Reinventing Upfront and building LA (with Upfront partner Kevin Zhang)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Well, Kevin, thank you for joining us.

Kevin Zhang (0:02)

It's great to be on your show. I've been a big fan.

Ben Gilbert (0:05)

We've met several times. I know you and David have hung out, and it's one of these things where every time, I think I have a conversation with you, I walk away and think like, wow, I wish I could have more time and I wish I could have taken better notes, and here we are recording for posterity. So now we get that.

David Rosenthal (0:19)

That's our strategy with Acquired is. Then we have people on the show who we want to take notes from.

Kevin Zhang (0:26)

Well, I feel very honored, and it is an excellent strategy.

Ben Gilbert (0:32)

Well, listeners, we're sitting here, I in Seattle, David in San Francisco, and Kevin down in LA on Friday. What is today? The 22nd in the afternoon, we just saw a couple of more S1s drop with Zoom and Pinterest. So excited to see what plays out there, and then obviously with Lyft coming next week. But in the meantime, before that insanity begins, we're going to have a fun conversation today with Kevin, and David, I'm going to kick it over to you.

Who is Kevin?

David Rosenthal (0:58)

Kevin, for those who don't know, is a partner at Upfront Ventures, which is the premier and largest venture firm based in LA. He's been there for many years and helped build it over the last several years into really the national force it's become today, which we'll talk much more about on the show. At Upfront, Kevin focuses on digital health and life sciences, along with gaming and digital media, and Raleigh, which we've talked about a bunch.

Maybe we will get into some of his gaming obsessions later in the show if we have time.

Ben Gilbert (1:33)

Hope so.

David Rosenthal (1:33)

But yes, super honored to have Kevin on the show and thanks for joining us.

Kevin Zhang (1:38)

Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. Yeah, I actually just fresh off the plane out of San Francisco from the Game Developers Conference, so fresh on my mind.

David Rosenthal (1:47)

Oh man, GDC was always one of my favorite conferences. All right, well, we'll get into gaming in a minute.

Ben Gilbert (1:52)

I want to hear your Google Stadia impressions desperately.

Kevin Zhang (1:57)

Happy to.

David Rosenthal (1:58)

Tell us about Upfront. Most LPs listening to the show have probably heard of you guys know about Upfront, but they may not know that Upfront was started back in 1996 by Eve Systersen, not as Upfront, but as global retail partners.

Ben Gilbert (2:16)

That's quite the ring to it.

David Rosenthal (2:19)

How did that happen? What was the state of play back then?

Kevin Zhang (2:23)

Yeah. Very different. Ninety-six was actually the year I moved to LA from Shanghai.

Obviously, very different world back then and Eve, who's still with us and has really been a driving force over the last 22, 23 years. He effectively and a couple of earlier partners as well, built out GRP because they had invested in some incredible retail innovation companies back in the day, places that we all still shop at like Costco and Starbucks and PF Chains, Jamba Juice, PetSmart, etc. The idea to start a venture fund and brand new fund was, it didn't seem like there was that much innovation still happening on the retail storefront site.

Instead, there was this thing called the Internet and turns out, maybe people buy stuff online. That was the point of the fund and that was really the genesis of how it all started in the mid-90s.

David Rosenthal (3:18)

Because that was what I was super curious about, whether you were looking to invest in traditional bricks and mortar upfront, but it was always about the intersection of retail and the Internet from the beginning.

Kevin Zhang (3:32)

Exactly. Then, obviously, you realize if you want to buy something online, you need a website, you need payment methods, you want to market to people, you want to keep records of them. That's really how we then pretty much transitioned into just a full-stack software tech investment firm. That's how we've been for the last 20 plus years.

E-commerce was a very interesting entry point. We still do probably more than our fair share of what I like to call commerce-related investments. That could actually be everything from a direct-to-consumer brand, to a logistics platform, to user-latest fancy machine-learning-based customer segmentation tool or whatnot.

David Rosenthal (4:15)

Even coming full circle back to what you and I were talking about a couple weeks ago about the Wing, which you guys just invested in, right?