the fundraising process?
14. What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
15. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
16. What's the best piece of advice that you have for founders?

My guest today is Andrew Dudum, founder of hims & hers. Hims and hers is a telehealth company that sells personal care products, subscriptions and and over-the-counter drugs online. We discuss our current healthcare system, what customer transparency really means, his fundraising strategy and what led him to take his company public via SPAC.

One book that inspired Andrew is:

Creativity Ink. by Ed Catmull

Questions I ask Andrew:

1. What attracted you to entrepreneurship?
2. What was the insight or aha moment that led you to found hims & hers?
3. How did you think about the competitive landscape when building hims & hers?
4. What categories did you start with? How did you think about product / category extension in the early days?
5. Did you always know you were going to be a brand that is in many categories?
6. What was your approach to hiring and building your team?
7. Many of the products you sell people don't really want to talk about or it's uncomfortable to talk about i.e. hair loss, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation. How do you think about building community and a safe space for customers to talk about these things?
8. What type of emotion do you want your customers to feel when they use your products?
9. What was your approach to fundraising?
10. Always make sure you had money in the bank
11. Why did you decide to fundraise?
12. What was the part of your business that was difficult get investors over the hump - what was the biggest reason they passed (for the few who passed :)?
13. Why did you decide to go public? What was the reason you decided to do a SPAC?
14. What's the future of hims & hers?
15. What's one thing you would change about venture capital?
16. What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
17. What's the best piece of advice you've received?
18. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders currently building?

Thank you Arie Abecassis for the introduction to our guest today Eric Doty, founder of Loupe. Loupe is a free app built for the modern sports card collector. We talk about box breaks, how he thinks about the sports card collecting market, solving the classic chicken or the egg, supply/demand trap early on and his approach to leadership.

A couple of books that inspired Eric:

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Here are some of the questions I ask Eric:

1. What was your attraction to entrepreneurship and collecting cards?
2. If they can do it, I can do it.
3. What was the insight that led you to founding Loupe?
4. Take us to that moment of what led you to focus on Loupe full time?
5. Describe to us what box breaks are for those who aren't familiar?
6. How do you think about trust and accountability? Validating cards in the break are legitimate?
7. How are communities created on Loupe?
8. How did you approach growth early on?
9. What was your approach to fundraising?
10. What were some of the biggest hurdles or question marks potential investors had?
11. What was it like fundraising during COVID?
12. Influencer
13. What's one thing you would change when it came to venture capital?
14. Do you have room limits?
15. What's the best piece of advice you've received?
16. How has that impacted you a leader or as a CEO?
17. How do you think about communication amongst your team?
18. Is it hard to build culture
19. What's one piece of advice for founders?

Thank you Samara Hernandez for the intro to our guest today, Monique Woodard.

Monique is the founding Partner of Cake Ventures. Cake invests in companies that address the needs of a world undergoing massive demographic changes. We break down the three layers of Cake or themes that Monique focuses on, how she thinks about geography and future of work and her learnings as an operator and from 500 Startups.

I highly recommend following Monique on Twitter @MoniqueWoodard.

A book that inspired Monique:

The Tycoons by Charles R. Morris

Questions I asked Monique:

1. What was your attraction to technology and entrepreneurship?
2. What led you to San Francisco?
3. Why did you decide to become an investor?
4. What were some of your learnings from your experience at 500 Startups?
5. What led to founding Cake Ventures?
6. What particular themes are you focused on investing in?
7. What's your decision making process or diligence process within each theme.
8. What has been some of the effects of COVID on sourcing and your due diligence process?
9. What's one thing that you would change about venture capital?
10. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
11. What's one piece of advice for founders who are currently building?

My guest today is Sara Deshpande, Partner at Maven Ventures. Maven Ventures is a consumer focused micro-fund that focuses on investing in seed stage companies. Some of their investments include Zoom, Wild Type, Angellist and Nuggs. What I most enjoyed about this conversation was looking at what types of businesses were being built on top of Zoom and the opportunities in telehealth. Without further ado, here's Sara.

You can catch her on Twitter @sara_desh.

Three books that have inspired Sara:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Maid by Stephanie Land

Some of the questions I ask Sara:

1. You came from healthcare consulting at Deloitte. What was your attraction to venture capital, startups and innovation?
2. Tell us a bit about Maven.
3. What do you consider micro-VC?
4. Walk us through your due diligence process?
5. How do you access how big of a pain point a company is solving?
6. What are some of the opportunities that you're seeing telehealth?
7. Another area of focus are technology that serves families. What's an example of a company you're excited in this space or a problem that you are hoping to see solve?
8. Has COVID affected any of the themes you focus on?
9. What are some other trends that you're curious about?
10. What's one thing that you would change when it came to venture capital?
11. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
12. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?

My guest today is Morgan Hirsh, CEO and founder of Public Goods. Public Goods is your one stop shop for healthy, sustainable, everyday essentials you can trust. This episode helps to demystify or understand what sustainability means or could mean for consumer products. I also loved learning about his approach to building Public Goods in multiple categories rather than just one category.

