“The most frustrating archetype of a founder out there is the finance founder. I am talking about a social orientation to work in which the most valuable thing is money, and solutions to business problems are assumed to be financial in nature. When there's a financial
You might think saying 'no' is simply a luxury of an established business who has the privilege to turn down an opportunity that isn't absolutely dead on perfect. But you'd be wrong. Saying 'no' is one of the fundamental business skills never taught in school,
Mission-driven brands were starting every hour, it seemed, back in the 2010s. Wall Street and PE threw billions at these businesses, especially plant-based meat and dairy. The pattern across most of them was a morally strident founder trying to ‘change the world’ by scaling their
Nothing is more disappointing than paying way too much for a celebrity influencer to pump up your brand, briefly, and then leave you without a proven marketing mix to continue growth. This has happened many times to brands with more cash than experience in brand-building. Unless
The primary reasons to exit early (early being Phase 2 or Phase 3) is that a) you are sick of operating the business and cannot find a suitable person to step in (or quickly enough OR b) you want an ‘entity’ to finance its growth
In 2020, as Covid up-ended our lives, I fielded lots of inquiries about how to make use of Direct-to-Consumer sales. If you remember, e-commerce sales had just exploded overall at the time. Americans received multiple stimulus checks and payroll protection and could not spend money at
The vast majority of CPG startups operate as B2B businesses. They don’t interact with their consumers. They aren’t curious about how they receive and use their products. As long as case volumes grow, they’re happy. As long as their wholesale price can float operations and
The standard of consumer goods innovation has risen in the past 10-15 years. If you want to achieve scale without influencer hype and keep growing, you must understand category-specific trade-offs and resolve them with an excellent sensory experience. To get a real foothold, therefore, you need
Gotcha. April Fools. VC money is not coming back. Maybe at a trickle from small funds that somehow sold the food sector to their LPs. Mostly, Wall Street is done with super early investments in food because, unlike soft drinks, precisely none of these brands
I’ll explain. But before I do, there are less than 10 spots available for the April Q2 cohort. So, you may want to grab one now. OK. For the rest of you reading this, this is my best explanation of why it matters for CPG founders