Forerunner Ventures

“I did 15 pitches in Chicago, because I wanted to raise our Series A from a Chicago venture fund. I got 15 no's. I did one pitch on the West Coast with Kirsten Green from Forerunner, and we got a term sheet within 48 hours.”

“Our hypothesis is it's happened because the healthcare system has let people down, so they have felt like we have to be more proactive with our own health, and that was enabled in the context of getting a lot more information, so people could start to have awa…”

“So we were fortunate enough to be able to team up with Kirsten Green. Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Who's the founder of Forerunner, Forerunner Ventures to join the board and be a part of this round. So Forerunner was the lead investor.”

“But if you step back and you look at the last two decades, the biggest companies started with a consumer first approach.”

“So on the health front, this is, you know, perhaps the biggest trend in my, you know, nearly 30 years now of investing. I think the biggest trend that we've seen People are, there is a growing willingness to spend on health and themselves and outside of the sy…”

“60% of the people describe health as being their number one priority, even above friends and family.”

“We haven't actually made an investment in a product company per se. We've always been looking at like a business model shift and a behavior shift.”

“A business that is eager for the LLMs to keep getting better because it has the potential to make their product better. Like that's where you want to be building, right?”

“It's like 60 or 60 plus of the people percent were like actually had said they were using AI regularly.”

“I pitched a hundred investors to get our first investor, you know, Kirsten green at forerunner. She backed us. I pitched a hundred investors in our first to raise that seed round.”

“Meeting last week or two weeks ago, and essentially a valuations are at 35, which was the same as 21. And now we all know about the spikes and the 20 on a hundred and all of that, but like as an average, it was 24 in 2020 thirty five million bucks and 21 forty…”

“My partner invested in one that's a, it's an auto body shop, a chain of auto body shops. And you're like, how is that venture? Well, it's venture because a lot of the technology that goes into powering that can then start to create a digitally native franchise…”

“I started this venture firm when I was 40.”

“Every time I have tried to say people in the room behave like this, I'll get more respect if I behave that way, I mess it up. You know, because I'm overthinking it or I'm Getting nervous as my words are unfolding because they're not coming from a place of real…”

“The best ones have people who shine in different areas and compliment each other. And the way to do that is to stand for something is to be known for something, to have some way to contribute where people are like, oh, I would like Harry in the room with me be…”

“Forerunner is still a relatively small, tightly knit team. That's intentional.”

“Our most recent fund that we just finished investing, I need to find the stat actually because we were referencing it internally the other day, but I want to say somewhere around 70% of the dollars went to B to B companies.”

“The more people you have, the more you're kind of also serving for those ambitious people and their own needs to be recognized and to have successes and wins. And you just, It requires you to be, I think, thoughtful and deliberate around your org development a…”

“When I'm in a position of giving hard feedback, I'm trying to be really thoughtful in advance and plan my words relatively carefully. So for instance, the other day I had to send a note to give somebody some feedback, which also included like an answer to a qu…”

“And I just, if I hadn't had a partner that had stepped up that way and had known what it meant to me and the value of that, I could not have been a good mother and started something that had potential to be successful at the same time.”

“5000 deals last year and, you know, eight or 10 investments.”

“I think that that's going to come to the venture world too. It's been a momentum trade. And so if you're Sequoia or Forerunner or Bessemer, you have services and tools. I think it's going to be hard to prove that you should be getting two in 20 versus an ETF e…”

“Forerunner Ventures led our seed pre-demo day, and that was exciting. So we raised four million then”

“Where I have had the greatest success is is in one of my longest time investors being Kirsten Green from Forerunner in that Kirsten loves consumers. She loves retail. She intimately understands the consumer and understands the dynamic between consumers and dif…”

“That's raised over forty-five million dollars in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including Thrive Capital, Forerunner Ventures, IVP, Redpoint, and SV Angel, just to name a few.”

“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.”

“Hey, we're only doing 20 deals in each portfolio. Each of these deals needs to make a difference if there's an outcome.”

“Yeah, so as a guideline, you know, we, we're similar to many of the other firms out there where we're earmarking reserves at about a two-to-one rate, so our initial investment is sort of 30% of our total dollars, and then 60% saved for reserves, or 35, 65.”

“Certain categories have structurally higher margins than others. Beauty is obviously one of them. And by vertically integrating their earlier stage teams have the ability to start investing in their businesses and marketing and customer service. Because they h…”

“They actually reach clear product market fit, certainly with their consumers in terms of consumer love within their first year or two of business, you know, and it's typically really hard for a brand to start breaking out several years after being in business.”

“I think if you think established is getting to fifty million dollars of revenue, I would say Away is going to do it in 22 months.”

“We just wired an investment yesterday, which is called Shop Shops, and this team is leveraging that live streaming video technology that I mentioned before, and they're bridging online customers to offline shopping experiences.”

“You know, Forerunner. Great investment. Kirsten Green. Great investor. Warby Parker. Dollar Shave Club. But that was led by looking at gender equity policies and trying to find women-owned investors.”

“Forerunner Ventures is the only VC firm to invest in both Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com, two of the biggest and highest profile e-commerce exits in recent years”

“Really believing that we were on the brink of a complete re-imagination of the retail ecosystem”

“And sometimes it doesn't make sense in the context of our fund model and our goals as venture investors to invest pre-revenue because of that.”

“That's not one where as investors were particularly keen on, because I tend to feel like if you're saying, you know, we're the lowest price out there, if you're successful, you're going to build a competitive landscape where it ends up being a race to the bott…”

“Amazon does more to make the market opportunity that we're investing in than it does to crush it.”