This Week in Startups - Rising Above the Noise in Consumer VC with Kirsten Green of Forerunner | E1961

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta - Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist Oracle - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Take a free test drive of OCI at https://www.oracle.com/twist. Mercury - With Mercury, you can simplify your financial operations with banking and software that power your critical financial workflows, all within the one thing every business needs, a bank account. And with new bill pay and accounting integrations, you can pay bills faster and stay in control of company spend. Apply in minutes at ⁠https://www.Mercury.com * Todays show: Kirsten Green joins guest host Mark Suster to discuss Forerunner’s framework on making investments (8:33), how AI will change how consumer companies and applications are built (16:28), cultural shifts that are investable (33:38), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Kirsten Green joins guest host Mark Suster. (2:49) Kirsten’s advice to stand out in consumer venture with only seven percent of VC dollars being allocated to consumer. (8:33) Forerunner’s framework on making investments. (11:16) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (12:09) The value of searching for where businesses are missing the mark, and the “wow” factor of the Oura Ring. (16:28) How AI will change how consumer companies and applications are built (19:46) Oracle - Take a free test drive of OCI at https://www.oracle.com/twist. (20:50) The current state of the consumer search experience and the power of personalization that AI can bring. (24:16) The disruptive lesson from mobile and the next level of being context aware. (28:24) Mercury - Join 200K startups who use Mercury to operate at their best at http://www.mercury.com (31:57) Forerunner Ventures lives within the intersection of invention and culture. (33:38) Cultural shifts that are investable. (36:36) The consumer shift from large to small screen. (40:42) The importance of the mix between direct and indirect revenue. (42:32) Discussing the relevance of “freemium”. (55:48) What the exit environment is like going forward. (1:02:55) What will it take to bring back the small and mid-cap market? * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out Forerunner Ventures: https://www.forerunnerventures.com/ * Follow Kirsten: X: https://x.com/kirstenagreen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirstengreen/ * Follow Mark: X: https://twitter.com/msuster LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksuster/ * Thank you to our partners: (11:16) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (19:46) Oracle - Take a free test drive of OCI at https://www.oracle.com/twist. (28:24) Mercury - Join 200K startups who use Mercury to operate at their best at http://www.mercury.com * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Say anything the fuck you want. I'm going to riff off you and take it in different directions, okay? All right. Something has to be both novel and both the utility. It needs to have an element of uniqueness to stand out in the market and cut through the noise. Okay, yes, you address the need. Then you also have to wow people. You have to give somebody a reason to want to talk about it or reason to want to try it,

a reason to tell somebody else about it, something that captures the imagination to trial. And then you have to deliver on something that's really good. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database,

development and AI needs. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash twist. And Mercury. With Mercury, you can simplify your financial operations with banking and software that power your critical financial workflows, all within the one thing every business needs, a bank account. And with new bill pay and accounting integrations, you can pay bills faster and stay in control of company spend.

Apply in minutes at Mercury.com. Mercury, the art of simplified finances. Welcome back to this week in startups. I am not Jason Calcanus. I am Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures. I'm so excited for my guest today. It's Kirsten Green, who is the founder of Forerunner Ventures. She founded it 12 years ago, has raised, in my estimation, about $2.3 billion.

And for anyone who doesn't know, to go from zero in 12 years founding a firm raising $2.3 billion is an enormous achievement. She is probably the best known consumer investor in venture capital of our era, having back players like Chime, Orby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Glacier, Hotel Tonight, and others. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Mark. And thank you for that very kind introduction. It's pretty succinct, right?

It's pretty succinct. I hit amazing highlights in 45 seconds or less. Listen, I want to start with founder advice, okay? I like to just get into the meet and then we'll back up a bit and we'll talk about the market. I want to start out with a bit of advice for founders so we can give some value before we step back and talk more broadly about the market. If I look at my data, I think about 7% of VC dollars are going into consumer companies these days. that's pretty small relative to what it was in the past. Let's say it's out of favor right now. Hopefully it doesn't stay that way. But if you were a founder trying to raise money in this market

where only 7% of the dollars are going into consumer, what would you do to stand out? And why are you still so bullish about consumer? I think that to start with why is so little funding going to consumer businesses is relevant to state that, which is it's been expensive to build consumer companies. There was this thing called social that came online. It really created an opportunity for businesses, digital businesses to get in front of consumers and for there to be network effects and all of that.

And I think it allowed discovery and propelled discovery. It has gotten expensive. It's gotten crowded. It's gotten expensive. One of the things that I think exciting about consumer businesses is they do have the potential to go after large markets, but you also have to get large audiences to really demonstrate and show your product. And that can be, you know, that is an expensive endeavor to get after.

So one, it's just a lot of upfront marketing and cost. Two, it's a very crowded marketplace because there are low barriers to entry. There's high barriers to scale, but there's relatively low barriers to entry. The internet has become a overwhelmingly crowded space. And rising above the noise is hard. It's harder than ever before. And in the face of crowded ad markets and expensive ad markets, it's even harder. And then there's the reality that, like, consumers can be fickle.

And I think that scares people more than it needs to. But that's like a prevailing, you know, kind of perspective. And so all of that sort of has people leaning out on consumer in general from the investment side. I think things do go cyclical. I want to explain to users just how this works. Okay. So upfront was doing a lot of consumer between 2020. to like 2015, 2016, and we actually ourselves carved back and started focusing way more on B2B

and way more on like tech, deep tech products starting around 2018. And I want to explain why. Chris Dixon, I think, says it best. He said the social networks are about attract and extract. And what he meant was in their growth phase, they try to attract massive audiences of viewers and massive audiences of people who want to spend money. Once they get the network effect, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, then they're in extract mode. So give an example of Instagram. Instagram would let you post anything you want for a while if you were a brand. And then what they started doing is reducing the amount of organic traffic they would put you in front of. But over the last few years, if you are a brand on Instagram

and they do a post, only 17% of your audience sees your post. Why? Because Instagram, Meta, knows that if they can reduce the footprint of what you're actually seeing, you actually then have to pay to get in front of your audience. That's extract. So the cost of acquisition went up dramatically because these platforms became big and extractive, and there has to be new ways to get to cost effectively in front of customers. Am I on the right track? Do you see acquisition with the same problem, or do you see it differently? That was a great explanation, and I definitely have seen that whole curve. It went from something that you could exploit from a business and get in front of consumers to something that is very expensive and challenging to do. So I think it goes back to what is a core

premise for any ultimately successful business is why do you have a right to be in business? Why does somebody care? What are you doing that solves a problem? What are you doing to meet a need in the market. How are you doing it better than anybody else? How is your product a standout? How is your experience incredibly delightful? How is your value proposition at some point a no-brainer for a consumer to buy into? And that is a really high bar.

