20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Ben Lerer is a Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures and co-founder & CEO of Thrillist Media Group. Ben was among Ernst & Young’s 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winners, Forbes list of “Most Powerful CEOs Under 40”, ” Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 5 Entrepreneurs of the Year,” and Silicon Alley Insider’s “100 Coolest People in Tech”. Ben is also an active mentor for NYC Venture Fellows, TechStars and E[nstitute]. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ben came to found Thrillist and then join the founding team at Lerer Hippeau? 2.) How did Ben's mentality shift from investing angel money to the fiduciary responsibility of a fund? 3.) How does Ben view FOMO? How does he look to negate and contol his emotions when investing? 4.) How has Ben seen his personal pattern recognition change over time? How does Ben use data to further improve his ability of pattern recognition? 5.) Why have we seen the rise of direct to consumer businesses? Is it easier to build a brand today than in previous years? Will we see continued M&A in the retail world with the likes of Jet.co and Dollar Shave Club? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ben’s Fave Book: The Goldfinch Ben’s Most Recent Investment: Everytable As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve. Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome back to another week in the world of the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings and you can add me on Snapchat at H Stebbings where all ads get personal thank you selfies from me, my word poor then. Anyway, to today's show and I'm thrilled to welcome a guest I've been wanting to have on the show for a while now. You might remember a while ago, we had Eric Hippo at Lira Hippo Ventures on the show and joining me today, I'm thrilled to welcome Ben Lira. Now Ben is a managing partner at Lira Hippo and he's also the co-founder and CEO at Thrillist Media Group, as if being managing partner at a top venture fund is not enough. So, but it's not just us who think he's awesome. He was also named amongst Ernst & Young's 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Forbes'

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  List of Most Powerful CEOs Under 40, Entrepreneur Magazine's Top 5 Entrepreneurs of the Year and Silicon Alley Insider's 100 Coolest People in Tech. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Kate Schiller at Galvanize for making the introduction today to Ben, without which the show would not have been possible. But before we dive in today, I've always been a big history man and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Now, check this out, since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley in, I believe, the late 50s, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world with 50-plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments, handle a myriad of issues that arise through a fund's

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

  lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also at Cooleygo.com, that's C-O-O-L-E-Y-go.com. And in today's episode with Ben, we also discuss the rise of D to C businesses and Eve is the UK's number one direct-to-consumer mattress company. Because they don't sell through high street stores, Eve cuts out 70% of traditional costs and pass those on to the customer. Developed over four years with thousands of prototypes, Eve is so confident of their product, they give customers 100 nights to try it at home before committing. For those who don't love it, they even offer a free return pickup with full refund. So

• 2:06Harry Stebbings?

  go to evemattress.co.uk, enter 20VC for £50 off and it'll be with you the next day. However, I'm now delighted to hand over to the main man, Ben Lira, managing partner at Lira Hippo Ventures.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:27Harry Stebbings?

  Ben, so fantastic to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Of course, thanks for having me.

