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We hosted Maven Ventures’ 2nd annual Hypergrowth Retreat last month to connect early stage founders from our portfolio and community to the top growth practitioners in Silicon Valley. After a full day of content, workshops, and one on one sessions, we were blown away by the positive feedback we got from our attendees. Here’s one attendee’s review:
“Gaining insights and valuable lessons from some of the most experienced leaders in growth helped us upgrade our pre-launch strategy, and better understand what it takes to build a scaleable product and business.”
Based on this feedback, we wanted to share some highlights from the sessions to help other early stage founders stay informed on how the top experts are thinking about growth today. These insights just scratch the surface. If topics like these are relevant to your business, consider joining us at next year’s retreat.
In his talk, “The Only Metric that Matters,” Josh Elman (Greylock) suggested that once a startup begins to track user data, there is one metric that is of utmost importance: how many times are users performing the core action on the expected cycle? For example, after charting user behavior at Twitter, Josh realized that the people who tweeted twice within 7 days in a given month had a very high likelihood of coming back the next month. So, that became their north star metric.
Andrew Chen (Uber), Elena Verna (Malwarebytes) and Joe Du Bey (Eden) discussed with Parker Thompson (AngelList) “Balancing Your Startup’s Monetization and Growth.” Elena shared the importance of getting Malwarebytes customers to the “aha moment,” the point at which they realized they should pay for the product. For her company, an anti-malware software, the “aha moment” comes when a potential customer downloads the product, because it’s at that point that their system can be scanned and malware discovered. Joe said that investors are sensitive to unit economics but growth is always the north star. By Series A, though, investors start to inquire more about the economics, Joe noted. Andrew added that getting addicted to paid acquisition early on can be a problem down the road; build an organic growth system, leveraging the unique value propositions of your product to ignite virality.
Maven has a decade-long track record of identifying and investing in emerging consumer trends, backing visionary founders who create iconic companies like Zoom and Cruise. We recently announced our fourth fund, a $60M seed fund to continue this mission.
We also have a history of investing in the era’s most cutting-edge technology, and today that is AI and machine learning-forward companies. In the early 2010s, we seeded a face-to-face video platform that has become ingrained in consumers’ daily lives - Zoom. In 2014, we ventured into autonomous vehicles with investments in Cruise, Embark, and May Mobility. Combined, these companies are now valued at over $30B. By 2016, we launched our thesis in consumer digital health with an investment in Hello Heart, a digital coaching app to manage heart health which has subsequently raised over $130M.
These investments have a few commonalities: a major emerging consumer trend, cutting edge technology of the time, and the application of machine learning and AI.
We are all consumers, and companies are being built for us right now.
While we were pioneers in areas like autonomous vehicles and digital health, as we were watching the advancements in AI, we were also patiently waiting to see when the technology would be good enough to reach other consumer-oriented sectors with the potential to have significant positive impact on the lives of billions globally. The public launch of ChatGPT in 2022 marked a pivotal moment for AI, demonstrating to us that it’s now time for emerging consumer AI opportunities. It was the signal we needed to eagerly shift our focus toward consumer AI investments.
Many investors are gravitating toward the safety of enterprise software, but we are doubling down on consumer investments because of our passion and knack for spotting emerging consumer trends. Consumer trends will never fade—they drive the economy. They inspire the tools we all use everyday in our own lives.
The advancements in AI technology are arguably the most impactful tech trend of our times. However, most consumers have not yet experienced the power and promise of AI directly improving their lives. When companies and their products begin to deliver on the grand dream of AI to make life better and easier for everyone, the best companies will be larger and more successful than we can currently imagine. These future household names are starting right now.
Today, we’re excited to share a glimpse into Maven’s investments on our quest to build the most iconic Consumer AI portfolio of the decade:
We believe these companies are on the verge of significant consumer breakthroughs, and to our knowledge Maven is the only fund to invest in this batch of leading AI startups.
It has been an exciting year so far, but we are not stepping off the gas. Alongside Jim Scheinman and Robert Ravanshenas, the Maven team and I welcome the opportunity to work with you and the inspiring founders in your network. We are doubling down on our consumer centric investment thesis because the future of consumer AI is happening right now.
We are laser focused on exploring companies on the frontier of AI applications for consumers, specifically in the areas of personal financial management, agentic AI, longevity, concierge medicine, and social/video. We welcome the opportunity to work with you or your network on uncovering the next massive consumer company. To stay in touch and follow our future investments, sign up for our newsletter here.
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Today the Maven team is thrilled to unveil our $60 million Fund IV. This latest fund culminates a decade of working together for our team — investing in talented, bold founders building tech companies addressing emerging consumer behavior and trends. We are driven to help those visionary founders unlock their potential to build iconic brands like Zoom and Cruise. Read more about our plans for Fund IV in today’s exclusive coverage from TechCrunch: Consumer tech investing is still hot for Maven Ventures, securing $60M for Fund IV.