It needs to be novel. It needs to be something that's just, it's not like I'm going to take something that everyone already does and put a nice brand on it and have a good marketing campaign. Maybe you're willing to do that, but I imagine you're looking for something a little bit more novel in terms of something that really hasn't existed and might be writing a new trend? Or how do you look at it? Yeah, I mean, I think actually, Mark, even harder, something has to be both novel and both the utility. It needs to have an element of uniqueness to stand out in the market and cut through the noise. Okay, yes, you address the need. Then you also have to wow people.

You have to give somebody a reason to want to talk about it or reason to want to try it, a reason to tell somebody else about it, something that captures the imagination to trial. And then you have to deliver on something that's really good. And then you have to do it enough that, like, people come back. And ideally... Also, that there were lower barriers to entry. You also have to do something that's defensible and not easy for other people to be able to do.

Right. And it's like, you know, I think that people often want to know, like, what is the one thing you have to do or the two things you have to do. And the reality is it's a whole cocktail of things that you have to do. It's a mosaic approach on every level. And that is what makes it as hard as it is. But ultimately, the ability to get those things to interplay correctly can really have this effect of something that stands out that gets above the zeitguise that becomes part of our routine and becomes like so many consumer businesses have become like verbs. You Google something, you Uber something, you Airbnb, you door dash it.

So I want to talk about why you're so much better of a consumer investor than I am. I'm probably going to give some compliments to your colleague, Yuri Kim. So many years ago, this funny Finnish team came to see me. They came to see me with this really weird product, which was a ring. I literally said to my partner, Hamay, who brought them in, this is at the seed round before you invested. And I'm like, no man is going to fucking wear any other ring other than their wedding ring, not going to happen, end of story. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong. The company was called

O-R-R-R-A for anyone who doesn't know it. It is the single most important product in my personal life that I've used in the last five years. I am a very big evangelist on ORA Ring. I'm not an investor, to be clear to anyone listening. I don't have even five shares of the company, but it's transformed like almost how I live my life and my health because I wear it. every single night and it has changed my behavior. There are other options. There's eight sleep. You can have your Apple Watch.

I could have whoop or other things. But nothing has had the efficacy as OroRing has. And you as a firm must have seen something I didn't see in that. I'm just curious. What do you think it was? Maybe this is a great example actually to sort of articulate what our kind of heuristic or framework is for making investments. And like it's really kind of the then diagram of three.

big things coming together. So on the one hand, consumer demand. And that is really understanding feet on the ground, what's going on with people. Like, how are their proclivities and needs and preferences changing? I think with respect to like health and wellness to dig on that a little bit and color it for aura, people are so disappointed in the health care system. They're so frustrated by the health care system. If you haven't been abandoned by it yourself, you've heard of, you have a loved one has or you have a close friend who has, that people are. finally at the place now where they're taking things into their own hands. And part of that is because we have information and we're starting to get more tools and we're being more proactive about it.

And so health is really a huge category and focus for us. We think that the consumers opening up their wallet for it and they're going to continue to open up their wallet for it. It's not just health care. It's well care. It's moved into the zone of being proactive. It's part of living your best life. In fact, there's a building narrative that supports that trend. And we see that as having gone beyond just the hardcore kind of early adopters getting into the mainstream. So it's an area of consumer spend, we think, is continuing to grow. So we're spending time there. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2 startup.

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earlier, which is like healthcare is missing the mark. So like, how do we live healthier, better lives? Like what products, services can help us do that? In the realm of wearables and data and quantitative self, those are things that didn't exist before. There are tools that people can use. There are things that can inform decisions and build habits. So that's a new product and a new service to meet that need. And then you go down to kind of like the technology and the business model innovation. And the reality is, is that the ability to get all of the data off of your finger and to put it into a small little device like a ring is something you couldn't have done a few years ago. But at the time when ORA was just starting, they were really pushing the envelope on what could happen in a very small chip, in a very small device, and bringing something to life that couldn't be brought to life before.

And that when you're first to market is an advantage in just standing out, right? So going back to what we're talking about before is like, what's the wow factor? There are several other rings on the market now. So like competing on the form factor isn't enough. But at the time, it was novel. And maybe you would have looked at it and been like, I don't want to wear another ring. I'm not even terribly comfortable having one ring. But there's another part of you that's so interested in your health, that's so interested

in the game of health and keeping up with it that you're willing to try it. And then you're wowed by the experience. Yeah, I think that there were people who came out before O'RRing, by the way, and I'm sure you know this. Brad Feld famously had invested and talked a lot about this. It was like, sleep is important, a quality of life. And therefore, I want to track my sleep. But they were little things you were on your head.

And what they didn't quite get right, I think, is the form factor, you know, many people have a partner in their bed and you don't want to look, unless you have to, you don't want to be that person with the funny thing on your head. So nailing the ring, I think, this is my wedding ring, and I'm very happy to wear a ring. I wear my aura ring only to sleep. And it's perfect for me for that. I know many people wear it for exercise. But nailing that form factor, I think, was a big unlock. It was. And I think from our standpoint, we built early conviction that there would be enough willingness to do that, given the strength of the value proposition in the data and the other information people wanted.

It also has the factor of like, it's on your person. So you're walking around with it and you can talk about it versus that headband that you just referred to. The only person that's going to see it is the person's sleeping next to you. And that's probably an unfortunate display of the product at that point in time. Yeah. The thing I would say to anyone thinking about consumer that I've often thought about was Livestrong. And obviously, when the person behind your brand becomes a fraud, it's harder. But, you know, people proudly wore, if you don't know, it was Lance Armstrong's thing. And they

proudly wore the yellow band. And in a way, like, wearing it was a status symbol. It was like wearing, I don't know, whatever, you know, people who want to wear a brand around Balenciaga or whatever. And it was a display of like a lifestyle choice that they made. And I, think wearing an or a ring is that. It's a conversation piece. It's like I have this thing that is important to me. You don't wear it not typically on your wedding finger. So you see people wearing it on their, what is that, your forefinger or whatever. Even I noticed it in TV shows like Jennifer Aniston, I think was on the morning show or whatever. And she wore one on the morning show. And I'm like, oh, she's got an or a ring on. So I think it does. Like if you can have a product for which

people wear it with pride and the brand of it. The other example I would give you of a company Weback was Ring, you know, the security doorbell company. What they did that was super unique because obviously you don't walk around with your ring camera, but they built a unique sound on your phone and it was different than any other sound when someone went in front of your house.