• 2:32Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to kick off today by hearing about how you made your way into venture and how you came to found Lira Hippo.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, well, I think I sort of fell backwards into venture in that I had been operating and building Thrillist, which I'm still building, and actually my father was operating as well and was, had been the co-founder of The Huffington Post. And he and I had started Thrillist and The Huffington Post at similar times, both in New York City. And we're building our businesses in what was a very different time in New York. And so today, it's easy to look at the New York sort of ecosystem, or even like the US tech ecosystem and say, oh, there's so many funds and there's so much money available and technology is this giant industry and this huge trend and there's this amazing community of founders. Well, a decade ago, this wasn't really the case.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  And in particular, in New York, people graduating from the best colleges and the best graduate schools didn't automatically want to go and start companies like they do today. And in fact, most of them wanted to go and work on Wall Street, or go become lawyers, or go do things that had sort of been the traditionally popular professions for decades, leading up to sort of the 2000s. And as I started building Thrillist and my dad started building The Huffington Post, something changed in New York. And I think a lot of this was actually on the back of Facebook and just how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and even like the movie The Social Network started to sort of popularize and in many ways, I think, you know, to a degree that wasn't even realistic, you know, turn entrepreneurs into celebrities. And you saw all these people start to want to start businesses.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  And my father had been making some very haphazard, small angel investments in technology companies, but there wasn't a huge number of them in New York. And he had made them and sort of, you know, consulting with me over the course of several years. And about six years ago, one day he sent me an email and he said, hey, look at the companies that we've invested in. Look at our list. And it was, you know, 10 or 12 companies that had all, to some degree, gone on and been quite successful. And within that sort of vintage was Business Insider and BuzzFeed and Paperless Post, a company called I'm in Like With You that ended up becoming a gaming company and selling to Zynga. And so we had a number of successful startups that we had invested in as individuals.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  But my dad sort of took a step back and said, you know, I think things are changing. I see your friends and peers wanting to go and start companies rather than join companies. And I've been around in New York for a long time and I've seen a bunch of cycles. And I feel like something special is happening here and we should have a more active role in it. And I sort of said, that's a really nice idea theoretically, but I have a job and you have a job. And I don't know where we're going to find the time for this. And he said, well, what about if we raise a fund and we can start to build out a team and get help? And so I said, fine. We said, let's go see if we can raise some money. He raised a lot of money. I raised approximately no money, but. You were 23 or 24 at the time, Nick. I, yes, but what the, what the trade was is I had deal flow.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Because my peers were the ones starting the companies and I knew the entrepreneurs. And he had the access to the money and the idea was he brings the money. I bring the deal flow and we would start a small fund investing in our peers in New York. And what happened is that first group of companies we invested in turned out to be a very good one. And that was Warby Parker and Birchbox and Everlane. And a bunch of very prominent consumer facing businesses that ultimately helped to benefit the, the Lear Ventures name at that point. That was before Eric joined us. And we got enough success from an investor perspective, as well as enough brand recognition that it enabled us to go and raise more money and continue to do what we did at a larger scale. And then when he sold the Huffington Post, Eric Hippo, who had been working at SoftBank

• 6:16Speaker 02

  and was a sort of professional investor prior to being an operator at HuffPo, came over and joined us. And that's when we got really serious and started investing. But, you know, I know this is the longest answer in the history of the world. But the thing I would just say is we're really not, at the end of the day, like, I don't feel like I am a venture capitalist. I feel like I'm an operator who is able to invest because of the way we sort of set up our, our life and our businesses. But for me, the best investors, particularly the best early-stage investors are going to be people who have actually been in the trenches and built and sold their own businesses and raised money for their own businesses and gone through sort of that slog versus someone who is just an incredibly thoughtful, you know, number cruncher. I think that the operating experience is crucial and it's why we've been successful.

• 7:01Harry Stebbings?

  I'm really intrigued to hear about the mentality shift for you from investing with your father, small checks and building that early angel portfolio, to spending institutional money and how that changed your investing mindset, if it did, and what that effect was.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Well, I think the idea is that it doesn't. I think in its best scenario, you invest other people's money the same way that you would invest your own money, because obviously you're very careful with your own money and you're trying to turn some of it into more of it and you're spending time investing in things that you believe in. And so, from that perspective, nothing has changed. I think having to be more, a little bit more buttoned up around thinking about the sort of balancing of risk and reward and thinking about reporting and thinking about just like how we have a real line in to all of our companies at all times and know what's going on so that we don't have surprises is probably the biggest difference. I think when you're sort of making haphazard angel investments, you sometimes forget that

• 8:02Speaker 02

  you've made them. And I think that it's very different with the fund and we've become much more buttoned up and more organized, but the principle of find people who are doing amazing things that we think need to exist, that solve obvious problems, remains the same. The check size is bigger and I think that, you know, we've gotten better at being able to make sure that we have certain terms that give us optionality in future rounds, things that

• 8:31Harry Stebbings?