In the backdrop of this market climate, the significance of crowning a ten-year history and successfully closing a new pool of capital is not lost on our team. We are immensely grateful to the bold founders we back and to our LPs for their continued belief in Maven’s team and strategy. Fund IV brings total assets under management to $200 million with more than 60 total investments.
With this new fund, we’ll continue exploring new trends while staying consistent with our investment strategy that’s proven successful. We have a knack for identifying phenomenal, technical founders with a Vision Worth Fighting For and the potential to build a massive company due to a new consumer trend. This strategy has led to an incredible hit rate, beating industry average by 10x, with 16% of the companies we’ve backed reaching a minimum $500 million exit or valuation. Our investments have yielded three billion-dollar-plus exits in Zoom, Cruise, and Embark, and enabled the return of significant capital to our LPs.
Fund IV: The Path Forward
A decade later, there continues to be so much opportunity ahead. The world has evolved significantly since Maven was founded. Society’s increasing complexity and technology’s continued rapid pace of change require a new generation of founders harnessing the power of emerging technologies like Artificial intelligence (AI).
Fund IV will continue our focus on seeding companies rooted in high-growth, consumer tech trends such as applications of AI, personalized healthcare, climate and sustainability, family technology, and fintech. Maven maintains a concentrated investment strategy, making only 6–8 core investments each year.
Once we invest, we become truly engaged partners. We provide devoted support to founders from inception and continue with follow-on investments as their companies scale. Throughout the years, we’ve effectively implemented this strategy across various domains and sectors, spanning over 10 years of successful investments from the emergence of mobile technology, autonomous vehicles, video communication, the consumerization of digital health, and more.
We feel particularly fortunate that this new fund aligns with the incredible evolution of AI technology. As consumer investors, we are hungry to find and fund new startups that are leveraging the power and promise of AI to make life better for everyday consumers. B2B, foundational, and infrastructure AI startups have boomed in the recent months, and we believe now is the time for new consumer applications of AI to blossom. Most people have yet to experience the true promise of AI that improves their life — and we believe we are just now seeing the emergence of nascent companies that will become household names as they make it happen. With this latest Fund IV we’ve already invested in a few, like MultiOn, a leader in building consumer AI Agents and Medeloop, a Stanford spinout leveraging AI to improve health outcomes by accelerating clinical research, with more to be announced soon.
To the bold, consumer-oriented founders that have a unique insight about how AI can deliver on this grand dream: we would love to hear from you.
Our strategy for Fund IV is to stick with what’s working. We’ll retain our highly concentrated approach led by our core investing team — Jim Scheinman, Sara Deshpande and Robert Ravanshenas. In a unique approach to success in our industry, our core team has remained largely unchanged. Jim Scheinman founded Maven in 2013, and Sara Deshpande joined as the first employee in 2014. She continues as a General Partner in Fund IV. Robert Ravanshenas, Maven’s first Associate, has returned as an Investing Partner after pursuing an operating role within a Maven portfolio company. We are incredibly excited for this next chapter together.
We do not do this alone
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our founders, limited partners, families, as well as many friends and colleagues in the industry for your unwavering partnership and faith in Maven.
Moving forward, our objective remains steady: to invest in and back bold founders in creating iconic companies that enhance the world, all while delivering outstanding returns for our LPs.
Collaborating with entrepreneurs, portfolio companies, industry experts, co-investors, and limited partners is an honor. Thank you. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and dive into the work ahead!
We're thrilled to share that Warmly raised an $11M Series A round to transform the SMB sales process with AI.
Combining the promise and power of AI with human capital has the potential to yield significantly accelerated benefits to any organization. One of our portcos, Warmly, has done just that with the introduction of the first AI-powered sales platform that streamlines sales processes, so salespeople can instantly and effectively engage with the most promising leads and ‘catch’ prospects who are actively engaged. Warmly's unique approach combines customer sales enablement tools with insights from various intent platforms, enabling it to determine which accounts are most promising and tailor engagement strategies accordingly. With their Series A funding, Warmly is set to advance their vision of AI, automation, and human collaboration to empower SMBs to thrive.
At Maven, we’re excited to see Warmly at the forefront of utilizing AI for business applications, an area that many companies are in early stages of exploring now. Warmly's early traction and impressive customer base, including New Relic, Gainsight, Sendoso, and more, reflect its effectiveness in identifying, tracking, and connecting with website visitors actively searching for products or services. The Warmly team, led by co-founders Max Greenwald, Carina Boo, and Alan Zhao, is nothing short of exceptional. Their combined technical backgrounds and wealth of experience give us the utmost confidence in their vision. And we are honored and excited to support their journey and to have participated in their recent series A alongside Felicis, NFX, Zoom, F-Prime Capital and others!