So when I'm at dinner and I hear that ring sound go off, I'm like, they got a fucking ring. And it's a Ching, right? And hats off to Jamie Simmonoff for understanding that. I have encouraged every company that has notifications to do that, like have a unique signature or footprint, that people feel pride in that thing going off. Exactly. That's good advice.

We're sitting here in 2024. The topic that everyone in the industry talks about is AI. So I really want to come at this from two perspectives. I first want to talk about in what ways do you think AI will change how consumer companies or applications are built. Well, first off, yes, we're all talking about AI. I'm actually really excited about generative AI and all the new products and services that can be imagined and come to life. And it's always hype at the beginning because there's, I think, that moment of creativity where just lots of stuff's being thrown up, you know, being being played with and tested and

who knows how much of it is viable. But you kind of got to go through that phase to get to the, okay, this is actually going to work and this is going to be a real business. But if you kind of step back and say, I actually don't think that many of the premises change. I think it maintain the basic premise of like, are you addressing a need? Are you going to offer a great experience and you know how to connect with your user on that? Right. And so I think that in that realm, like AI is like, does it make your product better? Can you leverage it to make your product and your experience better?

Can you leverage it to make your product possible that wasn't possible before or wasn't economically viable before? All the other stuff, like what's going on with people? How are there needs? Like that framework maintains and persists. It's just now that there's like a new tool of the toolkit or there's new advancement to maybe improve a product or bring new things to life. Have you started to think about, and I don't think anyone has the answer to this, so I want to precious with that. But have you started to think about how consumers want to interact with technology differently because of AI? Yeah, we have. It's super fun to start dreaming about that, right? And that's all anybody's doing is dreaming right now. We don't yet know. We haven't,

we haven't seen it. But we've been doing a lot of primary research with users and obviously meeting a lot of companies and seeing a lot of like early adoption. And I think that the framework that we're working off of is kind of two-dimensional, if you will. So it's like two main axis maybe. So one is do it with me or do it for me. And there's a spectrum of that. So do you know, do you have the AI bring you along and learning something, doing something better, or does it just take it off your plate and do it? And everything in between, right? And then the other one is do it faster or do it better, do it higher quality. And if you think about plotting those on a X and Y axis, we're just exploring like, okay, where is the biggest pull coming from on that?

And I think for different types of services or experiences, it's different. It lands in different spots on those quadrants. There's always a say-do gap with people. So I think you've got to kind of think practically about like, what do people, what do people say? How are the actions mapping to it? What do you really believe it will land? A lot of it feels like the do it with me and do it higher quality is where people are

are focused right now. And maybe that's where we are on the adoption curve. But I think that in the context of that, like green-filled opportunity. All right, AI might be the most important new technology. Well, ever, we know that. And it's storming every industry. Literally billions of dollars are being invested. But the problem is AI needs a lot of processing power. It needs a lot of speed. So how do you compete without your cost spiraling out of control? Well, it's time to upgrade to the next generation of cloud with Oracle Cloud infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and all your AI needs, and OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offering one

consistent price instead of variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and at less than half the cost than other clouds. So if you want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x, and Databricks, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash twist. That's right, oracle.com slash twist, oracle.com slash TWIST. I think about my own behavior and my own interaction with AI. Like everybody, chat GPT comes out and you play with it all the time and look at all the amazing things it could do. And then most of the individual use case, is for me don't persist. They were kind of fun experiments or whatever. I have been more struck by

perplexity. I don't know if you use perplexity, but I don't go to Google anymore. And I think it is really, maybe Google will then catch up or deliver new products. But what I like about perplexity is usually if I go to Google and I do a search, they're putting up a bunch of ads in front of me. I think people call it 10 blue links or whatever. I think Brad often calls it that Kersner. So you get 10 blue links of ads in front of you. And even if I click on organic search, I might then go to a web page that I find out is really just gaming me as a customer acquisition tool for the real end product. So, like, there's so much work now that goes into finding information. With perplexity, I ask the exact same question I might want to know. It gives me the answer. And then it provides me

links to relevant sites that I can click on just to double check that the answer is correct and not hallucinating. And I find that's changing my behavior of how I'm interacting with the technology. I mean, that's a really prime example of like what I think is like the next era of real opportunity, which is we're just talking about it around our table as sort of the shift from access to edit. So for the last two decades, if you will, technology has been unlocking things. It's been opening up access to information. It's been opening up social network. It's been opening up the ability to get information at any time, to buy products anywhere. It's really been more about creating accessibility. When we look deep into what's going on with people and, you know,

the nuances of how their behaviors are changing, we believe that like what people really want now is some edit. It's too much. It's become overwhelming. That search experience that you described, it's not productive. It's actually not saving me time. It might be wasting my time. And people are like, you know what? I want something that is like I give all this information to technology. Why can't it do a better job of personalizing to me?

Personalization has been talked about for two decades. I think I've invested in plenty of companies where people have said, this is personalization. Just hasn't, hasn't delivered. If you go to Amazon today or I go to Amazon Day, we'll probably go to the same page. I mean, it's just not. And so I think for the first. Amazon, like sometimes personalization. Probably the business models have been grounded in that too, right?

So if you think about most of the, like a lot of the companies have been built at a time when, you know, a decade ago and the landscape was different and then formed the business model that they have and you get down the path of building a business and you've got to kind of work within the confines of that. Well, this is a step change. What's possible now? Because Gen. I does make the possibility of personalization or it does make personalization actually possible.

And I think that is going to create an entirely new expectation, really, from the consumer, on what a great experience is. And it's going to, you know, I think that it's going to be part of a set of wow factors that bring new users into new products. And I think it's going to beg for reinvention of business model. Lots of change happening there. I think people have forgotten just how disruptive mobile phones were, meaning, you know, we had a way of interacting with the web before mobile existed. And then mobile came and obviously it changed the

screen size. It changed. It knew where I was. It had new behaviors like I walked down the street and I open Yelp and I want to know coffee places around me because I'm in a different place. So it had location. It could on healthcare as we talked about earlier, like I'm a huge user of Strava. I don't know if you've ever used Strava, but it could know the route that I ran or the route that I went biking. And so having mobility really changed how we interact with technology. And I think AI is going to do that or is already starting to do that because it changes. You know, the area I've been fascinated with for 30 years, I'm too old, called HCI, which is human computer interfaces. Like, how do we as humans interface with technology?

