How Kirsten Green Built Forerunner Ventures

**Kirsten Green** (0:00)
One of the big things that I learned through that experience was how important it is for a startup to be nimble. It's certainly one of your biggest advantages as a startup is to be nimble. And if you give that away, you're adding risk on risk, right? And so really knowing what the levers are in your business, having enough traction on revenue before you build infrastructure, having enough understanding of your unit economics before you hit the button on growth, particularly when some of that growth is in the form of long-term commitments for inventory, for leases, et cetera.
Like you've sort of taken your ability to be nimble out of the equation.

**Turner Novak** (0:35)
And you mentioned something before. One of those SPVs, 2008, didn't end well.

**Kirsten Green** (0:41)
I definitely felt that the pressure and the worry that it was over before it started, like literally before it started. To me, being able to leverage where you've been with a push for where you wanna go is like great tension to operate in. I got way out of my comfort zone. But if anybody could break through those, work around them, challenge them, I believed he could.
And that is exactly why startup investing is so exciting and fun.
That is always the truth. That is always the truth. It is so easy to out diligence yourself out of every single opportunity. But at some point, some part of the process, the founder, the, I don't know, compels you in a way where you're like, we're gonna go for it. And hopefully it's gonna work.

**Turner Novak** (1:28)
Some people say consumer's dead. Do you agree?
Welcome to The Peel, where we explore the world's greatest startup stories. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital, the world's most nimble venture capital firm. I'm excited to share my conversation with Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, a San Francisco based venture capital firm and among the best consumer investors in the world. We'll go back to the very beginning of Kirsten's career, including how she did in-person market research at malls to stand out as an analyst and her journey from public markets to venture. Kirsten takes us inside what it's like to build a firm from scratch, and we'll talk about how she raised her first $5 million angel fund and how she transitioned to institutional investors for her next $42 million fund.
She also shares a lot of stories I've never heard her go into publicly before, including why she almost didn't invest in one of her first big winners, Dollar Shave Club, her first big investment that went to zero, and how she led Faire's Series A, despite having a small fund. She also answers the burning question on everyone's mind. Is consumer investing dead?
I also want to apologize for something. A lot of you like watching these with a video, but we had a complication and this interview is our first ever audio-only episode. It was still a lot of fun and I had many takeaways. Let's jump in. Kirsten, how's it going?

**Kirsten Green** (2:46)
Good, Turner, nice to see you.

**Turner Novak** (2:48)
Nice to see you too. I wanted to kick things off. So you started your career covering retail, investment banking. You used to go to the mall and observe.
Why did you do that and how did that work?

**Kirsten Green** (3:05)
This was nearly the beginning of my career and I was fortunate to work with a bunch of people that had a lot of experience and credibility in the industry. And I was trying to figure out what do I add to this conversation as a newbie who was coming in just pencil, notebook and hand ready to learn. And it occurred to me that the companies that we were covering were addressing consumers that in many cases at the time were closer to my age than they were to some of the other people in the room. And I thought that I hadn't an opportunity to go to the mall and have a perspective on what was going on in the retail stores that we were covering that might be unique to the rest of my team.
And maybe I could figure out a way to make that relevant or useful in our coverage.

**Turner Novak** (3:55)
What did you find?

**Kirsten Green** (3:56)
It was not because I loved hanging out at the mall.

**Turner Novak** (4:00)
What were some of your most interesting insights that you picked up on?

**Kirsten Green** (4:03)
It turned out to be honestly, like one of the most productive things that I did as a research analyst, both because I got observations while I was there, specifically that I could use and interpret in my own way, but also because it gave me a touch point to go back and have conversations with companies or customers.