Warmly is a game-changer for businesses looking to boost their sales performance. Join us in celebrating their Series A success and experience the future of sales, driven by AI, automation, and human ingenuity. Warmly is not just a tool; it's a game-changer for businesses looking to boost their sales performance. Leverage Warmly's capabilities and transform your business today.
Today we are thrilled to announce our investment in House Numbers’ $3.75M pre-seed financing! House Numbers launched to help homeowners build financial independence with their AI-powered home wealth management platform. The platform empowers homeowners with personalized home financial recommendations, from choosing the right mortgage to accessing their home equity. By streamlining the process of accessing home equity — whether through a second mortgage, line of credit, or the variety of alternatives — House Numbers brings clarity, convenience, and efficiency to American homeowners.
Aiding homeowners in managing and maximizing their most valuable asset resonates with our team; it exemplifies our thesis to invest in Visions Worth Fighting For. House Numbers will empower individuals, boost the home-owning middle class, and foster financial well-being for millions of Americans by monitoring their homes’ value and addressing the financial complexities associated with homeownership. With House Numbers, the dream of owning a home can become more accessible and attainable for American families, leading to a better lifestyle, wealth accumulation, and greater financial security. This builds a stronger future for individuals, families, and our society as a whole. House Numbers also capitalizes on a significant market opportunity, as evidenced by the $15B spent on reverse mortgages, $240B on HELOCs, and $628B on home mortgage refinancing in the United States in 2022.
House Numbers is led by Co-Founder & CEO, Jeff Levinsohn, a serial founder with a strong track record and passion for the space; Co-Founder & CMO, Ben Hoffman, a longtime advisor to Maven; and startup veteran and CTO, Arthur Granado. We’ve been closely tracking Ben’s career since he served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Maven and helped launch a Maven Fund I portfolio company. We’re delighted to have this opportunity to back one of our own. We have the utmost confidence in Ben, Jeff, and Arthur’s ability to develop a robust product that fulfills their vision, promotes the greater good, and capitalizes on the latest advances in AI and fintech APIs.
We are excited to be joining this pre-seed round alongside Resolute Ventures and Uncommon Capital. If you’re a homeowner interested in guidance and insights on managing your asset, get started with House Numbers today!
I speak with hundreds of aspiring consumer entrepreneurs and review thousands of fundraising materials and pitches each year. From all this activity, certain patterns emerge that remain consistent with successful consumer startups. Primarily, consumer startups must have a vision worth fighting for to have a shot at massive success.
Which is why the question we always ask founders at our first meeting is: What is your vision worth fighting for? It’s a loaded question and we’re listening closely on several levels:
We want to hear what they are planning to bring into the world that is worth all the time, effort and money required for success. We are also listening carefully if the founders are passionate about this vision. If they don’t have the passion, then they will likely give up when the going gets tough. And, the going gets tough most of the time with startups.
We also want to make sure that the market opportunity is one that would justify a venture investment. There are many great consumer startups solving important problems that would make great businesses but could never scale to a billion dollar business. There’s nothing wrong with growing a successful consumer business addressing a smaller market, it’s just not the right type of startup to seek a VC investment.
Perhaps most often overlooked by founders, is the question of whether there are existing solutions that are good enough that already solve this problem. We often hear from founders that while there are one or more products that have millions of customers already in the marketplace that are solving this problem, these founders will claim, those products don’t work and their new solution will be so much better. You’ll hear some investors say that the new product would need to be 10X, 100X or 1,000X better. They might be right, but almost always, these startups will fail.
We prefer to invest in startups that are solving novel problems, that have discovered a secret that others haven’t noticed yet. We love investing in companies when after they launch, people say, “that’s a great idea, so obvious, why didn’t we think of doing that.” Building a new consumer habit is one of the hardest things a consumer startup founder will need to achieve, and if there’s already existing solutions to the problem that are “good enough,” that almost always spells doom for the nascent venture.
To sum up, the number one key to success for a consumer startup is the founders’ ability to clearly articulate their “vision worth fighting for,” which is a great idea that addresses a big market opportunity and that solves an important consumer need not already being solved by some other existing product. We’re also heavily biased to working with founders building novel consumer products that we’re proud of bringing to the world.
Zoom has become synonymous with our new way of living and working in the hybrid world created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom today helps hundreds of millions of us stay connected to one another for work, school and socializing. Because of this meteoric rise, Zoom is the next platform upon which both consumer and enterprise startups will build billion dollar businesses. At Maven Ventures, we focus on consumer software investing, which is why most of our Zoom App investments over the past year are solving big problems for consumers — mostly at home, but sometimes at work as well. Though it’s not our focus, it’s clear there are abundant opportunities for enterprise startups to build on top of Zoom as well. Recently, I described on CNBC how the new Zoom platform will work.