I think technology's become too overwhelming and what AI has the ability to do is extract away a lot of the bullshit and get us quicker to what we want out of the technology. Right. It's the next level of being context aware, right? And the analogy of mobile is really relevant. Like, what you described, mobile made the idea, you know, the possibility of being location context aware made the experience magical or that much better, that much more useful. Now, if you enter, like, really being personalization, like being all of the context that is out there about people and into an experience, like, that's a whole new level of opportunity.

And I hope, and I will just say out loud, what I'm most excited about is the hope that we finally can remove this barrier between us and the answer, which is a device or a screen, and move. towards more audio-based commands, audio-based interaction. Maybe it's getting closer to her, you know, the movie. Sam Altman. We all probably did the same thing this week after the Open AI and the Google announcements earlier this week, went home and played with these new tools, right? And I found myself that night or the evening after putting my daughter to bed, she's 10, and showing her having a chat GPT conversation.

And we, I mean, we stayed up too late because we got so into it. We were talking about everything from book reviews. Like, these are the books we're reading, but we're really not into it. How do we get into it? And, you know, getting some advice on actually how to navigate and understand a character and process a book to beauty product reviews, to what's cool in sneakers, to asking about news and what was more important. I mean, just on so many dimensions.

And she was so delighted. It was amazing. I mean, we were giggling and having so much fun. And she said to me, mom, I don't even need any of the social. I don't even need YouTube. Just give me chat GPT. She was like, I'll, I mean, she was asking for like that because she's been asking for YouTube and everything. I've been like, no.

Right. So she's like, I just want chat GPT. She was so excited. And I said, well, it's new. I don't know. No. We're not going to talk about this tonight. Plus, it's past your bedtime.

Let's go to bed. So she rolled over. Five minutes later, she turns around and looks at me with a terrified look on her face and a tear streaming down her face and said, what if what that computer told us is not real? Oh, good for her. What if that's not real? How would we know? And then we thought that's what, and she just, she went pretty quickly down the rabbit

hole. Is God real? She didn't go that far, but let me tell you, she did. She didn't have a good night of sleep. And this morning she came in and I was typing something on my computer and chat GPT asking a question. She goes, is that chat GPT? And I said, she goes, oh, I'm scared of it.

So we've got work to do on this. I mean, we've got work to do. It's very exciting. And I'm very bullish on it and very positive about it. And I definitely want to put that forward to my daughter. But like, we got to be careful how it gets executed. Most startups have tight runways. So keeping your finances in order is critical.

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Hillary Clinton selling babies and for sex or whatever. And it's like absurdity, right? Like any rational person. So a relatively rational person, I will say, took a gun to Washington, in D.C. to this pizza parlor to rescue the children. And when you think about how being part of a tribe and hearing and getting things reinforced that are your ideas can lead you to action into a belief system that on the face of it is absurd, now you take an image that looks exactly like Hillary, a voice that sounds exactly like Hillary, a room that looks exactly like the pizza parlor, you put that online, you share it with people, you have conversation, people believe it. Think about that world. Like, we're going to have to be in a world where we need real identity

and we need to be confident that something is real identity and the answer is a real answer. And I'll just say one last thing, Kirsten, is also the model that these are trained on is susceptible to interference. So do you think if you ask in China, tell me about Tiananmen Square, you're going to get a real answer? Of course you're not. So the models that it's trained on are going to be trained to help with propaganda of what people who have large amounts of money and resource and a vested interest want us to hear. I know. The edit that we're excited about getting in the face of being overwhelmed also has this downside. Who's doing the editing? What are the guardrails on the editing? I want to ask you more about your great firm, Forerunner Ventures. I went to your website.

It said something interesting. I don't see on any other way. website for venture capitalists. Most of us have boring websites. And it's said that you live at the intersection between invention and culture. How do you define, how do you think about what popular culture is? So to make culture like for one minute a little less sexy, but to make it a business conversation, we put it there because to us like culture is a driving, it's a driving component of demand. Okay. Right. And ideally, you're building, you're inventing into the demand curve. Those are two things that we are always exploring, like where's the opportunity as we're thinking, particularly about early stage businesses, right? So you're trying to build into something new. So that makes culture

highly relevant in the context of that. When people say culture, they generally think of pop culture, right? But really culture is way more than that. And in the context of what we're doing here, it's more along the lines of how are people's needs changing, their preferences changing, their behaviors changing. So that really that's driving the demand and the need. I think that like there's a lot of ways to get to a belief system around that or some ideas or learnings around it. I think it starts with being curious. You know, being curious, wanting to know the answers to those questions, being open-minded about it, being flexible about how you kind of imagine. imagine what a signal today might mean tomorrow for a future action or behavior.

Can you give me an example in the last 10 years? So I'll give you a really wide net of a cultural shift that you've noticed in society and how something like that could become investable. I didn't prep you for this. So you can punt it. I have an example, but I want to lead with you. I mean, I love the question. And we can probably play with this for an entire podcast. We actually already talked about this, Mark, when we talked about health, right? It's been a cultural shift in how people view about health. It's still very much underway. It's not something that's like, I think the way everybody in our country talks about health. But I think that health has become wellness. And I think that the culture is moving towards taking responsibility for having your own

healthy life, not waiting until you're sick and then being frustrated that somebody wasn't able to save you. And so that really is a cultural shift, which is, is driving, which is in the form of demand for new products and new services. Are you a millennial or Gen X? Are you Cusp? I'm a Gen X. Cus. Okay, Gen X. Thank you. I'm a Gen X by birthday. I'm a Gen X by birthday, but I'm like maybe a Z, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're way too cool for Gen X. But listen, I'm very clearly, Jenna. And I want to talk about a cultural change as a way to kind of tee up a

softball for you. Here's something I noticed. When I grew up, if you went to a therapist and I didn't, I'm Gen X. And even if I did, I would pretend like I didn't. I told nobody. Absolutely nobody. When I first started going to a therapist 20 years ago, I told nobody. When someone's like, oh, your insurance will cover it. I'm like, no way.

I don't want my work to know that I'm going to a therapy. I mean, nobody. I told my parents. And most insurance did not cover it. No. Yeah. So I told nobody because I'm Jenna. I didn't tell no one.

I didn't go. I really didn't. I swear. Sorry for you. But no, of course, I'm very open-minded to it. But my generation wasn't. And now, like, I'll be talking to someone young in my office, let's say 28 years old. And I'll say, hey, Friday, 3 p.m., we have this meeting.

Can you be there? And he or she will say, I can. I'm really sorry. I have an appointment with my therapist. And I'm like, you don't have to tell me. Like, I'm not. Like, that's HIPAA compliance. And they're like, no, it's okay.

