Kirsten Green on the Rise of Solopreneurs

Hi, I'm Connie Loyzas and this is Alex Gove and this is Strictly VC Download.

Hey everybody. Good evening from Strictly vchq. It's been a very busy week and we are winding it up with a very special interview for you. Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures is one of the venture world's foremost experts on all things E commerce. Her investments number among some of the biggest and brightest names in retail, including Stadium Goods, Fair chime, bonobos, and jet.com. kirsten founded Forerunner in 2012 and she and her team count approximately $2 billion in assets under management. In Connie's conversation with Kirsten, Kirsten talks about many hot topics, such as what Web3 means for consumers and whether brands should invest in the Metaverse. But first, the news. What with worries about inflation and the war in Ukraine, one might think that investors would flock to Bitcoin as an attractive place to shelter their money. After all, alt currencies have long been popular because they exist outside of the earthly realm of governments and world affairs. As it turns out, however, the price of Bitcoin has fallen almost 40% since its all time high of $64,400 this past November and almost 10% in the last month alone. In today's New York Times, author Kevin Roose runs through several reasons that might explain this drop. First, crypto has never been user friendly in any sense of the word. It's still way too hard to convert one's assets to an alt currency. Second, Bitcoin and Ethereum, also down significantly, are notoriously volatile, in large part due to the tremendous amount of day trading and speculation that they have always attracted. And finally, some fear that the amount of attention and negative press coverage that crypto has received in recent months could lead to more government regulation. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has called for Congress to increase its supervision of cryptocurrencies for fear that Russia might try to hide its assets in alternative currencies. While Rus did talk to a Ukrainian official who praised crypto for making it easy to raise and disburse money in the absence of a functioning national bank, the falling prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum suggest that cryptocurrencies are still a risky bet at best. Bad news for all of you. Metamates Meta, AKA Facebook, has just announced that it will no longer offer cherished perks such as free dry cleaning to its employees. Meta's move is perhaps understandable post pandemic, many employees will continue to work from home, and the company plans to increase workers wellness stipends from roughly $700 to $3,000 this year, and the abuse of perks was apparently getting a little out of hand. One Meta food service worker criticized his co workers for carping about the cuts. I can honestly say when our peers are cramming three to ten to go boxes full of steak to take them home, no, nobody cares about our culture, he posted. A decision was made to try and curb some of the abuse while eliminating 6 million to go boxes, he continued. Yes, Meta's stock price, which has plummeted 50% in the last six months, may have had something to do with the move, but perhaps Meta's penny pinching also reflects its new strategic priorities. As Meta moves all in on the Metaverse, maybe earthly distractions like dry cleaning and food seemed just a little less significant. Whatever the case, it was clearly a new day for Meta's minions. Asked by the Times to comment, one employee texted back, can't talk, doing laundry. Up next, our interview with Kirsten Green, founder and Managing Partner of Forerunner Ventures. But first, a word from our sponsor. Find them. Turbocharges Talent Acquisition with AI from Search to hire Hiring for engineering leaders who have seen a company from early stage through exit, let's find them. Hiring for account executives who have worked for multiple unicorn companies and made presidents club. Let's find them. Only findem lets you search by what matters and uncover the top talent no one else is finding. Search like never before, engage without limits and make amazing hires with Findom. Try Findom at www.findum.AI strictlyvc. That's Fin D E M AI strictlyvc and now, Connie's interview with Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures.

Kirsten, it's so great to be talking to you. It's been too long and I hope to see you in person very soon. We're doing this over Zoom today.

Connie, thank you so much for having me on your show today. I'm so happy to catch up with you.

Okay, so first I should say congratulations on a $1 billion fund that you just closed, which is a very big deal. I wondered if you did any press around this or you just quietly posted the news yourselves.