Consumer technology over the past century is divided into eras of disruptive platforms. From radio, to cable TV, to broadband internet, to the rise of mobile internet, generation-defining companies have been built on these new platforms. But in the years since the proliferation of mobile internet devices, we had not yet experienced another platform to achieve a similar critical mass…until Zoom. Simply put, it’s time for a new platform, which is a rare and exciting time. And I believe it’s just getting started.
Zoom reminds me of previous births of past tech platforms like broadband, mobile, and cloud. I saw these platforms emerge from inside the tech industry, as an internet exec, then an early employee at consumer social companies Friendster and Bebo, then as an Angel investor in many mobile-first companies in the early 2000s, including Zoom. When I started advising Zoom pre-launch, they were building mobile-first and on the cloud. The new mobile and cloud platforms gave rise to Zoom, and now Zoom will enable the launch of many more tech successes. I love how the tech ecosystem keeps enabling new startups to innovate on prior successful platforms. Here are the five reasons Zoom is now positioned to be the next big platform to launch new, multi-billion dollar companies.
Video communication’s rapid, widespread adoption in our personal, social, educational, and professional lives cements Zoom as the next big consumer tech platform. Sudden mass adoption of a product creates a distribution channel (a platform) for new products to reach millions of people overnight, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Zoom. In just a few months at the start of the pandemic, Zoom jumped from 10 million daily meeting participants to over 300 million, and with its global penetration came the opportunity for Zoom to shift from product to platform.
This mass adoption has made it possible for Zoom to realize it’s opportunity as a new platform. By comparison, when Apple launched the App Store with 500 apps in 2008, only about 10M people had an iPhone in their hands. Yet it was still a big enough start to launch the mobile app industry that has propelled so many successful tech companies. By reaching a critical mass of daily users who rely on Zoom not just for videoconferencing at work and school, but also personal uses like exercising, entertainment, celebrating life milestones, and socializing, consumer comfort with video technology is now in a position to support new applications and new multi-billion dollar businesses.
A product only becomes a platform under visionary leadership. CEO and Founder, Eric Yuan fits the bill. Eric has been a visionary since I met him in the early days of Zoom. Eric recognized the global shift towards mobile and cloud computing, and built a mobile-native and cloud-based HD-quality video product that would eventually take over the market. Eric exemplifies the type of founders we want to back at Maven Ventures: those who can see a better future when it might still seem crazy to everyone else and will do everything in their power to bring to the world their vision worth fighting for. He also instilled a healthy culture of trust and happiness amongst employees and customers from day one that’s still very much alive in Zoom today. The culture sets Zoom apart from most other public technology companies — just take a look at the Zoom employee experience shared widely on employer review platforms and in the media. Now that Zoom is the backbone for video communication, Eric is leading the Zoom team in its evolution from a product to a platform. They’ve bolstered Zoom’s video infrastructure, adding three key pieces to its foundation: the Zoom App Marketplace, Zoom Apps, and a customizable SDK, all announced at the most recent Zoomtopia conference and highlighted as Eric’s and Zoom’s key priority in the most recent Zoom public quarterly report. These three critical components will enable Zoom to be the launchpad for the next generation of billion-dollar consumer and enterprise startups.
The Zoom App Marketplace is an open platform where apps built by third-party developers can leverage Zoom’s platform to enhance a user’s full Zoom experience. Put simply, the Marketplace is the distribution channel bringing both third-party and Zoom-built apps and integrations to the hundreds of millions of people that already use Zoom daily.
The Zoom App Marketplace is fully secure, with a comprehensive review process ensuring every application is vetted for security, privacy, and UX. Further, the Zoom team has made app discovery remarkably simple, breaking down the hundreds of apps into a dozen clear categories so users can easily find the app best suited to their needs. Since its launch in 2018, the Zoom Marketplace has claimed more than 400 integrations from both startups and publicly-listed tech companies alike, and boasts over 800 million monthly API calls. The Marketplace is rapidly growing with applications spanning from chat to calendar to telehealth, and we see no signs of slowdown as these integrations enhance the Zoom experience for millions of users.
If the Zoom App Marketplace is the place to discover hundreds and eventually thousands or millions of app integrations for the core Zoom meeting experience, Zoom Apps are a group of selective applications that deeply integrate with Zoom and might be used as stand-alone applications with Zoom as a component.
Zoom Apps allow users to bring their professional, personal, or social applications into the Zoom experience without having to switch between multiple applications on their desktop. Zoom Apps are used within the meeting window and the desktop client (before and after a meeting), and can be presented, used alone, or used collaboratively. As users can seamlessly bring an app into a meeting for all to see and interact with, the introduction of Zoom Apps creates new functionalities within Zoom, and widely expands the range of use cases and distribution methods.