  You wouldn't do as an angel.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Things that you wouldn't do. Also, as a fund, part of the success of any investor is pattern recognition and I think by creating a fund and by sort of institutionalizing what we did, we were able to build a brand. And the importance of brand shouldn't be understated. Brand is what gives us so much amazing deal flow. Which enables us to really be able to see enough companies to be able to identify the ones that seem to be the outliers and the really special ones. And so I think we're a lot better and, you know, better positioned to succeed. Um, I think we see a lot more. I think we're more thoughtful and more careful as fund investors than we were as individuals. But at the same time, we have to follow our guts still. We can't make everything fit into a formula

• 9:12Speaker 02

  or fit into some plan where we're able to sort of, you know, do some, you know, risk analysis on the money. We're, you know, as early stage investors, emotion plays a role and gut plays a role and finding people who are doing amazing things and believing in them and really believing that they're going to be able to pivot. Because so many of the businesses that we invest in don't end up looking like what we invest in. We need to be able to have an imagination and I think that balancing sort of the professionalism of fund investing with the with, with sort of the way that you use your, your emotion and your gut to make decisions as an angel is the, is the line that we have to balance on.

• 9:49Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'm so glad you didn't see the schedule because everything you've said there has just made me change the schedule to a much better one. So talking about gut and emotion, a pivotal part that a lot of VCs suffer from is FOMO, um, fear of missing out.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 10:03Harry Stebbings?

  Much of a role does that play for you when investing? Do you suffer from it? If so, how do you try and kind of negate it?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so FOMO is a part of life as an investor and I think more so a part of life in early stage than in later stage. In early stage, in some way, you're always investing in a dream. There's a lot of nice dreams and there's a lot of good salespeople and there's a lot of companies raising that you're not investing in. And so for us, FOMO is definitely something that we have to be aware of. Being aware of it is how you don't fall victim to it. Always making sure that you are making investments, not because of a herd mentality, not out of fear, but out of sort of offensive desire and interest in a company, not out of, oh, but if we miss this, we're going to look like schmucks because we see it first and because our peers are doing it.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Uh, and so a few different ways to avoid that. One of the ways to avoid it is, is frankly not. Asking, really, I don't want to say not caring because it's always nice to be co-invested with people who you think can add value, but generally speaking, not ever making a decision based on who your co-investors are, always making it based on the company. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, which is you see a bunch of good brand name VCs and so you give a company more credit than it deserves. And so I think making sure that we, in some cases, have less information about who's investing makes me more capable of making cleaner decisions. I would also say that because we now write larger checks and generally lead almost every round that we're in, we actually have to have more conviction and move faster.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  And if we want to do a deal, we're not able to just sort of hang around and see if we like it and see if it gets hot and sort of hover. We need to strike and we need to go and we need to get sort of a leadership position from an investor perspective. And that doesn't mean we need to go and like buy the deal or pay up for the deal, but it means we need to have conviction and move fast and be decisive positively or negatively on a deal. And doing that, making fast decisions doesn't let you get caught up in FOMO quite as much, I don't think. But look, FOMO is like, the second you stop being terrified of FOMO, you make FOMO investments. And over the 275 companies that we've made in the history of the fund,

• 12:18Speaker 02

  there are definitely ones that we can point to and say, FOMO investment, FOMO investment, FOMO investment. Some of them have been successful, some of them have not been successful. And there's been great companies that we've passed on and missed. And I think that you have to be comfortable with that and you have to always stick to your guns. And if you pass, you have to know why you pass. And if you don't pass, you have to know definitively why you don't pass. And it can't be, yeah, it seems pretty good and everyone sort of likes it and we think that the team is smart and there's other good people around the table. Like, that's not a reason to do a deal, that's a reason not to do a deal. A reason to do a deal is, I absolutely have to do this deal and I'll go to the mat fighting for it because X, Y, or Z.

• 13:02Harry Stebbings?

