Building Enduring Consumer Brands

What the last decade of DTC taught us — and what to forget in the next.

There's a kind of company that gets built in the margins — between meetings, on long weekends, in conversations that nobody writes down. We've come to believe that most of the work that matters is invisible until it isn't, and that the firms most likely to recognize it are the ones that aren't watching for headlines.

The temptation, of course, is to optimize. More deals. Faster decisions. Bigger checks. But the math of venture is unforgiving in the opposite direction: returns are concentrated in outliers, and outliers cluster around the people you actually understand. Volume rarely produces understanding.

A different kind of clock

We think the next decade rewards investors who hold longer, write less often, and listen more carefully. The companies that endure are not always the ones that dominate a launch week — they're the ones whose customers can't imagine going back.

"The best founders are the ones who don't need us. We invest anyway, because they're the only ones we'll be proud to call back in a decade."

If any of this resonates, we'd love to hear from you. Our inbox is small, but it's always open.