Developers are responding with overwhelming positivity to Zoom Apps’ model for two reasons. Most importantly, the open platform offers strong distribution channels. It offers free distribution to potentially tens of millions of new customers through the Zoom App Store via discoverability, sharing, word of mouth virality, and IT deployment within organizations.
Starting with applications built by 35 launch partners, including Asana, Coursera, and Slack, and Maven portfolio startups, Docket, Fathom, Pledge, HeYo, and Warmly, Zoom Apps seek to transform the way consumers use Zoom by bringing them access to their essential applications exactly where, when, and how they need them.
To access Zoom Apps: 1. Update to the latest client here. 2. Start using Zoom Apps! You may need to ask your IT admin to enable it for you.
In order for a platform to supply its users with a robust suite of applications, it must provide developers with a set of tools from which they can build. App developers have been able to integrate Zoom’s video meeting features into existing applications for years now, but as Zoom’s global influence has grown, so have the needs of developers building on Zoom. To meet the desires for additional flexibility and creative control, Zoom offers two SDKs. The first is a Zoom meeting SDK that enables developers to bring a Zoom meeting into another application. The JavaScript SDK allows the Zoom app to communicate with the client; it shares how the app is being used, when the app is being shared, when the app is being sent, and supports the modification of virtual backgrounds (with one direct API call to the client).
Zoom’s second SDK, next generation & fully customizable, unpacks the meeting SDK so developers can build entirely new third-party applications, incorporating video or audio as a service. With its customizable SDK, developers have the freedom to embed and enrich their own original, external apps with Zoom’s video or audio experience and scalable infrastructure, as well as the ability to create a custom UI, layout, and composition without app users ever knowing the video capabilities are powered by Zoom. By putting more creative power into the hands of developers, Zoom opens its platform up to a world of new use cases and applications and enables more video-based applications to be created than ever before.
Considering our high conviction in Zoom as the newest platform for billion dollar companies to be created, many of the incredibly talented founders from our recent Maven investments are using the Zoom platform to achieve their visions worth fighting for:
Class is replicating the real feel of school classrooms on Zoom, allowing educators to take attendance, hand out assignments, give quizzes, grade work, or talk one-on-one.
Daybreak Health is a digital mental health center built for teens. Daybreak provides individual counseling, group sessions, and wellbeing tools to teens, their parents and high schools.
Docket is a meeting-focused workspace for collaborative agenda creation, decision documentation, and action item tracking.
Fathom is a meeting-based intelligence tool empowering users with transcriptions, and insights on video calls.
Frame Therapy helps consumers find their therapist, schedule online therapy sessions, pay securely, and browse on-demand mental health content.For therapists, Frame is an intuitive practice management solution offering telehealth, marketing support, communication, scheduling, and billing tools.
Heyyo is a feature-rich chat with reactions, threading, pinned messages, group chats, file upload support, and more — all of which last between meetings and are accessible through their mobile app. Heyyo is built by the Glimpse team, who are also working on an AI-powered breakout room assistant.
Luma is a one-stop shop for creators to organize and host their events on Zoom, and manage their audience via events, newsletters, and community analytics.
Pledge is the leading fundraising platform for today’s mission-driven companies, nonprofits and individuals. As Zoom’s official charitable giving partner, Pledge brings frictionless fundraising functionality to any virtual event on Zoom.
Warmly empowers users to conduct better, more productive meetings by providing instant context and insights for everyone you meet on Zoom.
Stealth: Our team has also made one additional recent investment in a live-streaming startup building on Zoom’s platform that has not yet been announced.
With all of the companies we’ve invested in over the past 14 months, our investment process has been completed entirely virtually. Our introductions, pitch meetings, and check-ins with current and potential portfolio startups have been enabled by (you guessed it) Zoom, making us all the more excited about our newest investments.
As our Maven team continues to identify evolving consumer behaviors, in our remote world and beyond, Zoom’s infrastructure has clearly set itself apart as the newest platform for billion dollar startups. If you’re a founder building a consumer startup on Zoom’s platform — we’d love to connect! Shoot us an email at hello@mavenventures.com!
As we head into a new year and a new decade, the pace of innovation and technology adoption has never been higher. Consumer attitudes and interests are changing just as rapidly. Here are ten areas where consumer preferences are shifting and evolving, based on reviewing more than a thousand business ideas in 2019 and meeting hundreds of early-stage startup founders, mostly focused on launching new technology businesses targeting the consumer market. Each trend will drive big opportunities for innovation in the year and decade to come.
A new year brings renewed excitement to meeting hundreds of emerging early stage startups. I expect to see many thought-provoking, creative ideas within these ten big consumer trends. Consumer preferences drive the economy. From new meat alternatives, to software for a thriving home life, to new models for education, there’s no shortage of innovation coming in 2020 and the decade ahead. This article was originally published in Forbes on January 16, 2020.
