The Ledger
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Maveron keeps investments unannounced due to competition from Amazon
“You know, my last three core investments still haven't been announced, largely out of fear of competition, both from Amazon.”
Every Maveron portfolio Series B faces questions about Amazon
“Every single Series B that our portfolio companies raise, the question raised is, what's Amazon going to do?”
Consumer startups offer minimal IP differentiation compared to founder execution
“There's less and less differentiation on the IP of consumer deals and much more around how well the team understands how to connect with end consumers.”
Kaden: USV and Maveron intentionally resist the trend of fund size inflation
“So both Maveron and USV have similarly sized Funds by Design. Both firms believe in relatively small funds, a very focused approach to kind of series seed and series A investing, and resisting this macro environment of raising massive amounts of capital as oth…”
Kaden: Scaling physical product businesses to venture size requires rare founders
“You know, so all of that being said, I think it takes a special kind of entrepreneur to build brands with inventory and with physical product and to use technology to create the right leverage there to make it venture scale.”
Kaden: Narrowing a VC investment thesis accelerates and sharpens pattern recognition
“Partly because it helps hone our pattern recognition, which I know leads us back to the beginning, but as investing requires this ability to pattern match with great things that have come before, while still keeping that eye on the future, if you can narrow th…”
Kaden: Face-to-face interaction beats public writing for VC pattern recognition
“The strategy that I've taken the most and it could adopt over time is kind of feet on the street, really digging in with entrepreneurs having conversations often face to face and really understanding how they think that's been the most valuable for me in devel…”
Maveron was Zulily's first investor, incubating the $6B company in-office
“I think Zulily a daily deal site for moms and kids, you know, IPO for about six billion dollars. We were the first investors in it. It actually started inside of our office in Seattle.”
Kaden: Union Square Ventures and Benchmark prove small fund sizes work best
“I think one of the things I admire about Union Square and Benchmark is they've kept the fund sizes small and focused and we are big proponents of small fund sizes and focus at Maveron too, so I look to them for a lot of guidance.”
Easy seed funding creates peak competition in startup recruiting
“On the right team side, I think the recruiting environment's getting as competitive as it's ever been, and that's sort of the downside to how easy it is to get seed funding, and not only in terms of the talent”
Maveron exclusively invests in direct-to-consumer startups
“Every investment we make is something that is direct to consumer, so no enterprise, infrastructure, and hardly even B to B to C.”
Kaden: Maveron's Allbirds investment scaled with high capital efficiency
“There are companies that are scaling even in direct-to-consumer brands, and they're scaling with capital efficiency, you know, invested in Allbirds at Maveron. It's going really well, and they're extremely capital efficient, and customers love it, and they com…”
Physical product brands represent only 25% of Maveron's portfolio
“Physical product companies might be a quarter of what we do.”
Kaden: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake is exceptional at team building
“An entrepreneur who's fantastic at that, even though she's not in our portfolio is Katrina Lake at Stitch Fix. I've learned a lot from watching her. She just has hired an incredible team to execute there.”
Maveron uses a 10-point data-backed framework to evaluate entrepreneurs
“So we've actually tried to Map out what we think goes into a great entrepreneur and put it into 10 bullet points. And all of these bullet points are created through data of what we've seen work in our entrepreneurs and in other entrepreneurs in the past.”
CircleUp's 2012 seed round was rejected by over 60 investors
“And raised our seed round, which Maveron and Clayton Christensen wrote the book called the innovators dilemma through his hedge fund, Rose Park. They led that back in in 2012. That was a very hard round for us to raise, to be frank with you. And I think we wen…”
Maveron evaluates potential CEOs using a 10-trait scorecard reviewed post-investment
“We, we've kind of put together a list of 10 key traits that we believe are kind of the key success traits for a Maveron consumer successful founder, and we actually score all our potential investments CEOs against this scorecard, and we often look back six mon…”