Well, first, thank you for the kind words. No, we did a post and honestly, I think I was inspired to write the post as much because we're going to celebrate our 10 year anniversary this year and I love milestones and opportunities to reflect and I also love thinking about the future and planning for the future. And so a decade of being in business felt like a moment to do that. It happened to be marked by the fund as well, so it was good to be able to wrap those together. And I think our team feels energized by where we are and certainly energized by having a new fund to invest. But we didn't think about doing any press. I think one, there's a lot of fundraising going on, so I'm not sure it's newsworthy anyways. But also when we think about our portfolio companies and how they work towards creating impressions in the market for their businesses, we really encourage them to think about talking about the innovation that they're leading, the customers or users that they're serving, the uniqueness of their product. And if you want to throw it a foot in about your fundraise, that's great. But like, that's not what we're here to really do. And so I think we just wanted to practice what we preach. I think it's great. Well, congratulations.

I mean, I can remember when you were basically a one person shop, so it's incredible to me what you've built. I wondered if you just frankly don't need what more deal flow than you're receiving. Because I do feel like I saw a shift in terms of who's announcing funds and who's not and I guess who's pitching us aggressively at TechCrunch to get in front of founders and who isn't. And it just seems like a lot of the bigger funds recently, I'd say over the last six months to a year maybe are not necessarily coming to TechCrunch or Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal, but just throwing it out there and whoever picks it up, that's great, right?

Well, listen, I mean, we're in the business of deal flow. It's vital to our business. And we still think about the need to continue to cultivate deal flow. And there's a lot of different strategies you could put for that. I think one of the things that we've always prioritized a 4Runner, is let's do fewer things better. And our focus on deal flow has been twofold. It's been let's have focused areas that we are well versed in or researched in and passionate about and could show up that way, informed and passionate and be making efforts to communicate that to the market through the work that we're doing. And then let's do good work by the entrepreneurs because good entrepreneurs know good entrepreneurs. And I think this goes all the way back to the very beginning of 400, when it was just Yuri and I and two people and we thought we have ambitions that are greater than the resources we have to put against them. And so all the more reason to be focused on doing a few things and having a strategy or two that you can really nail to get after something. And so like, that's kind of been the hallmark of deal flow for us. And so, you know, I think that the press and the press's role in Forerunner over the last decade, let's call it, I've been incredibly grateful. I think that it's really powerful and important to get your story out there and tell your story. I think it's more important to get the story about our companies that we're investigating out there and tell those stories. And so it's definitely valuable and important to be part of the ecosystem and share your thinking and your focus. But I think we think about it more holistically than we do about deal flow.

Well, one story that you've told well and your results have told the story was about Forerunner. As an E commerce investor, you built your reputation on funding these really Great DTC Brands, Jet.com, bonobos, Glossier, Outdoor Voices. And I know that the firm has evolved somewhat and I'm sure you're still getting pitched by many, many brands. So I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about the firm's evolution and maybe moving away a little bit from that earlier strategy, just as I guess the market has. So one question I have is, is the bloom off the roads for D2C brands some of to be struggling after a good run? Every company has sort of its ups and downs. It just seems like the market became so crowded at some point, it's hard to sustain interest over time. What have you sort of learned from your many years dealing in DTC and how are things changing now?

