Forerunner

Glossier You has been a unique kind of success. A few years ago, it would have been incomprehensible to think that people would buy a fragrance online before trying it themselves…but Glossier’s magnetic energy and lock-tight relationship with customers has flipped this on its head — so much so that upon launching in retail at Sephora, it instantly become the #1 selling fragrance at the retail giant. Today, Glossier is expanding the You universe with the launch of Rêve and Doux, two extensions of You that build on the same lovable base notes, but with distinct new scents. This team's sheer creativity and tireless execution continue to work wonders.

ŌURA has become an absolutely generational consumer health company. Nearing $500m in revenue, growing 100% , with cutting-edge hardware the margin profiles of a software company, ŌURA continues to push the boundaries of what the best in biometric data capture can do in enabling personalized health recommendations and truly improved outcomes. This is what category leadership looks like. Up next: much-anticipated 4th gen ring rumored to drop in Oct, new breakthroughs in supporting heart health, women’s health, stress and activity tracking, and overall longevity empowerment for all. Congrats to Tom Hale, Michael A. Chapp, MS, MBA, Dorothy Kilroy (she/her), Doug Sweeny, Avonte Campinha-Bacote, Sean Brecker, Holly Shelton, Judy Gilbert, and so many more of the A Oura team! https://lnkd.in/gkh2AjwZ cc: Forerunner

So many excellent consumer companies on this list, including our portfolio companies Fora Travel and Headway ⚡ https://lnkd.in/USTopStartups2024

At our startup Pie we are on a mission to defeat social isolation. According to the surgeon general, we are spending 24 fewer hours per month together than we were 20 years ago. This is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We are building a social app to combat this problem. The job to be done is to make it easy to make friends. Our vision is for a world where doing things you enjoy with people you like should be as easy as calling an Uber. I am building Pie personally because I experienced the social isolation pandemic myself. As a new dad in a new city (Chicago), my life was filled with two forms of Greek love: eros (romantic love) and storge (parent/child love). But I was lacking in two others: philia (platonic love) and agape (the love of the tribe). I was digitally addicted. I felt frozen in amber. Here is my start with why: https://lnkd.in/gEa7WDXs This morning the The Wall Street Journal shared this exclusive story on our Series A round and our Chicago launch. The $11.5 million round was led by my friend and longtime collaborator Kirsten Green of Forerunner -- with meaningful participation from a mentor, friend and personal hero Ev Williams, cofounder of Twitter, and founding CEO of Medium. We were delighted that Jason Heltzer of Origin Ventures and Renata Quintini of Renegade Partners also participated meaningfully in the A. We're also grateful today to longtime investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures. My favorite quote in the article is from Ev: "Pie is competing for the time that people are off their screens—not on them." Our corporate motto is more social, less media. If you have a friend in Chicago who is looking for more in their social life, or if you are that person, our web and mobile app is here: https://plan.getpie.app/ My cup overflows with gratitude. Thank you to the IRL Pie team in Chicago that now is. Sam Burke Gustavo Casas Martha Glodz Beatriz de Souza Kauffmann Brittanie Jakubowich Hunter Husar Francisco Martinez Samir Mirza Bridget M. Thompson Thank you to the remote/hybrid Pie team that once was. Cofounder Jen Greenwood Halle Gold Eric Rubin Kishan Patel Rob Bruce Kinnara Anindita Ondřej Korol Daniel Pecher and Wolasi Konu Thank you to (some of) our Pie angels and advisors. Evan Sharp Scott Belsky Sam Yagan Tim Kendall Nikita Bier Marc Lore Monica Royer and my parents Usha and Charley Dunn. Thank you to OG Pie cofounders Erik Allebest, Alixandra Freedberg and Becca Harris Lewy. There is no pumpkin in this Pie without you, is there? Thank you to our counsel Megan Baier of Wilson Sonsini. And thank you Manuela Zoninsein. You are my inspiration and the most tenacious entrepreneur I know.