We hosted Maven Ventures’ 2nd annual Hypergrowth Retreat last month to connect early stage founders from our portfolio and community to the top growth practitioners in Silicon Valley. After a full day of content, workshops, and one on one sessions, we were blown away by the positive feedback we got from our attendees. Here’s one attendee’s review:
“Gaining insights and valuable lessons from some of the most experienced leaders in growth helped us upgrade our pre-launch strategy, and better understand what it takes to build a scaleable product and business.”
JON SHOOSHANI, AVO
Based on this feedback, we wanted to share some highlights from the sessions to help other early stage founders stay informed on how the top experts are thinking about growth today. These insights just scratch the surface. If topics like these are relevant to your business, consider joining us at next year’s retreat.
In his talk, “The Only Metric that Matters,” Josh Elman (Greylock) suggested that once a startup begins to track user data, there is one metric that is of utmost importance: how many times are users performing the core action on the expected cycle? For example, after charting user behavior at Twitter, Josh realized that the people who tweeted twice within 7 days in a given month had a very high likelihood of coming back the next month. So, that became their north star metric.
Andrew Chen (Uber), Elena Verna (Malwarebytes) and Joe Du Bey (Eden) discussed with Parker Thompson (AngelList) “Balancing Your Startup’s Monetization and Growth.” Elena shared the importance of getting Malwarebytes customers to the “aha moment,” the point at which they realized they should pay for the product. For her company, an anti-malware software, the “aha moment” comes when a potential customer downloads the product, because it’s at that point that their system can be scanned and malware discovered. Joe said that investors are sensitive to unit economics but growth is always the north star. By Series A, though, investors start to inquire more about the economics, Joe noted. Andrew added that getting addicted to paid acquisition early on can be a problem down the road; build an organic growth system, leveraging the unique value propositions of your product to ignite virality.
Cat Lee was the first head of growth and now runs culture at Pinterest. She discussed “How a Company-Wide Growth Mindset Built Pinterest” at the Retreat. Aspirational cultures are fine, but company cultures that come with real, actionable values translate to the most success. For example, Pinterest has the company value “Put Pinners First” that can be referenced in any decision a team member faces. This means that all product features are built with the goal of giving pinners the most delightful experience possible. Also, growth is not something that only the growth team should get credit for — the entire company is responsible for growing the product. As Cat put it, “One team, one dream.”
Darius Contractor (Dropbox), Dan Barak (Lyft), and Nick Soman had a conversation about “Growth Hacking the Conversion Funnel.” Nick said that you don’t have a conversion funnel if people aren’t getting to value, similar to getting to the “aha moment” Elena described. Dan added, users won’t get to the moment of value if there is a broken layer on the funnel — identify where people are dropping off and mend the hole. Darius mentioned the importance of building a dashboard that can be easily queried for the effects of certain actions so that you can implement an analytical, number driven approach to growth.
Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO of Zoom, sat down with Jim Scheinman (Maven Ventures) to discuss how focusing on customer feedback and building a product that makes users happy has always been Zoom’s primary goal. For example, Eric shared that in the early days of the company he would send customers a personal e-mail if they cancelled their subscription. That kind of customer care is what sets the groundwork for a billion dollar company.
In his presentation “Beyond Product-Market Fit,” Brian Balfour encouraged attendees to not think of market, business model, product and channel as different silos. Lay out a hypothesis on how a new product or feature will fit into the entire framework of the market it’s addressing, the channel it will grow on, and the acquisition model it’s based on. Then, test the hypothesis. Diligently tiering your products and ensuring they have all of these fits will lead to a high revenue, successful business, Brian said.
Building on Cat and Eric’s talks describing growth as more than numerical analysis, but also emotional connection and care, Dave Kashen (Fearless Ventures) explained how to “Make Your Company Culture Your Secret to Success.” Companies that have strong company cultures, data shows, outperform those that don’t. While many leaders intend to create the greatest output by creating fear if deadlines are not met, the more effective strategy is to lead with love. “Inspire the why,” Dave said, and your company will be aligned towards achieving the greatest success.
In the panel Jim moderated on how autonomous vehicles are a new platform for consumer Hypergrowth, Alisyn Malek (May Mobility), Zach Barasz (BMW i Ventures), and Frankie James (General Motors) had a consistent message. As Alisyn put it, finding opportunities to find and surprise riders will be the next step in creating value in autonomy. Zach continued saying that Lyft and Uber have commoditized driving and created the infrastructure to get us from A to B. Now, new companies will need to differentiate themselves based on social or other factors, such as how customers are matched in a shared ride. Frankie added that beyond the social components, technical aspects of automotive — like batteries — need to be innovated for full autonomy to become a reality.