Well, thank you for the thoughtful question and if I can, I'd like to answer it or address that topic two different ways. One, to your first question, which is what's been the evolution of the firm? And then two, we can talk about what at least my two cents are on what's going on in D2C in terms of the firm and our investment focus when we raised our first institutional fund in 2012, again, small team, small fund, wanting to drive value and having focus. And I had been two decades or so before investing in and around consumer broadly, but also with a lot of focus on retail. So I had an informed, experience driven view on what was going on in retail that was really shifting and changing and so thinking about a place to start as a firm and to create Focus. We went after this thesis in the context of consumer broadly around commerce. But even then, Connie, that was the go to market, if you will, for our firm. But the vision for our firm was multifaceted. One really build on how we structure our team and how we do business. But just from an investment focused standpoint. It was about having the consumer and a changing user as the North Star. And so saying that we're going to get our inspiration and we're going to build interest areas based on observing behavior, engaging with people and finding out how are things changing, how are preferences changing, expectations, proclivities, habits, needs changing and then thinking about where is business not meeting those demands. So that's the first part of the Venn diagram and then the third overlay on that is evolving in technology and methods of doing business that lend themselves to a better, more efficient business model. And the intersection of those three things shows up in everything we've ever invested in over a decade. One of the things I really like about venture is that it's about having one foot in today, but an eye towards tomorrow and really thinking about what's relevant enough today that it's going to speak to a core set of users as you find product, market fit, that you have a market tailwind that's supporting it, that you can execute into, and that over the course of some amount of years, let's call it 3, 4, 5, 10 years, it becomes something that is maybe a ubiquitous behavior or ubiquitous need or demand that a company is early in addressing. And if that's what we're looking for as venture investors, you can't do the same thing over and over again. You have to always be thinking about what's next and what's new. And so we look across 10 years of investing and every fund has a couple of different iterations of themes that we are particularly interested in as we see them evolving on a continuum. And some of them will come back around over time. But we're trying to move the conversation forward all the time. Yes, in 2012 we came out, we had a view on what was happening in retail. It could be summed up as the current iteration or the current dynamic change in retail was being driven by a buyer whose purchase journey was being shifted by digital access, that was discovering things different, being influenced by something different, expecting a different purchase experience. And the companies that were playing into that change were part of rewriting the rules of what the retail landscape looked like. And suddenly if you were a brand that had been in wholesale traditionally, you found yourself retailer and the retailers found themselves competing with the brands that they've been posting in their stores. And so they had to think more clearly what their value proposition was. And ultimately both were influenced on what their business model was. And in all of that change, we saw a lot of opportunity. We saw opportunity for companies that were part of reshaping the landscape and how business got done. And those companies that you mentioned early on, each one of them we felt like played into a different dynamic of what was changing in that ecosystem. So it wasn't that we invested in a beauty company. There's been a lot of great beauty companies that have been started. Glossier captured our attention because we had a different vision of a business model and how to engage consumers and how to serve consumers and how to use their input and feedback and the product roadmap, et cetera. And we thought that was really interesting in the context of the massive changes that were happening. Dollar Shave Club was going to Trojan horse into a customer's home and life with the proposition around shaving. But it was as much about saying a male consumer is ch changing their habits around personal care. They're engaging in their own shopping more. There's an opportunity to serve them directly. And by the way, wholesale businesses, the world is changing. There's this direct to consumer. You need to understand who your consumer is, be that much closer to them. And that was a whole new way of doing business. In those cases, the premise for the investment was as much or more about the business model than it had anything to do with the product. And so, you know, at some point those new rules have been written and the same kind of change and outsized performance and growth and leadership that we're looking for in those early companies that are showing others the way to play into that evolving landscape has played out. And those companies that are launched later might be great businesses, but they might not be venture type businesses.

Why don't move on from here? But I'm a big fan of Emily. I think Emily's a superstar. And glossier outdoor voices as well. These companies have struggled somewhat. They grew really fast. Maybe, maybe it's just a natural retrenching. But with Dollar Shave Club for example, it started and it was acquired by Unilever when it was still enjoying an upward growth trajectory. Where do these companies go from here?

Generally and without speaking specifically about company who tell their own story? For the most part, we're looking for businesses that are leveraging innovation or some change in the landscape to introduce something new, to create space for themselves. And then once that is your wedge into the market. Essentially you're starting to think about more broadly how you serve that audience or what are the product extension opportunities, what are the distribution extension opportunities, et cetera. And a lot of times that is what powers the ability to build a large business at scale, which over time might be addressing some of the market opportunities that the older businesses were addressing, but just with their more modern business model or whatever the case may be. So I think that those businesses that started online, that really used the go to market around digital to build up those muscles up front, as they expand and start to reach more people and want to reach more people, they think about other distribution channels, whether that's their own retail, whether that's wholesale, whether that's international, whether that's other product lines, whether that's other methods of rolling out products. I've always thought all those things are in play for every business that we're working with. Hopefully we're investing in companies that have that kind of longevity and have that kind of pull from their users that they want more from them. And wherever you are on the journey, you're starting to unlock more of that opportunity.