The Business of Fashion dives into AI's potential to reshape the shopping experience, highlighting our recent thesis on the shift from Access to Edit: "Kirsten Green, a founder and partner at Forerunner, a consumer-focused venture capital firm, argued in a talk in July that consumers today feel overburdened by the amount of information available to them and are prioritizing technology that can sift through it for them, driving a shift in services from what she calls 'access' to 'edit.' 'As a result, we now see a refreshed desire for experts and services that edit the vastness of what’s available, present the best possible options instead of more options, and do things for us instead of enabling us to do it ourselves,' Green wrote in a post. AI, in her view, offers a solution." https://lnkd.in/gceuWjdD

Ritual continues to expand its women's health offering with the launch of Fertility Support, the only 3-in-1 supplement formulated to support conception outcomes, and designed in partnership with OB/GYNs and fertility specialists. Shop it today! https://lnkd.in/gZVK-Srs https://lnkd.in/gDR_B42K

"Give us what you dread" — a compelling promise from Duckbill, the personal assistant service that takes to-do lists off of people's plates. Meghan Verena Joyce appears on CBS to explain Duckbill's AI-powered, human-in-the-loop approach. Today, Duckbill is scaling the historical luxury of hiring a personal assistant to offload the admin of life: https://lnkd.in/dc-9Z7CR

The generational companies of the past decade were largely based on accessibility: opening up access to products and services that were historically confined to certain gatekeepers, high price points, geographies or other barriers. In our latest thesis, Kirsten Green lays out why Access is post peak – and conversely, why the current AI technology shift is so well suited to usher in the value that will drive tomorrow's generational companies: Edit. We believe the shift from Access to Edit is grounded in a few themes: • Decision paralysis is present across nearly every corner of consumers' lives, as an onslaught of options and decisions now compete for their mindshare and dollars. This means Access becomes counterproductive, doing more harm than help — and in turn, companies that Edit this vastness with acute personalization and specificity become exponentially useful. • "Price, Convenience and Quality — you have only have two" is a common framework for business building. Access-focused companies have typically focused on winning with price and convenience, while maintaining quality parity with the legacy standard. With Edit-focused companies, we'll see a new focus on quality, where they'll win by advancing the core quality of the product or service while maintaining pricing parity with past standards. • From the consumer standpoint, the primary promise of Gen AI is to effectively edit our digital worlds, taking broad swaths of legwork off of our plates and offering up personalized insights with more comprehensive context than any one person could have themselves. This ultimately takes back some of the optionality and responsibility that Access let loose onto consumers in the years past, and reverts us back to more “traditional” pathways where we rely on the quality of outsourced expertise — even if this time, AI is the engine. • We are already seeing companies driving these shifts, whether they are replacing elements of the sprawling, unilateral search engine experience with interactive, actionable, expertise-driven services (Daydream, Joy Parenting Club, Fora Travel) or building the essential trust stack that underpins these behaviors (webAI, Persona). We're eager to hear from Founders building in this space and from anyone with new perspectives about these shifts: https://lnkd.in/gjGPw2eS

We're growing our team! We're hiring a Research Associate to help build out investment theses and sharpen our market perspectives. This role with work alongside Jason Bornstein, Mengmeng Fu and the entire investment team. Apply here! https://lnkd.in/grdUjsQu

Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly thought about the growing sense of bloat and superfluousness that’s weighing on the consumer. There’s a deluge of options, information, purchasing research, and comparison inherent to nearly every dimension of our health, finances, personal interests, home lives, and so forth. Rather than empower us with optionality, this degree of access is bogging consumers down, leading to an acute sense of decision paralysis at seemingly every turn (new research shows that 74% of consumers abandon purchasing decisions simply because they feel overwhelmed by the volume of choice). This is without doubt a byproduct of the past decade of tech innovation focusing on access. “Democratizing access” has underpinned the thesis of the lion’s share of startups — and it has been an excellent place to build from. But access now feels counterproductive. More is no longer more, signaling that the prevailing value proposition of the tech industry is post peak. At Forerunner, we obsess over values shifts and technology shifts — and an intersection of the two is where things get really interesting. This shift away from access is significant, particularly because it dovetails with the current major technology shift: gen AI. Rather than wanting more options or the agency to do things alone for themselves, consumers are now craving products and services than edit the vastness of what’s available to them and do things with them, or better yet, for them. Gen AI is uniquely suited to accelerate this value opportunity, and on a scale that we haven’t seen before. In our latest research efforts at Forerunner, we explore this shift from Access to Edit, and how that’s changing the way companies are built, where value is created, and what opportunities are poised to capture consumers’ hearts and minds in this new paradigm.