  And talking about like why you like it and why you don't like it. And you mentioned pattern recognition there earlier. How have you seen your pattern recognition change over the 10 years, is it now, since angel investing to now being one of the leaders of New York's venture scene, really?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Well. That's a good question. I think from a, we've seen a lot more. I think that we've had the benefit of being inside so many great companies and getting, you know, weekly and monthly and quarterly updates from all these fantastic companies and also all these companies that for whatever reason haven't succeeded, that we don't just have the pattern of we've seen a bunch of pitches, but we've actually seen a bunch of operations, having, and we've seen a bunch of exits and we've seen a bunch of failures. And so more data is better as long as you're willing to sort of parse through it. I think one of the patterns that I would say we've definitely started to notice is so many of the big, obvious ideas have been

• 14:02Speaker 02

  taken and there's multiple companies building them. It's rarer that we see some life-changing, brilliant invention or idea that we never imagined would be possible. It still happens and it happens, you know, not infrequently, but more often now we're starting to see, we're starting to see disruption happen further out from the core. And I think the key for us is going to be not to go and chase and say, well, you know, we've seen disruption of media and retail and the businesses we really understand. Now we're starting to see disruption in farming, in, in clean energy, in medical supplies. Not that there isn't going to be disruption, but that we may not be the guys with the most expertise to look

• 14:42Speaker 02

  at that stuff. And so I think we're now seeing more deals get further out from where we really think we're our smartest. And so that's a, a pattern that we're now recognizing. And I think we're just trying to make sure that we stick to our guns and we stay focused on what we've stayed focused on. There's still so much room in the categories that we're in and maybe the, the disruption is going to be less obvious from the idea, but it's still, I mean, the best pattern we have is that the teams that are the best win. And so let's always be team focused first and foremost and not let ourselves get sort of enamored with, with big sexy ideas, but with teams who like, we don't really understand and who we don't think have the same, who we're not able to like really compare from

• 15:27Speaker 02

  an apples to apples perspective. Against other stuff that we have a lot of comfort with.

• 15:30Harry Stebbings?

  Well, let's let's talk about one of the the brilliant patterns that you're in and we both love. And that's Raiden. We had Josh on the show. But I want to discuss more the business model and the rise of direct to consumer business models over the last few years. As you said, Warby Parker as well. So talk to me, why have we seen this rise over the last few years of direct to consumer? And why is now the time that we should really be building these companies?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so look, direct to consumer from a commerce perspective, I think, is it's very appealing for obvious reasons in that you own your own customer, you own your own data, you sort of control your own destiny, you're able to avoid, you know, margin dilution from middlemen. And obviously, in a world where everyone is connected through social and through search and really just the internet has made the world smaller, we are more able to build brands more quickly and and build direct to consumer businesses more sort of in more cost effective and agile ways than ever before. So it's inevitable that we're going to continue to see direct to consumer businesses being built. I don't think just being direct to consumer is disruptive anymore, though.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Just selling products without a middleman is no longer enough to sort of consider yourself to be, you know, sort of breaking the old model. But I do think that taking advantage of a world where where everybody is connected, where you're able to effectively sort of benefit from so information travels differently today than it did thirty or forty years ago. So old brands were built on, basically, from a from a marketing perspective, one set of pipes, which was your your linear TV pipes, really dominated by cable. And I think you're seeing this disruption happen in media today, but it actually affects every industry that used TV as an advertising medium, which is that there are new pipes.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  The new pipes for content discovery and content distribution are owned by Google and Facebook and Snapchat and to a lesser degree Twitter and the messengers. That is where new, that is where sort of millennial and, you know, that word is overused. But that's where the next generation of consumers lives. And gets their information and spends their time for the most part. And so brands that are built are on reaching audience and buying audience. As retailers through those old pipes are generally speaking, not the ones who believe in their heart of hearts. That mobile is the first screen and who understand how to use social and search and modern advertising. And modern communication tactics to reach the audiences that they ultimately need to get in front of.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  And so it's not just selling direct to your customer, but it's actually how you even build your brand. How you advertise your brand, how you use data to make decisions and how you use technology to make decisions in your business. All of these factors contribute to a new kind of retail company. Because the old retail companies were just built to do different things. They were built as amazing real estate speculators. They were built as amazing logistics companies where now so much of your logistics operations can be outsourced. They were built to be amazing linear TV media buying entities. They were just great at things that aren't the skills that are necessary to be successful today. And so all those factors are what make up, not to mention that they're typically run by people.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Who just simply aren't the modern consumer. They're run by people who sort of are used to buying things and learn about things in a way that is no longer as relevant. And so for so many reasons, traditional big retail companies aren't poised to sort of thrive and lead today. It doesn't mean that many of them won't succeed because they have really robust balance sheets. And they have brands that have a lot of recognition and they do have a bunch of valuable skillsets. But I think you'll see retail, just like you'll see media consolidate. And you'll see lots more acquisitions happening. The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the Jet and Dollar Shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominos in what will be a bunch of dominos falling, I believe.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  In consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional guys in media. Really the traditional guys in sort of most consumer businesses are all waking up and saying, oh shit. This digital thing, which has been an annoyance for the last 10 or 15 years is It's going to be a lot more than an annoyance for the next ten or fifteen years. And we need to stop growing our business through stock buybacks. And we need to start growing our business through acquiring these new brands and this kind of talent. And you've seen Facebook and Google and Amazon and the best companies in the world all grow through acquisition. And I think better late than never, probably, you're going to see big retail and big media become very acquisitive in the next. You know, it's already started and you're going to see it continue for the next several years.