So it sounds like a lot of sort of tried and true means of growing are applicable to these companies. Maybe a question I was getting at is the discovery piece. It seems like it's become a tougher nut to crack as some of these bigger platforms have only gotten bigger, like TikTok Instagram. Do you feel that that's true? What are the best ways to get in front of the consumer in 2022?

100%, Connie is true. The good news is there's more people online and so there's more customers that are comfortable discovering and purchasing from new brands or products or services online. But similarly, there's more businesses online. So there's a lot of noise in the market. And I think what's exciting about that is it means choice for customers and it means opportunity for entrepreneurs. I think if you're an investor, you have to have a bigger story or opportunity in mind than something that's incremental to the landscape. Always true. But as things play out, there become more and more players in the market. And so some things that were easier early on become harder. And one of the ways that we've been talking about it here is that so much of the last decade for branded consumer products in particular or consumer oriented, anything, if you will, was about acquisition. It was about all these new ways of reaching customers, all these new ways of building a customer base, getting your product getting your service out into the market. I think we're now in a phase where it's now becoming essential to think as much or more about ongoing customer experiences. How do you cultivate customers? How do you really think about long term relationship, long term business building with a consumer or user? So simply said, moving from acquisition is a priority to retention as a priority. And you just assume that it's an aggressive acquisition market. We advocate that our company should work on being very good at test and trial, be at the edge of trying everything that's out there when they get opportunities that yield great ROI to lean into them. But the secret is to be nimble, which is probably always true for so many aspects of operating a startup or a business. But I don't think there's an acquisition strategy that's getting you to the promised land.

I feel silly asking this question, but since it's so top of mind for people, do brands need a Metaverse strategy? I saw Ralph Lauren was going to be opening pop up shops.

I do, I mean I, I do think that the whole metaverse web 3 crypto, that entire class of opportunity or conversation is really interesting and really promising. Like most new things, it's unknown how long it takes to play out when the mass adoption is, what the tipping point on all of that is. But I definitely believe in it and I think that most companies do if you look at all of the contributing trends driving it. And so yes, with that in mind, get in there and start experimenting, get comfortable, start getting comfortable building muscle in it. Think about what's right for your business, what's right for your brand, where are there opportunities that are customer acquisition or customer retention or even to sell new things? Because quite frankly, all of those things are probably in play in that universe. It's not going to come out of the gate as a make or break it for anyone's business in 2022. But I don't know, in a few years out or maybe even closer in, it could be right.

Well, one thing I really appreciate about your firm is the diversity of bets you've made. It feels like there are a lot of really forward thinking founders in your portfolio, one of whom is Julie Borenstein, who I talked with two years ago when she first took the wraps off the yes, which is a commerce site that readers and listeners may know. It sells all kinds of brands, both high and low and it kind of figures out your style over time and makes shopping more fun and efficient is sort of the thinking. One thing that I thought was interesting was that it went app only to begin with, which was very experimental. I'm wondering how that played out and if that's another strategy that you would repeat or that your other founders have also done.