Dan Vallejo (Google) taught attendees that the first step to “Maximizing First 72 Retention” is to make setup as short and painless as possible. Then, don’t inundate your new app users with education on how to use the product at the outset. Additionally, use feature retention analysis to determine which features are associated with the most active users, and focus your initial on-boarding on getting users to that action. (Elena and Nick’s “aha moment” principle is coming into play again!)
Gustaf Alströmer (YCombinator) shared his principles of “Laying the Foundation for Sustainable Growth”: build a culture of data and review experiments often. For every experiment a Product Manager runs, he or she should track closely how it performs against a control group to understand what would have happened if that feature wasn’t shipped. At Airbnb where Gustaf led the growth team, they used A/B testing on a systematic level to validate ideas. Using Cat and Dave’s frameworks for infusing this experiment + validation mindset into your company culture can be a recipe for success.
To conclude the Retreat, Sara Deshpande (Maven Ventures) moderated a panel on “Getting Funded by Top-Tier Investors.” Rick Yang (NEA) explained that deploying a $3B fund, as his firm is doing, means being patient and looking for huge opportunities that may take 10+ years to exit. So, he looks for vision and endurance in founders. Mar Hershenon (Pear VC) felt similarly that a startup mission needs to get her team excited about the market opportunity for them to make an investment. Rebecca Kaden (USV) shared that entrepreneurs that can articulately explain how their product and team are uniquely suited to address the market get funded.
Building products and businesses that achieve Hypergrowth is not easy, and these principles are just the starting point. I hope you find these frameworks for thinking about growth useful — and also continue to push the envelope on experimentation, tracking, and instilling strong team cultures to build the next wave of fast-growing, transformative companies.
Thank you to all of our Hypergrowth speakers for sharing their experiences at the Retreat. And, to Benjamin Hoffman for sharing his diligent notes to make this post possible!
Over the past year, Covid has had an immense impact on families everywhere. This pandemic has been particularly difficult for the tens of millions of families with young kids where all parents are working — which is true of more families than ever before. Mothers, especially, have been disproportionately affected: COVID-19 has reversed decades of progress for women on the work front. With women losing 5.4 million jobs since the onset of the pandemic, the percentage of women in the workforce is the lowest it’s been since 1988 according to the National Women’s Law Center. Mothers have turned down promotions, reported higher stress levels and less job flexibility, and have left their jobs to care for their children.
There’s been so much written about this problem. If you’re reading this as a parent, especially a mom, you get it. I know I do, as a mom of two kids under three, including a baby born in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. But where there’s a major trend and severe pain point, there's a massive opportunity to build and fund technology companies to solve it. Where are the startups serving families, saving their productivity and their sanity? They’re starting to emerge, and there’s a huge opportunity to build and fund new companies in this category, dubbed “FamTech.” Here are a few of the major gaps in the market, highlighting opportunities for innovation:
Managing the Mental Load. Mental load is the behind-the-scenes work of household management. It’s the organization, planning, and execution of how things get done at home, from booking doctor’s appointments to remembering important dates to planning transportation and childcare. The mental load is a heavy burden, and it’s often because of this burden — not because of work — that women are leaving the workforce in droves. The mental load that parents bear on a daily basis, as explained by Dr. Lauren Knickerbocker of NYU Langone, often leads to “resentment, burnout, and frayed patience, especially when it is outside of others’ awareness or shared responsibility.” With over 30 million families in the U.S. with children and at least one working parent, startups that help parents handle mental load will have a tremendous market opportunity in front of them. This can include offerings like scheduling and delegating tasks, or management tools to help outline and share the often invisible work of the mental load. There is some early startup funding in this space, including startups like Maple and Milo, but it remains limited and ripe for innovation.
Creative Care Models. The childcare crisis in America was well-documented before Covid, when childcare was already unaffordable for 63% of parents. Then the pandemic required parents everywhere to balance child care and schooling on top of other professional and domestic responsibilities, quickly exposing the severe inadequacies of traditional child care models. Consequently, the opportunity for creative care models has never been more obvious. Traditional childcare is one area of family tech with many venture-backed companies like UrbanSitter, Winnie, and Brightwheel — yet there’s plenty of room for more innovation in an area where families spend $42B per year on early childhood alone. More startups are emerging to target employers, expanding the market for childcare as an employee benefit, such as Kinside. This sector is poised to grow, as companies with policies and tools that support parents have a leg up in recruiting, retaining, and promoting their people. Beyond the shift in traditional childcare — either adding tech to the existing paradigm, or changing who pays for it — there’s an even bigger opportunity to rethink family care. One of the challenges with the existing childcare model in the U.S. is that it represents a huge share of wallet for parents, who often spend at the very top of their budget, yet caregivers often still struggle to make a living wage (and provide childcare, if needed, for their own kids). Startups will win when they can push the world from where it is, to where it could be — providing great care for families, and increasing supply and access to high-quality childcare, while building a business model that is fair and equitable to care providers. In today’s world, this also includes caring for family members with medical needs or aging parents, further underscoring the size of the market opportunity and the need for solutions.
