The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gillette failed to react competently to Dollar Shave Club's rise
“Gillette had not still to this day has not reacted in a competent way that put any pressure on Dollar Shave Club.”
Most funded consumer startups will sell below their last valuation
“Consumer companies typically it'll be a graveyard. There'll be some exceptions. Unilever bots, Dollar Shave Club, because they needed the capabilities of DTC. That'll happen a few more times, but many times they will be sold for half of the last round valuatio…”
Kaden: Dollar Shave Club yielded strong venture returns, Bonobos did not
“The examples you gave of Dollar Shave and Bonobos have wildly different outcomes. One of them was a huge win for their investors and their team and kind of showed that you can get the return on it that they wanted going in, which is Dollar Shave, and the other…”
Bessemer Passed on Dollar Shave Club by Overanalyzing Unit Economics
“It was Dollar Shave Club meeting meeting Michael, the founder there very early on, and just, I was always very, he was just an impressive guy. You could see it in his videos. You can see it in his personality. This is someone that'll just will this thing to su…”
Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups
“The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the jet and dollar shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling. I believe in consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional …”
Science Inc. endured 3,000 rejections to raise $350M and build Dollar Shave Club
“At this point, I think I'm at 3000 plus no's. Right. And you know, what counts is the 83 yeses that we've had, and three hundred and fifty million raised against the portfolio, and now, of course, the Dollar Shave Club billion-dollar exit.”
Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever to accelerate global scaling
“Michael and the management team were ultimately convinced that Hey, we can get so much bigger, so much more quickly by working with these guys, then continuing on the independent path, and we like them. So that was really what led to the decision to undertake …”
Dollar Shave Club was headed for an IPO before the Unilever buyout
“We were likely to become a public company really as a financing opportunity to add, you know, many more hundreds of millions of dollars to the company so we could expand internationally into more products and into more territories.”
Multiple Dollar Shave Club seed investors passed on the Series A
“A number of the firms Who were already seed investors either did not engage with the company around its series egg or took a look and passed. It wasn't terribly competitive around for me to win.”
Over a dozen VCs declined to lead Dollar Shave Club's Series B
“Michael pitched, I don't know, probably at least a dozen firms in the series B where there was some investor interest, but no one who would catalyze around no one who would lead around.”
Pakman: Venrock backed Dollar Shave Club when VCs doubted it could scale
“You know, I did that with Dollar Shave Club, where very few people believed that that company could become as large as they have and could disrupt, you know, a traditional legacy shaving market, men's grooming market.”
Eurie Kim: Consumer E-Commerce Acquisitions Fetch 4x to 7x Revenue Multiples
“Dollar Shave Club being acquired by Unilever for five X revenue and Shoei's acquisition of by PetSmart, which are four X and even more traditional commerce deals that you see, which are as high as six or seven X for some beauty deals that L'Oreal and Unilever …”
Davis: Early DTC giants won primarily through supply chain efficiencies
“Warby Parker and Harry's and Dollar Shave Club and so on and so forth were doing wonderful things. They'd typically been supply chain disruption businesses, and they'd been targeting efficiencies in the supply chain to give the customer a cost saving or an eff…”
The market overlooked Michael Dubin's serious vision behind Dollar Shave Club
“I think that the market got totally taken by the video, and I think they misread that as a amazing go-to-market gimmick, and they might have missed how amazingly serious Michael is as an entrepreneur and a leader and a businesswoman. Vision that was behind tha…”
Consumer startups must use broad advertising to achieve mass adoption after saturation
“At scale, Dollar Shave Club has to buy podcasts, television ads, because there is a saturation point on all places, and the only way you can reach mass adoption is kind of advertising.”
Dollar Shave Club revenue tripled from $20M to $60M in year three
“So we went from twenty million in year two to sixty million in revenue in year three.”
Dollar Shave Club showed extraordinarily low early cohort churn
“I flew to LA quickly and sat down with Michael and his team and started to go through the numbers. And I was very specifically focused on, let me see churn. Let me look, let me see what the early cohort churns are. And they were extraordinarily low.”
Dollar Shave Club achieves higher margins by selling proprietary products
“They have High margins compared to e-commerce companies that sell someone else's product, because they sell their own products.”
Dollar Shave Club generated $7M in revenue in its first year
“You know, they did about seven million in revenue in their first year, and they were on track to do twenty million in their second year.”
David Wu passed on investing in Stitch Fix, Instacart, and Dollar Shave Club
“But from an investor perspective, I would probably say that, you know, the biggest mistakes have to be, you know, my personal portfolio to date. Or anti-portfolio. And three that come to mind are all for different reasons where companies that I passed on that …”
Forerunner Ventures is sole firm invested in both Jet.com and Dollar Shave Club
“Fun fact, they're the only firm to have investments in both Jet.com and Dollar Shave Club, two of the biggest and highest profile e-commerce exits in recent years.”