That's a great question, Connie, and thanks for mentioning the yes, because I just was reading this afternoon that it got named on Fast Company's top 10 most innovative companies in style. So I think that was an exciting vote of confidence or recognition from Fast Company. The yes is playing into a couple of trends. This idea of the endless aisle, it's been brewing for a while, and in a lot of ways, it's here. But the problem on the other side of that is discovery. It's like, okay, so now there's all this stuff like, what do I do? Where do I actually find what I want? I did a search on Amazon. It has everything in the world, but I just want to get to the truth on one thing. I need to buy, and I've got too many choices. And so how do you navigate that? And the most practical way to address the endless aisle is to have a marketplace model, which is what the yes is. They don't hold any inventory. They are basically distribution partners for all their brands. And their job is really to create a great experience for the customer so that the customer comes there and that the customer converts and the customer repeats more than it would in other places. And so the first leg of the business was a super heavy lift on the tech side of building an incredibly detailed taxonomy of attributes around products and building a series of integrations that made it possible to onboard brands from not just an inventory standpoint, but a purchase exchange and customer information exchange so that it wasn't done manually in the background. It's actually a tech integration, and so a lot of work was done to kind of lay the foundation on there. The next next premise was let's test out this taxonomy and test out this product catalog and the experience we have in mind with a group of super users. And so the app was the way to deliver the most engaged embedded experience. There's some friction in getting there. And you had to get somebody who was actually really interested. They were gonna take a quiz so that we could start to understand, are we actually able to take people's information against the taxonomy of products that have been built and really deliver up a more appropriate assortment of products so that instead of searching through thousands of items, you could search through dozens of it and get something that you were more likely to meet your need or your style or your use case. And so the app experience really allowed the deep dive on the customer side, the deep dive on the engagement side. Once the team started to feel confident that they were onto something with the way they'd organized the taxonomy and the way they'd organized the learning algorithm, we of course then wanted to build a broader experience and they took it to the web too. So I think that for this business and the way that they were building the tech and rolling it out and learning, it was a good strategy. There's lots of companies, if not most companies, that I don't think you'd want to go to market that way. I think you'd rather think about how do you then offer that to a super user or somebody that's engaged but have a lighter weight way to get them onboarded. Julie should tell this story, but I think today we have great engagement and repeat activity on the app. We have great acquisition through the web and then they migrate people that way.

You did this really great post. I'm not just saying that to you to, to flatter you, but last year you wrote about this sort of circle of life and commerce and I think it was sort of like you were talking about the rise of the creators on Instagram and Substack who could sell their products directly to their followers. And I feel we're kind of in like the marketplaces and bizarre world right now. And so I'm just wondering, as somebody who kind of sees around corners, what's next? Where's your attention focused for 2022 and beyond?

Well, Juan, Connie, thank you for the nice reference to the post that we put out last year, which has really been the basis for building a portfolio in our most recent fund. A lot of that thinking, if not most of that thinking, feels really still relevant and active for us today. Thinking about powering the one to one opportunity is multi layered in what it takes to make that viable.

Right?

So you start with this idea of hey now, anyone who's got something to say can be a publisher, you can get a substack link, you can start putting it out, you can start charging for that. But the difference between that idea and the execution is a lot, because it's a lot to do. It's hard to do. And so what are the tools, what are the services, what is the software? What's the community that needs to support the single entrepreneur? That's a whole ecosystem of efforts that need to be built and that need to be trialed and tested and marketed and improved and moved forward. So I think we're still pretty early on in the Innings of organizing all of that, defining that and having like the really big breakout companies. So we're, we're still thinking a lot about that. I think once you have a lot of individual people that are in some ways hanging out a shingle, whether that's online or in real life or whatever, then you kind of go full circle to like, okay, well how do you bring people together so that they can discover those? That begs the question for like new marketplaces or new collectives that bring people together. So we went from big corporate ideas to individual ideas to creating collectives. I think there's a whole opportunity set in there. So those kind of all play in that evolution of the commerce to the seller genre. And we invested in a handful of B2B companies because of that stage of the development of that whole ecosystem in the recent 18 months. We're still investing there. This web3Evolution and how companies can use that to have a future leading stance on community, a future leaning stance on empowerment, maybe a future product strategy is interesting. There's a journey to get there to mass adoption. And I don't know how long that takes or necessarily where we are in that journey, but definitely somewhere that validates spending time and even money in that space. One of the things that we are really interested in paying a lot of attention to getting back to tracking with consumers and users and people and what's going on with them, is just how preferences and priorities are changing. One easy way to describe it is that if you look back historically, I think you could probably put most purchase decisions in a three pronged priority, structure, price, quality and access or value. And there's a fourth one. So we're going from a three legged stool, if you will, to a four legged table where people are thinking about how's this business, this product, the service, fitting into the concept context of sustainability, of the environment, of the future, of modern social structure. So that's a whole nother opportunity for different ways of running your business, different kind of tools or supply chain dynamics that you need, as well as maybe different products or different services spike when you put that in mind. So I think that's pretty interesting. And it's a play also into demographic shifts which are both generational and psychographic as well as ethnic. And there's a lot of change happening in this country on all fronts.

