Nov 8, 2024 · 37m · sourcery
America's New Consumer: CPG, Sports, Four-Wall | Jason Fiedler, Left Lane Capital · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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In this episode of Sourcery, host Molly O'Shea speaks with Jason Fiedler, Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital, about his firm's counter-consensus strategy of applying software venture capital frameworks to non-AI consumer categories, physical retail concepts, and modern sports leagues.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 18.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 3.7 Guest teaching 4.5 Guest disagreement 1.4 Molly pushing back 1.5
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 12:38 Rejection of the 'reckless' aggressive framing
Jason pushes back on Molly's characterization of Left Lane as aggressive, clarifying that while they move fast, the term can carry a reckless connotation that does not apply to their rigorous process.
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 11:51 Molly presses on firm aggressiveness and rapid scaleMolly explicitly doubles down on her characterization of the firm as aggressive, questioning how such a young team managed to raise two billion dollars in under five years.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:43 The relative NPS Delta frameworkJason educates Molly on why looking at standalone NPS is misleading, explaining that switching behavior is driven strictly by the net promoter score delta relative to stale incumbent alternatives.
Molly holds their own ▶ 27:04 Molly articulates consumer cyclicality versus B2B rigorMolly displays sharp industry knowledge by contrasting intuitive, fast-decaying consumer hype cycles against structured, recurring enterprise B2B contracts to challenge fund evaluation discipline.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct-to-Consumer Evolution & The Starbucks Model | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Molly asks Jason to explain the scale and takeaways from the Starbucks model. Jason explains how rising DTC customer acquisition costs led him to study four-wall retail economics and massive public consumer market caps. | |
| Consumer Categories & Software Framework Adaptation | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Molly probes how Jason translated traditional software growth frameworks from Insight Partners into consumer investing. Jason explains their outbound sourcing model and how high-volume consumer transaction data provides earlier predictive signals than enterprise SaaS. | |
| Applying SaaS Frameworks to Four-Wall Businesses | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Molly prompts Jason to explain his Sims framework for portfolio construction. Jason describes the transformation of physical retail into digitally native food and entertainment concepts driven by mobile navigation and distrust of legacy brands. | |
| Net Promoter Score Delta & Category Switching | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Molly asks about the NPS Delta concept and presses Jason on why she perceives Left Lane as aggressive and how they raised two billion dollars rapidly. Jason reframes the word aggressive to avoid connotations of recklessness and outlines their position-building fund model. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Archer Aviation Air Taxis | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following a mid-roll ad read, Molly asks about board seats and the operational volume of junior sourcing. Jason details their three-pillar sourcing methodology across networking, proprietary data triggers, and thematic research. | |
| Identifying Breakout Companies & Market Winners | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Molly asks how to spot breakout winners across thematic strings, and jokes about legacy funds being founded in the typewriter era. Jason explains that near-perfect global market mapping reveals the winner, which takes most of the value even in non-monopoly markets. | |
| Operational Challenges of Rapid Organizational Growth | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Molly inquires about the operational risks of scaling a fund so fast and brings up Left Lane's rumored investment in Olipop. Jason shares how internal processes break quickly and lays out his thesis on legacy soda giants experiencing a cigarette moment. | |
| Packaging Evolution & Microplastics Awareness | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Molly discusses microplastic concerns before asking how the investment committee remains objective given consumer hype cycles. Jason describes how their IC applies B2B SaaS retention benchmarks and cash-flow foundations to de-risk high-beta consumer bets like sports leagues. | |
| Sports Investment Thesis & Fragmentation of Media | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Molly asks how Jason built conviction to invest in emerging sports like professional volleyball. Jason explains the macro shift caused by the death of linear TV bundling, creating massive fragmentation and high-margin recurring media rights. | |
| Unconventional Business Ideas & Apple Notes Brainstorming | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Molly prompts Jason to reveal unconventional ideas from his Apple Notes, leading into a discussion on upcoming macro trends. Jason pitches ideas like Driscoll's for grapes and home services automation, while sharing a bearish take on urban centers. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Fiedler: VCs underestimate consumer market scale, missing Monster Energy's $70B cap
“One question I would often ask people is how big is monster energy? And they would often say like 2,000,000,003 billion. I think at the time it was seventy billion. And so I think a lot of investors are magnitudes off in how big these categories can be.”
Fiedler: Pet care retains 80-90% of spend, mirroring enterprise software
“When you think about The enterprise software of consumer spend. Pet is it. I mean, yes, you'll have that initial maybe 40 to 60% drop off in the first year, but after that, you're retaining 80 to 90% of your customer, of your dollar spend year after year, and …”
Left Lane: Junior outbound sourcing drives the majority of invested dollars
“The majority of our deals and majority of our dollars are in companies that our junior sourcing team brings to us, not Friends of ours that we've known for whatever saying, Hey, I got this deal. Let's do this together.”
