Maveron

“In fact, Maveron, who was, you know, came from the money of Starbucks, they told us that if Starbucks had walked in their door right now, they wouldn't fund them.”

“I will never forget it was the fall of 2007, and we had an investment meeting in Seattle, and he walked in and he said, we need to slow down our investments.”

“We saw an investment at Maveron called Dollar Shave Club. And we passed.”

“We passed for all of the reasons that one might think at that time didn't make sense about Shaving, you know, size of the prize. How do you take Gillette on? Who's gonna buy this stuff? You know, sort of direct to consumer.”

“I met with first round capital, general catalyst, Maveron, you know, all the names that we know today of backing up some of the biggest and best brands and companies. And Despite having connections or relationships with people, when I showed up with a deck tal…”

“I have this offer from a venture capital firm, which was a firm up in Seattle called Maveron, and I said, but I don't think I'm going to take it, because I'm going to sell pants on the internet.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Physical product companies might be a quarter of what we do.”

“Every single Series B that our portfolio companies raise, the question raised is, what's Amazon going to do?”

“You know, my last three core investments still haven't been announced, largely out of fear of competition, both from Amazon.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Every investment we make is something that is direct to consumer, so no enterprise, infrastructure, and hardly even B to B to C.”

“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”

“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.”

“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…”