Going back to Web three, I am wondering if you've made bets that you would say fall into that category. I'm still trying to understand what it means. I had talked to Sarah Tavel, a benchmark and she was saying that there's this confusion in the market about how decentralized ultimately all these companies are supposed to be. And she was like, a lot of the top companies right now, OpenSea, for example, is very centralized. It just happens to be on a decentralized platform. And so I guess and that way somehow it helps with community. But of course it remains more akin to a traditional venture like investment in that it's never going to be fully owned by the community anyway. I'm just wondering if you see brands doing anything in particular that are really interesting here, or if you're focused on again, like infrastructure, how you're kind of viewing how you get down this trend.

If at all well, without knowing a lot. So I could say this somewhat naively from the sidelines. I'm imagining a whole new category or a whole new protocol being developed for digital connections. In the infrastructure side, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and we've seen a lot of interesting projects and companies in that space. That's not historically where Forerunner has really showed up. We've been again more on the front line as it relates to the consumer. So I think our orientation is a lot on what's it going to take to migrate or include Web2 in Web3 and bring companies along in that journey and bring consumers along in that journey. And it strikes us that up until two years ago, most of what was happening in Web3, crypto, all of that area, those terms that get kind of like bunched together, it's called the evolution of the digital landscape, kind of lived in specific corners of the universe as opposed to being something mainstream. And I think what, what we saw last year was NFTs hit the radar in a thing that like were confusing to people how they worked or why they should value them. But the idea that there was something that you could pay money for that resonated on some simple way. So it was a way for people to start engaging a little bit there. But in order to make it more mainstream and to make it something that is beyond a novelty, I would imagine there needs to be real use cases and there needs to be much lower friction in how you engage. And so the effort to make that happen is it feels essential to getting it to be again mainstream, something that's ubiquitous and valuable. And I think there's a lot of opportunities in what that bridge looks like. Some of the work there is technology focused, some of it is experience focused. And that's where we've been spending most of our time. Time we've made a handful of investments. A bunch of them have not been announced. That's the founders and the company's opportunity when they're ready to tell about their businesses. Some of them are in market with products but just haven't done a funding announcement. But there's a handful of them that are part of the toolkit to help again bring Web two companies into Web three. And then there's a few that are really focused on the consumer experience in web3 and making it more approachable than maybe what exists out there today.

That's interesting. Sarah and I were talking about NFTs to track real estate or fine art. So I'm curious to see what the applications will be. I mean we've got to get away from cartoon monkeys that cost a lot of money. Yeah.

Which I think that's a novelty that gets people to kind of pay attention. Right. And to debate it like this is interesting. This is worthwhile. You need to have something like that for people to start talking about it and paying attention. I didn't want to ask you quickly.

About two other things that I think are interesting. The live streamed shopping. I was actually trying to get a couple of the founders of startups to a strictly VC event late last year. Pop Shop Live, which is a marketplace where people can host their own shopping channel. There's another company that's doing something very similar called Whatnot. I don't think I saw forerunner in those deals but I did see you invest in. Is it called LoopTech?

Yep.

Okay. So that's a streaming platform built for sports card collectors. I thought that was so interesting because it's a little bit more specific than these other platforms. What do you do that deal in particular? And I guess what gives you confidence that people want to shop via live streams?