I go every other Friday. And I think that's a perfect example because it's become a cultural norm of acceptance and for great purpose. I mean, I'm really happy with it. Yes. That's an investable trend of a change that happened. It's a great example. It's a specific example. And I think that it's like, you know, it's almost gotten to be where it's like a badge of like I'm taking care of myself.

I have a coach. I have a therapist. Like when I was in my 20s and 30s, you know, obviously I sat in front of my. TV, went and rented DVDs, put them in, whatever. I love the big screen experience. I love surround sound. When my kids were little, I would put on a movie for them and they didn't want to watch it on a big screen TV. They wanted to bring out this freaking thing and sit and watch it. So examples, as they got a little bit older, you know, we liked watching Saturday Night Live together. And so I don't watch it on Saturday nights. I watch it on Sundays. I'm not, I'm not crazy.

inevitably we say, hey, why don't you guys come watch Weekend Update with us or come watch Saturday Night Live? And they'll watch it with us. And when it gets to weekend update, they've already seen it. I'm like, well, how have you already seen it? Oh, we watch it on Snapchat. The other obvious trend is, and I actually was

lucky enough to spot this in 2006, 2007, 2008, was the shift away from big screen to small screen and the change in the kind of content that was being produced as a result. So I remember being with senior execs from Disney from Fox. Their mindset about YouTube was, yeah, YouTube, it's dogs on skateboards. And I'm like, guys, you've got to look beyond that. Like, it's a new

form of content. It's a new type of storytelling. People want an authentic relationship with a creator. They don't want professionally produced stuff. They want this. And it's going to change how storytelling work. And everyone wrote me off from 2007 until like 2011, 2011, 2012. I made a lot of money on that thesis investing in initially Maker Studio. I was going to say, there you are. You are a good consumer investor. It's a good articulation of a big trend like that. I have given up on it. But the recent trend that I noticed, Kirsten, when I go to buy a present for my children, especially my 18-year-old, he doesn't want new stuff. He only wants used. And he goes to a private high school. He's about to graduate in L.A. All of his friends,

have some degree of money, like some degree, they're not like I grew up with nothing. And they don't want new. It's not cool. They go thrift shopping. I don't know if that's going to be a persistent trend, but I see it in my kids. I mean, I think that trend has, it's coming from two really strong places. One is just like style being more about individuality. I think back to this is pretty far back, but like two plus decades ago when the gap sort

of dictated that Fridays was casual day and everybody wore khakis. I mean, that's what you did. Like, people want the exact opposite of that now. They want their own individuality. They want their own look and feel and with the way they put things together. And because you can get anything in the click of a button or most things in the click of a button, this idea and this hunt for something that's a one of is on. It's on.

And there's the idea that, and this is maybe less prevalent and maybe because it's earlier in the trend being, becoming the norm. but there's a sustainability element to it too. There's a backlash against the waste. I think my kids are driven by sustainability side to it. Yeah. I think in a good way, the social pressure to think about the sustainability side of it. And then therefore it becomes cool to care about that.

But there's a lot of conflicts around that too right now, right? Like there's genuine care when somebody says that. But then there's still a lot of shopping of like plastic things or things are, I mean, there's this like, there's this high prevalence. towards wanting inexpensive things. And so, like, where, you know, they're kind of in conflict with each other a bit. I hear you. I mean, I was saying Sheehan and people like that where they get super cheap stuff that's almost

like wear it three times and throw it out because it's so cheap. And that is in conflict. Another debate in consumer, which could be good advice both for investors and for founders, is this idea of direct revenue. and I want to say it this way, is the customer paying or are you monetizing in a different way, either through ads or through selling data or even in the case of healthcare, sometimes the go-to-market strategy is insurance underwriting it to bend down their cost curves. How do you think about the importance of direct revenue and the mix between direct and indirect revenue?

So I was just having that conversation on a diligence call this morning. I do place a high value on a product being important enough to the user that they're willing to pay for it. I think people are voting with their time, but when they're voting with their dollars, it's just that much more powerful. And when you're on the path to building a business that has repeatability and it has stickiness in it, I think that is part of the signal. and it's part of the challenge of what business leaders should challenge themselves is if I putting out something that's needed enough and loved enough that someone's willing to open up their wallet for it. I do also think, though, that this is where consumer businesses have a chance to be

even more interesting businesses because there's multiple ways. Oftentimes there's multiple ways to monetize the business. And I do think that, like, thinking about, like, is there other dimensions that can add to make business or the product? better by monetizing other aspects of what we have. Data being one, if you have a marketplace, maybe one side pays for being in front of the consumer in a different way. I think there's like other things to play with in the context of assets that get built through a business. But the user paying matters. It's an indication of value. Even talking about just like, you know,

something is imaginative of as pay up front. And over time, if you're using the product in a certain way if you're kind of, and the business is able to create value in other ways that they can actually give credit back to the consumer, where it can then sort of pay you back. That's very interesting. Yeah. Do you think freemium still works? Like, do you ever look for freemium models? Are you averse the freemium models? And just to make sure all listeners know that premium model, the idea being you give a base away of your product for free, and then your goal is to think of it as a funnel where you can convert a certain number of those people eventually to paid users as you restrict features from them that they really want. And as they become addicted

to your product, maybe think of it as, you know, you'll give away your first hit for free and then they become an addicted customer. Does it still work? Or do you think that's an outdated idea? I think it does still work. I think like everything, it's like a case-by-case basis, but I think there's definitely a role for it. And I think of it less about a signal as a, the customer wants your product and more of a marketing funnel and bringing people kind of through a funnel of messages or prompts and maybe that being like the one right before you're converting them to pay. But I think it can be a really effective way to bring people into your product, particularly if you are gaining something as a business in the context of it. If there's some

advantage you're getting by having more users on the platform that's either doing something to make your product better, forming the data better. Or it's a video game and therefore there's more people playing it. Tell me this. Another thing that makes VCs very uncomfortable is hardware. Or let's say Adams versus Bits, which is, you know, 20 years ago, the debate, atoms being physical product. Some VCs are just absolutely allergic to them.

Where do you stand on Adams versus Bits or Adams Plus Bits? Hardware is hard. I mean, I'd love to say something novel here. And we already talked about ORA. We did ORA. That was a hardware product. That was an exception. It was an exception because it fits so squarely into other trends that we felt so strongly

about. And we could see and feel the product. And there'd been de-risked, at least bringing the product to market. That mattered. But I do think that there are so many risks inherent in being an early stage founder and in being an early stage investor. And you add in something that is, as capital requiring upfront that has as many points of failure from idea to product that you

can actually sell and start to monetize. It's extraordinarily challenging. You have to be extraordinarily convicted on the size of the opportunity on the other side of it to basically kind of make it worth the journey that you need to go on before you can even get it to market and start getting customer feedback. So it's not a category where we play in comfortably often. Nothing said. Like, think about this. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen a bunch of this lately, but I've been seeing more and more humanoid robots. So there are a class of entrepreneurs out there that are, you know, at some point, we're going to have humanoid robots.