More Hours in the Day. There might not be more than 24 hours in anyone’s day. But so many billion-dollar companies have been successful in building productivity tools to help make the most of our hours at work, from Slack to Zoom to the proliferation of “future of work” tools. Roles like executive assistants, office managers, and chief of staff exist in droves. With family life more complex than ever, there’s an opportunity to adapt these models to the home, allowing families to delegate, outsource, or otherwise leverage new services or platforms to help manage their homes and families while making the most of their 24 hours. This category is just emerging, with new entrants like Strongsuit, Villo and Bozzy attacking this huge opportunity.
Parenting Tools and Resources. Parents are more informed than ever before, with an immense amount of research and expertise at their fingertips. New startups are emerging to help deliver what parents need when they need it, whether it’s sleep training their babies or providing e-learning for older children. This is a category where new entrants about, yet many leaders have yet to emerge. According to Chian Gong, a Partner at Reach Capital with expertise in the early childhood education market, some of the opportunities include parent support and education as well as tools and services for home learning, empowering “families as a child's first educator.” Examples of early-stage startups in this category include Lovevery, BümoBrain, Beanstalk, and Epic! (disclosure: my fund Maven Ventures is an investor in Epic!)
The need for innovation in the space is striking a chord with gender equity experts, investors, and celebrities alike. In late 2019, author Eve Rodsky published Fair Play, “a time-and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities.” The book was a result of her recognition of all the unpaid and unnoticed work she was doing for her family. Fair Play has helped shine a light on the severity and prevalence of unequal labor in the home, which has been exacerbated by a lack of technology, tools, and services to help strike a better balance.
“Women’s unpaid labor at home has increased by 153% during the pandemic. What if we treated our home as our most important organization?” says Rodsky. “There would be a lot more tools that focus on boundary setting, systems, and communication.”
Covid isn’t the only factor amplifying this sector. Startups building solutions for parents might benefit from political tailwinds in the near future as campaigns for gender equity in the home receive increasing support from all angles. In late January, 50 high-profile women, including Whitney Wolfe Herd, Gabrielle Union, and Eva Longoria, ran a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding newly-inaugurated President Biden to enact a “short-term monthly payment to moms depending on needs and resources,” and “pass long overdue policies like paid family leave, affordable childcare and pay equity.” Just weeks after, 50 men in Hollywood, professional sports, and Silicon Valley ran a similar campaign in the Washington Post to show their support. Many states are instituting more generous leave policies, and if any federal administration shows that family-friendly policies are a priority, it might be this one.
While research and policies are a start, more tech-oriented solutions would likely unlock far greater results for parents. Considering under-innovation around many of the day-to-day issues that plague parents at home, many of the smartest consumer venture investors are more focused on the space than ever before. The industry tailwinds coupled with massive consumer needs are causing leading VCs and other leading experts to notice.
Where are the investment opportunities, according to the experts?
Kanyi Maqubela, Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures:
“The market opportunity for family tech companies has become a matter of national crisis, as almost every American family now has first-person evidence that without childcare, you don't have an economy. I like the idea of companies sponsoring more family-first benefits, particularly in financial services. Paid leave in the US is at minimal levels compared to global standards, and the costs of early parenting can be subsidized by employers in B2B2C models, with win-wins for every participant.”
Julie Wroblewski, Managing Partner at Magnify Ventures:
“We're starting to see promising, emerging solutions but overall the area of household management innovation is still nascent and much further behind the pace of productivity innovation we've seen in the workplace. We're now at a point where technology is poised to produce the next wave of labor-saving technology in the home that addresses both physical labor as well as the mental load that working parents and mother, in particular, are dealing with.”
Chian Gong, Partner, Reach Capital
“I am excited to invest in the family tech space. This is not only a huge market opportunity, but also a critical engine to economic growth. The companies that build trusted brands with families will have significant influence over the $4.3T in family spending.”
Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play:
“Gaps in the marketplace have stemmed from the fact that we don't treat our homes with any respect or rigor. The trends that are exciting me the most are solutions to help recognize that the home is the most important organization.”
These leading experts and venture capital investors — many of them parents themselves — see a huge opportunity for new startups to tackle big consumer problems. We have more work productivity tools at our disposal than ever before, yet we’ve made few strides with in-home productivity, leaving a bulk of the 30 million working families across the United States craving creative care models, more hours in their day, new ways to manage the mental load, and better parenting tools and resources. The Family Tech sector is just at the very beginning. As more companies launch and grow, there’s a wide open opportunity for founders and investors to create new consumer software and tech-enabled services companies beloved by parents everywhere.