Okay. So maybe four or five years ago we invested in a company called Shop Shops with an incredible founder, Leah. And that business is a US and a Beijing company. They have a good and solid growing business in China as well as the US and. And we have long thought people spend money on things they need and people spend money on things they want. So on the discretionary side, which is in the things that people want, sometimes it's about the item. A lot of times it's about the journey and the sport or the entertainment or the novelty of shopping. And so when we think about the ways that people engage on that pleasure side, we had malls. They brought brought lots of stores together to create a dynamic environment. They had movie theaters, they had stores. They became places to gather people would meet there for a social date and then maybe they'd pop their head into a store. As a related component, you see people online going on social networks, following people, engaging in content. It's sort of a natural idea to think, okay, there's this shopping component somewhere in here too. That's part of the mix of the entertainment and the engagement and the camaraderie that happens. And certainly we've seen this in other places in the world, most predominantly in China. It's a big business. And having invested and looked at these businesses for the last decade, I've seen a lot of upstarts in the US that came from the premise of QVC and HSN dating back 10 years ago. Huge businesses, they're on TV, they're one dimensional. From that aspect, there needs to be an evolution. And people have approached what the evolution is. And there's been a lot of false starts because I think you kind of need to step all the way away from those past experiences that worked on TV and completely reimagined and your mobile device getting stuff on the go experiences. It's very different. And so we first got engaged in this theme with the premise that there was something about this entertainment, the engagement, the camaraderie, the community shopping and that there was success with that in China. And I think a lot of that drew us to Leah and the experience that she had. And while we've been on that journey with her, she's built a great business in the US and we've gotten the opportunity to learn a lot about it. And so, so this is a little window into how we invest. So then we have some learnings, we have some higher conviction and opportunities and we're looking for something that we can build off of that. And so Loop is an example of that. The other trend that we observed that contributed to enthusiasm in Loop was just this collectibles trend. And that's not like a new trend. I mean, that's the basis of ebay and Beanie Babies back in the day. People have liked to collect things and as people like to collect things as much because they like to commune with the people that are also collecting those things and have it be a fun social thing or a hot on the side. And if you look at the sports memorabilia market, it's a huge significant market. There's a good volume of business online, there's a good volume of that business on ebay. The majority of it is still offline. And it did seem that given that we have come a long way with what an Experience is and how people connect online from ebay that there's opportunity for evolution in there. The founder at Loop, Eric Eric comes from Xbox and he has a lot of experience around gamification and game oriented experiences. And I think he was passionate about that category and really articulated a vision for how to create a great intersection of entertainment and exchange, which is commerce in this case, and maybe even be a third screen for people that were engaging in watching sports or sports activities. And so. So the combination of all of those things are part of what shows up in Loop.

I love getting an insight into how you come to an investing decision. It is difficult to stay on top of everything. There's so much that you have to sort of know that's bubbling up in order to maintain your high quality deal flows. So you've raised this billion dollar fund. Are you using any of that money to invest in other funds? That's another trend that I feel like I've seen over the last 12 to 24 months. A lot of firms saying, you know what? I need people that are boots on the ground talking to founders that are just coming from all parts of the world, maybe coming right out of university. I'm just wondering if you're doing anything like that and or if at this point Forerunner has scouts of its own.

I think all of those efforts are really interesting and I know from peers at other firms they're really productive at some point. Maybe that's something we need to prioritize. Early on in this conversation, Connie, we started with our mentality of being a startup ourselves and thinking about we want to build something that lasts for a long time. We have a set of values that we want to always be executing to. We're on a path to growing. We've been balancing that with trying to do fewer things better. And so we haven't added scout programs or investing in other firms. That hasn't yet been a focus for us. But I'm watching the industry very closely. I always do. I think that's fun. I've actually ending up enjoying the business of building 4Runner and thinking strategically how we build a firm that can last for the more than I imagined when I started this. Just inspired to be an investor. So maybe sometime, but not yet. No.

Well, thank you again for making time for this. It was a pleasure talking to you and no kidding, I hope to see you in the very near future.

Me too, Connie. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the thoughtful questions and next time we do this in person.

Absolutely.

Thanks for listening everybody. See you next week.

Sam.