We're going to have droids and people are starting to work on it. And I think it's really exciting and I believe in that trend. But, you know, goodness gracious, it falls into the spectrum of like there is, you know, there's there's more money than there are. really compelling companies to invest in, which is making our business incredibly competitive, and I think forces us to kind of approach it that way. But there are also more amazing companies being built than I need to invest in. We're all driven as investors in different ways, like different things motivate us, inspire us, or give us ideas. I fall under the camp of being overly driven by macro trends, like macroeconomic trends. And so what do I mean by that?

One of the biggest themes for me of the last five years is the demographic changes. So declining population in almost every major country around the world and people living longer. And when you take those two things together, what it means is we get persistently low unemployment. And we are increasingly putting large amount of costs into things like extending life and health care that are going to be harder for us as a society to afford. So why do I mention that? Like, I had dinner with this really smart lady last night. She's an investor. And she was talking about how the economy isn't doing well. And I said, well, what's the unemployment? She didn't know. She knows lots. She didn't know that. 3.7%. It might go up. But there's a kind of trickiness to

unemployment going up, which is we don't have a lot of workers. And so if you want to open a in a new business and you want to get a lot of low income workers, like, they're just not out there. And it's because the baby boom generation, which came after World War II, was the largest population cohort we've had in the United States. And they're already well into retirement. And the people who came after them, which is you and me, Gen X, we are a much smaller cohort. when the millennials are at their peak earning, when they are at, call it 30 to 50, and they're earning lots of money pumped into the economy, that's about 13 years from now. And that's when we finally will pick up some of the slack from the reduction in workforce

from baby boomers retiring. So what I say is I'm looking a lot at things that either have robotics to fill some of these needs or automation, which has become AI, to serve these needs. So if people are living longer and we have fewer people and unemployment is persistently low, robots in people's house, even just as a companion for elderly people, is going to be an incredibly important thing in terms of well-being. So I think there's just so many use cases for stuff like this. Yeah, 100%.

Maybe that's my definition of older culture. You know, they need a humanoid robots. And then, like on hardware, I would say, I think you make money in venture capital. You make money as an investor in any category by believing in things that other people don't believe in. And being right. So what I love about forerunner is you believe in consumer. You've made a lot of money in consumer. You have a lot of knowledge of how consumer works.

And you've got the brand to attract entrepreneurs. and because all the dollars have pulled out and are focused on other things, you now have a better swim lane. And as long as you still believe in it, and if you're right, and I suspect you will be, your next 10 years should go really well. I have always believed in hardware. And I've always had to argue this to other people, which is this. Hardware is the greatest determinant of value because it means someone has to pay. And it is the best defensibility if people buy it to create some degree of lock-in. It has to be hardware plus software or a ring got version one right with this beautiful hardware product. I don't think they would have built as interesting as a business if they didn't

eventually add on the services component, the monthly subscription. I still think they need to improve their software and make that better and add more value to me. I suspect they will over time. I'm always looking for the hardware plus software. What made Apple so successful? It's not that they have an app store. They wouldn't have a right to have an app store if they didn't have an iPhone, right? If you look at why did Facebook pay $2 billion for Oculus Rift? Because they knew that they couldn't get in the phone business and they're like,

what is the next big platform shift? You look at why Amazon bought Ring, why Amazon Launch Deco, why Google launch home. They all understand that hardware is the, end user interface point for the right to serve high margin software on the other side. Listen, that is well said, and that is true. Hardware still hard, just like consumer is hard, just like probably enterprise is hard. I think that, like, what doesn't get talked about are the 100, 200, 2,000 companies that don't work for the ones that we do talk about. Across any category. Across any category, right? Which I think is like,

Like, you know, which is one of the things that it's like if you, I think it's extraordinarily hard to be a generalist early stage investor, you know? I mean, there are people who are very good at it, but it is, it is incredibly hard and particularly where things are changing at the rate that they're changing at now and they have the level of complexity or optionality or variation in how they get done, it's even that much harder. So, you know. You have to be good at something because to make money, you not only have to believe something that other people don't believe and be right. In order to do that, you have to have a level of expertise that other people don't have.

You know what's also interesting, Mark, is like, okay, yes, I totally agree with you that being contrarian is a much more proven way to have outsized returns. And, you know, getting back to the point about where money is flowing and maybe not as much to consumer, so you could say it's less competitive and maybe that's more opportunistic. That's great. but this is an ecosystem-driven business. And as you know, like, the person that does the first round is usually different than the second round or the third round or the fourth round.

So it's finding that balance between having enough conviction on your own to do something different at the early stages and then, like, have, you know, the confidence that there's going to be, like, it's in time, by the time you need other components of the market to fall underline enough they're there to compel those people to what is what you're building is, you know, it's another element of kind of the players on the chess board here when you're thinking about how to be successful in early stage investing, you know, so I think maybe that's a convoluted way of saying that like hardware is also hard because like there's not as many investors investing in it. And so you're taking an even bigger risk on like, is the capital

going to be there? The same could be said for consumer, you know? One of the reasons. we've tried to raise bigger funds or we've wanted to raise bigger funds over time is like, I'm really a believer in this idea of life cycle investing. You know, I know our industry works by having kind of, you know, a different investor at different rounds, but it sort of is counter to how I instinctually feel, which is if you get something early and it's working and it's right, like, why wouldn't you just lean into your winners? You know, they're so hard to come by and as it is. But, you know, there's good reasons to have, I think, collaboration and other people to come in and validate and add new ideas or new resources to companies.

So with your life cycle investing, if you get into a deal early and it's working and you have conviction, you don't mind leaning in and doing more and more. I don't. Almost all of our funds have outsized exposure to a couple of few investments in the fund. and I think that's absolutely critical to driving top performance. Is that something you publicly talk about? Do you have any examples of places you've leaned in? Or do you prefer not to like name specific companies? No, no, I haven't thought about that. No, I haven't talked about it.

