Kirsten Green - Investing in Consumer Change

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:35)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:07)
My guest today is Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures. Kirsten launched Forerunner in 2012 and has built it into a leading consumer focused venture firm with early investments in consumer brands like Dollar Shave Club, Bonobos, Faire and Warby Parker.
Our conversation is an exploration of consumer behavior and how to invest behind change in our society. We also discuss frameworks for identifying brands early, how to build deal flow and the shift in power between buyers and sellers. Please enjoy my conversation with Kirsten Green.
I've been thinking about our conversation for the last several days and the many directions that we can take it. And I think because you and your firm have such differentiation in the understanding of the consumer, what we'll call the consumer often through this conversation. It would be fun to begin with something you and your firm have been working on fairly recently, which is a huge, I guess I'll call it a study of consumer trends, passions, interests, preferences and so on. I'll leave it to you to describe what that study is, but I'd actually love to begin with the insights that you've gleaned so far from studying the 2022 consumer.

**Kirsten Green** (3:11)
Thanks for the question on one of my favorite topics. Fascination with the consumer, fascination with users, fascination with people's behavior has been the guiding light throughout my investing career. And one of the foundations Forerunner was started on. This year we're celebrating our 10 year anniversary. And we felt like as a team, given that it was a decade marker, we felt like it was a moment where let's really put our heads down and reassess the consumer. So this is a project we've been working on since the very beginning of the year, even the fourth quarter of last year. And we started with a couple of hypotheses about people and we took those into kind of some pretty tailored surveying. Surveys led to questions, more questions. Went and did some focus groups.
And then over time translated that into a much broader base survey. And this was all of an effort to collect a robust set of data, make sure that we had a broad representation of people because what we were really trying to do is get in the heads of the collective American, the global population certainly matters, but let's start with our own country because it's plenty dynamic, the most dynamic. And then we took all of that information and we put it against economic data and we put it against credit card data and packaged it in a way where we said, here are 12 archetypes and across the 12 archetypes, we can more or less fit everybody into them. And we meant for them to be much more psychographically driven than age or financially driven, but of course, they end up having, you know, they skew different ways like that.