Fiedler: SMB and consumer startups generate far more early predictive data than enterprise
“In fact, those businesses generate a lot more data earlier on, right? So a series A business that has, that's in the enterprise space that has 20 or 30 customers, you can probably just phone all them. They may be YC friends. It's very difficult at that stage t…”
Left Lane adopts LTV-to-CapEx framework for four-wall retail investments
“I would say on the newer kind of four wall stuff, there is this concept of LTV to CapEx that we've been adopting. That's kind of interesting or LTV to CapEx plus sales and marketing, which is essentially your cost to acquire customer is building that four wall…”
Fiedler: Brick-and-mortar burger shop payback periods can rival software startups
“When you look at a burger shop, which traditionally has not been something that, you know, our LPs would know us for, and you see that it can, you know, it costs, it can generate a hundred You realize that that payback and life after payback is really interest…”
Fiedler: Digitally native brands beat legacy chains via TikTok foot traffic
“These entrepreneurs are repainting You know, the streets with new brands and they're digitally native, which provides a huge advantage over the incumbents. The newer generations are walking into places because of their phones, right? That's their navigation sy…”
Fiedler: Absolute NPS is misleading without measuring relative NPS delta
“I think a lot of people focus on objective NPS. Like you, we have an NPS of 90, and that's not that great if the NPS in the incumbent industry is 87, right?”
Left Lane builds positions in one out of three or four Series A investments
“We execute a position building strategy where we look specifically for series A's early traction, Building, getting minority ownership into those businesses and then with support and getting them to that next phase where we can hopefully generally one out of t…”
Left Lane has completed nearly 80 deals, partners sit on 12-14 boards
“We've done almost 80 deals to date and 80 investments, 80 companies, and it ranges partners around anywhere right now from 12 to 14 boards, I would say generally.”
Left Lane exclusively promotes partners from within rather than hiring externally
“We don't go externally and hire with recruiting firms to poach other partners. That's a similar, that's a strategy that we did take from the insight days where we promote from within.”
Left Lane's 20-person investment team speaks with 780 companies a month
“I think I was checking before this, I think we've spoken with 780 companies this month so far. So we got another week to go and manage Everything in Salesforce. And so, but that's really a, it comprises of, you know, the investment team of 20, twenty-ish.”
Fiedler: I Have Spoken to Over 75 DTC Pet Food Companies Globally
“There's over 75 direct to consumer pet food businesses globally that I've spoken to, right?”
Fiedler: Non-winner-take-all consumer sectors let trailing players return base cases
“The beauty of some of these categories is they're not necessarily winner take all. You know, there's some platform or network or brand effects, but winner can often take most as we saw in indirect to consumer pet. But if you ended up in two, three, four, or fi…”
Fiedler: Coca-Cola and Pepsi are experiencing their 'cigarette moment'
“Coca-Cola and Pepsi, three hundred forty-five billion dollar companies, they're really having their cigarette moment and they were cool when I was a kid. And now they're not healthy.”
Fiedler: Olipop can become a several-billion-dollar business
“We said this can be a several billion dollar business. We absolutely believe it can be a several billion dollar business playing against these slow incumbents.”
Fiedler: All 20 of Coca-Cola's billion-dollar brands are declining year-over-year
“Coca-Cola has 20 brands that do over a billion dollars. Every single one of them is decreasing in sales year over year, and they haven't innovated at all.”
Fiedler: Left Lane portfolio company Holy is nearing a 100M run rate
“We have another investment that we made in, in Germany in a company called Holy. That is a powder based beverage business with energy, hydration, and teas, and the business is nearing hundred million in run rate.”
Fiedler: Beverage packaging is reaching a tipping point against shipping liquid
“The way that we, what we consume and the way that we consume it on the beverage side in terms of packaging volume water and shipping it all over the place. I mean, it sounds common sense and we've been saying it for a while, but I think we're actually reaching…”
Left Lane Rejects Consumer Startups Entirely Reliant on New Customers
“If you are entirely reliant on new customers for your revenue and you can't really go to sleep for a year and be a decent sized business that next year, It's just not going to work, and it's not going to hold up in RIC.”
Fiedler: League One Volleyball de-risks pro league via 50 youth clubs
“What was interesting to us about League One is that underneath their hold co, they also are buying the top youth volleyball clubs globally, nationally. So they have 50 of those, and it creates cash flow, and a really stable business with which you can de-risk …”
Left Lane Capital invests in Kings League, volleyball, and chess leagues
“So we're also investors in Kings league, which is a seven on seven soccer league started in Barcelona by ex Barcelona star. Gerard Piquet and we've got a chess league that we've invested in and another one that we'll be announcing.”
Fiedler: No growth investor specializes in building next-generation sports leagues
“These sports businesses all have common growth and pain points, but there yet isn't really a growth stage investor that's addressing how do you build the next generation leagues into formidable businesses longterm.”
Fiedler: A Y Combinator for fast-casual restaurants needs to exist
“I think we could actually have an entire YC for fast casual businesses with how much share there is to steal pretty quickly and how many entrepreneurs are going at it.”
Fiedler: Tech and AI will boost home services margins by 5-10%
“I think there's a lot of ways that technology can improve the operating margin of these home services businesses by five, 10, 15%, maybe not 15. And there's just a hugely long tail of fragmented service providers in, in all of these industries that can get rol…”