I haven't talked about it publicly. We've written a big check. We have definitely been disciplined about how we manage follow on investing. And I think that's a critical part of portfolio management for sure. Right. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's as important, arguably as the first investments you made is how you allocate your time and your dollars after that and being really, you know, kind of mindful of like not having too much exposure to something that doesn't work out. And, um, and hopefully leveraging your, your upside to things that are working. We've had 20% of our, of our money in an investment. Holy shit. So that's like founders fund. Founders fund like has back. No, I'm not saying your founders fund, you're very different, but like they have backed their truck up. to massive winners, like whether it's Palantir or SpaceX or Anderrell. And people often ask me if I would do the same thing. And I think you need to know what you're good at. I'm not good at

having the absolute confidence and assurance that they have to write a $150 million check into one place and relatively early and be right. Well, it also just depends on like what are the early signals and what are you basing it off of and how is a company capitalizing itself? So in this market that we were just in the last few years where people were raising fund, a funding round every nine to 12 months, I don't think you had enough time to see things in a way that said, like, we should triple down or quadruple down. So, you know, that's a market dynamic versus other times when things are maybe playing out at a different pace or the particular thing that you are investing in can scale at a different pace that, you know, maps to the right sort of, you know,

risk-reward outlook, then you might feel more comfortable doing that. And I guess I'm probably more managing my money with all of that picture in mind than I am just going on like gut instinct early. Like I'm not, you know. One of the things that all investors need to think about, but truly founders do as well, is what is the exit environment going forward? Like, you know, are you thinking I'm backing companies to IPO them? Are you thinking I'm backing companies in a perfect world they'd IPO, but most likely will be

exited into trade? So how are you thinking about the future accident environment? This is such an important topic. And, you know, I don't think we, we spend as much time talking about it maybe because it's not as fun as dreaming about the possibilities is, you know, kind of coming to, coming to head with what the end goal here is, at least for an investor. And it's, we do start out by looking at a company and saying, can this be an amazing standalone company that can earn the right and the opportunity to capture the imagination of the public markets and go public. But the reality of the public markets is if you look at a graph of the last 20 years, it's almost straight. up and to the right, both in terms of the size of the IPO and the market of market cap of the IPO. The reality is, is like there is a, you know, definitively what used to be called

a large cap stock is still is now the smallest end of the smallest end. You know, I look back and when I first started, you know, in the investing business kind of in the late 90s, companies were going public with, you know, $200 million market caps, $20 million of revenue. Exactly. No go today. $200 million of revenue is probably not even enough in most cases. You know, particularly for a consumer business, we're talking $500 million of revenue. The bar to get to $500 million of revenue, the time horizon to get to $500 million

of revenue, the growth that you have to display after you go public at that scale compounding, it is a daunting order. And what people don't understand is like even when you go public, it doesn't guarantee liquidity. So I have been in public stocks in which, okay, we have a nominal value, but if you wanted to sell your position, you couldn't because there's no buyers because the people tracking major purchases of stock are wanting to pile their money into bigger winners. And so, like, you could be public, but there's no way to get out of the stock. Yeah, the same thing we were talking about, like the ecosystem that fuels a company from seed, you know, on to scale is that ecosystem continues into the public markets. And so this, you know, being very conscious and proactive about how you're thinking about liquidity as a venture manager is so important too. How then do you think in the consumer world, are there, is there a different buyer set that you're thinking about actually?

Like who tends or these private equity? Okay. So, I mean, I think as a first principle and a starting principle, we are playing, and I say we, meaning this industry, I believe, is playing for like just outsize. unusual success stories. I remember, like, early on, 15 years ago when I started thinking I had a focus, had a thesis, and I knew an industry called I was going to be a better picker. But you know what, is really hard to win that way. Even if you are a better picker, the amount of things that can happen along the way, the amount of things that actually play into like whether you get a big successful outcome and get cash back are like many, many, many. And I think that the realities are, is that

It's one or two companies that drive like huge outlier funds. So it is about finding enough risk, enough opportunity and taking enough risk to kind of expose yourself to those kind of way upside cases. And that is a really, that is a hard challenge. And that is a very uncomfortable journey because the reality is you find out faster, a lot faster what's not working. And so there's a moment in time where you're like, wow, I made X amount of investments and these all aren't working. and these, can these go to the distance? How are these going? You know, I think so, so like, if that's the awareness you come into the game with

and you plan your portfolio as best as you can for the kind of the wild upside outcome, the thing that like, okay, I can see, I can see the big business. And then if these three or four other things happen, like, you know, next layer can be unlocked and that can be, you know, that unusual outsized outcome. Like, that's what you have to be here playing for. And then you have to kind of, I think, work it all the way through. Work it all the way through. And that's where things like being savvy with M&A, being savvy with kind of how you explore

the secondary markets, you know, whatever tools are in your toolkit. Like, I think you've got to try to. And you've done obviously a bit of both. I mean, you have Dollar Shave Club, which was a very nice exit. But at the other end, Warby Parker, which I guess is a public company, I just looked it up, still a $2 billion market cap. So, like, there are big buyers in your category as long as you don't, like, get into too crazy high evaluation, which means that your universe of buyers goes down. And there is still IPO for the best companies. Those are two really specific kinds of consumer companies that you mentioned, like the Dollar Shave Club, the Warby Parker.

I think that our definition of consumer, as we see it, is probably broader than that. It includes anything where a consumer opens up their wallet to pay for something and any business that's dependent on the consumer utilizing it. So Facebook, consumer tech. Yes, they have enterprise business that fuels their ad platform, but it's really dependent on the users and what the users are doing. And so, like, in the context of that broader definition, there's a lot of companies of a lot of scope and scale and sizes. And, you know, I think we're highly cognizant of that as we're thinking

about balancing portfolio. I wasn't trying to pigeonhole you into those type of companies. Oh, it's just something I love to get defensive of. All right, I don't love to get defensive. I have to get defensive of it because it's like people say like, oh, consumer and then they think it's retail. And I'm like, it's not retail. That's one component of consumer. And of course, you're in chime as well. I just wanted to mention two very successful exits for you so that people could see that there's one case where you could get a buyer to pay a billion dollars. We sold Ring to Amazon for north of a billion dollars. And another case where they were able to go to the distance, make the company public,

and still yet have a $2 billion valuation as a public company and hopefully grow over time. So I was just trying to point out that both of those exist. Thank you, Mark, for that too. And also we were first early investors in Hymns, which was a SPAC company. that I think has, like, worked its way through that journey and is finally getting the respect in the market for being an incredibly well company with great execution and a huge market. As long as the CEO can avoid talking about politics, it can go the distance. But I'm not going to grind you on that.

I'm not going to grind you and I'll leave it to him to sort of how to do that. But can I say one more thing on the public thing? Because this is the topic I'm passionate about too, which is what do you think the possibility is or what would it take to bring back the small and mid-cap market? Because so much value is being trapped in the private markets. And really, if you think about kind of broader economic opportunity, broader participation with people in the growth of the economy and companies, like having it all, you know, kind of in, you know, more closely held hands until it gets to be $10 billion. And then the growth rate is totally different.