In this episode we discuss:

• What led Morgan to leave Canada and come to New York City?
• Why he decided to start Public Goods?
• What sustainability means
• Investor reaction when he wanted to build in multi-categories
• His approach to leadership

My guest today is Alex Fine, founder of Dame Products. Dame is the home of phenomenally fun toys for adults, that helps people to upgrade their self care with toys for sex. They were also named one of the most innovative wellness companies in 2020 by Fast Company. We touch on alot of areas in both sexual wellness and femtech that have been traditionally heavily stigmatized and her journey guiding Dame to amazing heights.

Some of the questions I ask Alex

1. Let's start at the beginning. What attracted you to entrepreneurship and sex therapy?
2. What was the insight that led to Dame?
3. How did you start creating vibrators?
4. What was the process of testing, finding women to test the product. Was there any hesitancy to sample since they were putting the vibrators under their labias?
5. When did you realize this could be a business?
6. How did you approach marketing and brand?
7. How did you think about the competitive landscape in the vibrator category?
8. How do you think about product extensions and launching new products?
9. What are some of the hurdles or challenges you've had to face?
10. What was your fundraising strategy?
11. What's the most surprising thing you've done and thought you'd never do as a founder?
12. What's one thing you'd change regarding the fundraising process?
13. What's one book the inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
14. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
15. What's one piece of advice for founders?

My guests today are Aditi Dash and Joe Hovde from CircleUp. CircleUp Growth Partners is an early-stage consumer fund that takes a data-driven approach investing in compelling companies. Aditi is one of the investment partners and Joe is one of the data analysts. This is a fascinating conversation about building a data base for the private markets and using that data base as a tool to help make investment decisions and discover trends in CPG.

Some of the questions I ask Aditi and Joe:

1. Let's start at the beginning. What was each of your attraction to working with consumer brands and the private markets?
2. For those that aren't familiar walk us through a little bit of the history of Circle Up.
3. One of the difficulties in the private markets is that company information is private. I understand that you are building a platform to help make investment decisions based on data, but what's that process of convincing a company to share its metrics and data with you?
4. How has the platform helped make investment decisions?
5. What are some of the ways that you've been able to leverage data?
6. What is the relationship between data and how you make decisions when it comes to investing?
7. How do you make sure you don't overindex on the data when analyzing a company to invest in?
8. What are the most important metrics
9. Has the platform led to help you discover new trends?
10. What are some of the trends that you are most excited about?
11. Walk us through your due diligence process.
12. What makes a strong founding team?
13. What's one thing that you would change about venture capital?
14. What's the best piece of advice that each of you've received?
15. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?

My guests today are Wendy Tsu who is a partner of new business ventures at AlleyCorp and Susannah Shipton, Head of Platform and investor at AlleyCorp. AlleyCorp was founded by Kevin Ryan and both founds and funds companies in New York. On this particular episode, we're going to focus more on the founding / incubation side of AlleyCorp, which I thought was truly fascinating. Some of the companies AlleyCorp founded was MongoDB, Zola, Business Insider, GILT and Nomad Health.

Some of the questions I ask Wendy and Susannah:

1. What was each of your attraction to innovation and startups?
2. Tell us about AlleyCorp because it's a bit of a different type of fund that we've discussed on the show.
3. What is an incubation studio and how do you think about innovation?
4. How do you think about ideas that could be businesses? Where do you start?
5. Walk us through your process of once you have a compelling idea what happens next?
6. This concept of idea-market fit. How do you approach ideas, markets and evaluating pain points?
7. What are some of the ways you conduct market research?
8. Once you have conviction in an idea, do you have to have your full team's support to move forward or what are the next steps?
9. How many companies do you typically launch per year?
10. Are you able to walk through a couple examples of consumer facing businesses from ideation stage all the way to a proper business?
11. What's your approach to building teams for young companies?
12. How do you interview potential CEOs for these businesses that you're building and structure team?
13. What do you think are the most important interview questions or the goal of an interview?
14. What's one thing you would change about venture capital or the fundraising process?
15. What's one book that inspired each of you personally and one book that inspired each of you professionally?
16. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
17. What's one piece of advice for founders today?

Thank you Elizabeth Edwards for introducing me to our guest today. Leigh Radford, the Senior Vice President, Founder & General Manager of P&G Ventures. We discuss what is corporate venture capital, how P&G partners with brands, and the advantages for aspiring brands. Without further ado, here's Leigh.

Some of the questions I ask Leigh

1. What was your initial attraction to consumer products?
2. How did you end up working at P&G?
3. Of course, when it comes to building brands, P&G are one of the world's best at doing so. What were some of your learnings of brand building at P&G?
4. Tell me a bit about P&G Ventures.
5. Startup studio, partners with entrepreneurs both inside and outside of the company.
6. What do you look for when analyzing brands?
7. Walk me through your due diligence process.
8. What are some of the advantages for aspiring brands that's hard for incumbents to adapt to?
9. What are some of the advantages for an aspiring brand to partner with corporate venture capital arm vs. a "normal" venture capital firm?
10. When you are analyzing online brands, what are some of the attributes they need to have in order to work in retail?
11. Going the other way, what types of brands might work in retail without having an online presence?
12. What are the KPIs you look for when brands are in retail?
13. What's one thing that you would change about venture capital?
14. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
15. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?