Or maybe that dearth of small and midcap companies even cuts off some of the opportunity. for businesses to succeed. Like, it's a mess. It's a real mess. I'll tell you what I think. And obviously, Bill Gurley is the expert on this. So I don't want to pretend to be the expert, but I'll tell you what I think. First of all, I think the idea of small-cap public stocks that ship has sailed and it's not coming back.

And the reason my less informed than Bill, but more informed than most people, point of view, first of all, you now have algorithmic trading. You have so much driven by computer models. You have the business model themselves to the financial institutions that no longer have the money to spend on supply side analysts to track stocks, to promote them to individual stockholders. You have the biggest tech companies driving the overwhelming amount of returns. And therefore, you also have more people wanting to put more dollars into people who are getting scale advantages, the magnificent seven or the six plus one, whatever you want to call it. then you have the growth of people wanting to buy indexes, which is retail investors buying index. So if you move into an index, the S&P 500, for example, if you move into an index, then you're automatically purchased and money goes to you and your price goes up. So I don't think you're going to

solve that, but there is a solution. And I want to say it this way, Kirsten, is a lot of money has moved into late stage private. And that money has filled the role that used to be small cap public. The problem for venture capitalists is way too many VCs, and you used the word, and I want to describe it to the audience, way too many VCs saw that as just part of the journey to get to the end state. If you saw that late stage money as a partial secondary opportunity, a partial liquidity opportunity, you might be sitting on $300 million a gain and sell $100. That serves the same function that the small cap public role used to fill. It's just that VCs, I think in part because the IPO market was allowing some big companies to get out and also a little bit through greed of not wanting to give up upside,

weren't taking the secondaries. And I think in the future they're going to. Yeah. And that's kind of what I was referring to earlier about just like working it. You know, you really got to do that because the small cap and the mid cap market doesn't exist. Yes. And I think it's well known because I've said it a lot publicly, but in 2021, we drove a ton of exits through secondaries because of that reason, because we didn't think a lot of these companies were going to go public anytime soon. And our view is it was time to return some cash to shareholders. I want to have two final, like, punchy questions and answers for you. Number one is having done this now for 12 years at forerunner, having been an investor before that,

but 12 years at forerunner, what do you know now that you wish you knew? then. Oh, you know what? Actually, I've been playing with this, but from a different angle, mark, which is I have been challenging myself to be very cognizant of how much I'm leveraging experience and things that I've learned and seen along the way and against the beauty of naivety, you know, the beauty of just like taking the leap. You really have to be willing to do that in this business, right? And so I remember thinking early on that I was disadvantaged in my lack of experience and I was on a fast pace to get a lot of things done.

One of those things was experience because when I got experience, I'd be better. I'd be more relevant, all those other things. Right. Now at, you know, 10 years and thinking about the next 10 years, what is it going to take to be really good at it? It's like, well, I, you know, I get the benefit of experience. I'm happy to be able to leverage that. I think that's incredibly useful and powerful.

But don't, you know, stay open-minded. Be flexible about the future. The reality is, is what works yesterday is not what works tomorrow. That's the whole point of our business is like breaking things down and building new thing. Or not breaking things down. It's about building new things, right? So I think that like looking to the past to inform the future is not the playbook or the architecture to use. So instead of thinking about like what I wish I knew then, don't know now, I'm finding myself saying, go back to what I had been and making sure that I don't lose it now.

So I think part of the problem with being older as an investor, not old, but older than we once were, me older than you. How about experience? The challenge with having experience is you sometimes know the things that can't work. And I'm going to take your word because it's a word I use often, which is naivete. And I have a belief that what you really want in the founders you back is naive optimism. What they're doing shouldn't work. It probably won't work. But they're just a little too naive to know that.

So they're going to try to do something that they probably can't do. And by being a little bit naive about it and not accepting conventional wisdom, some of them break through and achieve it. And the older you get as an investor and I've seen things that don't work, the easier it is to write off why it's not going to work. In a firm, a lot of my investors at Upfront are younger. And I love that younger voice that challenges that it's different now, Mark, you don't understand. And I think that naive optimism matters. I even use it as a metaphor for the United States, Like Europe where I lived for almost a dozen years, Europe's, you know, like had society now for thousands of years to the point where they just start with what won't work.

And sometimes the Americans are just dumb. We're just like, oh, we're going to do this and it's going to work. But that naivete, most of the time we're wrong, but it produces SpaceX. It's just like the thing that the Europeans say would never work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I love that, that that's your.

metaphor is naivete and embracing naivete, it's harder to do. Last question for you, Kirsten, what advice do you have for people in their 20s, maybe 30s, but let's say 20s, if you could go back and do a redo, again, knowing what you know about life? What advice would you have for, what would you have for the younger you in your 20s? This is less about going back and doing a redo. I'm sure there's things I could do differently that would be great, but I spend like so little time thinking about that because what's the point? My motto is kind of, you know, you've got choices, you walk through a door, you pick the door, you make the best of it and don't look back from it. But I think one of the things that makes life so exciting is that like it is, it is always, it's always possible for it to be changing.

And I think that like it's important to have goals. It's important to have direction. But it's also important to allow yourself the freedom to grow and change or, you know, challenge yourself to grow along the path and allow yourself the freedom to make some changes to those decisions or those paths, right? And don't be so focused on this is what's good. This is what I should do. This is what I said I was going to do. This is what I have to do. And kind of approach it with, you know, yes, a big picture goal. Like maybe it's a meta goal and then show up every day for the immediate goal and opportunity in front of you and make the most of it. I mean, this, you know, sounds like maybe Pollyanna-ish,

but I really believe that that will lead you into all the right places into a really like a full life. I like both of those answers because I like that answer. And I also like the answer you gave about walking through doors

and not looking back and looking forward is I think the younger generation, you get anxiety from having five doors you could walk through. You walk through a door and you're like, Should I have walked through those other four? And I always say, like, when you face life's crossroads and you choose your path, don't second guess yourself, enjoy the path, enjoy the journey.

And I think that's partly what you were saying. Hirsten Green is the founder of forerunner ventures. Truly is considered, I think, the preeminent consumer early stage now life cycle fund and venture capital. I can tell you from personal experience, if you have the opportunity to work, with Kirsten or anyone else at the firm, you not only get someone who gives you money, but actually does the work in cares. And I'm telling you that from personal experience, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Oh, Mark, so nice. Thank you. Thank you for the thoughtful questions and the good engaging discussion and all of your wisdom. Thank you.