• 20:15Harry Stebbings?

  Obviously, M and A is great in terms of cash on cash for for VCs with LPs in mind. But in terms of the actual portfolio companies themselves, when you, when you, when you look at them, you know, your ratings could be a ten billion standalone business in ten years' time and one of the biggest suitcase manufacturers in the world. What's your thoughts then on M and A versus staying private and going it alone? How do you advise startups?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, I think it's very driven by the founding team and what they want. And, you know, you try to not make your investors, like as an investor, you don't want to be the ones making those decisions. I think obviously at certain times, there may be moments where someone shows up and makes an offer that a company can't refuse or that they shouldn't refuse, and and we have opinions in those places. But generally speaking, we'd love our companies to sort of take the approach that you've seen a war be take, for instance, which is we're going to build something for twenty years, we're going to put our heads down. And then in those situations, you would hope that the companies would create opportunities for investors to get pieces of liquidity as time goes on, for investors as they think about creating liquidity for themselves.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And that doesn't mean a one to one, but it just means that if a company is going to go it alone, you want to know that those founders have a respect for their investors, that they, they understand that they've invested money because they do ultimately want a return. And so if they are going to build something and and never sell it, you'd like to know that there's opportunities to sort of take little pieces off the table to to, you know, show that you're, you're serious about being a good partner.

• 21:45Harry Stebbings?

  And then final question before we dive into the quickfire, and one I'm not sure about the answer to. So I'd love to hear your thoughts is, is it easier now to build a brand with so many different channels? But then there's far more competition on those channels. What's your perspective on brand building? Today versus maybe twenty years ago when it was much less competitive.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think brand building twenty years ago was easier in that you like you sort of could buy your brand growth, which was there was really one channel that that was so much more powerful than all the others from a marketing perspective, which was television advertising. And so if you had the money to go and buy the linear TV spots in the finite amount of time that existed, in some ways you could win by yelling loudest. I think that that's much more difficult today because of how fragmented consumer attention is. And so it is not easier to build a brand today. That being said, if you are built for these modern pipes and you're smart about how you use them and you're a step or two ahead of the rest of the market, you can make a lot of progress more efficiently

• 22:45Speaker 02

  and sort of less expensively, I think, than ever before. So it's a double edged sword and it's more democratic today, sort of anyone can win. But there are more people competing for time and and and a more diverse range of places where people spend their time. And so it's very confusing. And I think whether you're the best at this or the worst at this, it's just a sort of scary frantic business world right now because of how quickly things are changing.

• 23:12Harry Stebbings?

  And then I want to finish today on on a quick fire. So I say a statement and you give me your thoughts in sixty seconds or less per one. How does that sound?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  That sounds great.

• 23:20Harry Stebbings?

  Favorite book and why?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Favorite book? Well, I don't read nonfiction. I read smutty fiction. I don't know what my favorite. I I love so many.

• 23:30Harry Stebbings?

  Fifty Shades.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Books. I have not read Fifty Shades. I'm reading The Goldfinch right now, which I adore. I'm loving The Goldfinch. So today, that's my favorite book.

• 23:37Harry Stebbings?

  The Goldfinch it is. A vision for for Lira. What's kind of, you know, twenty years time, where do you want Lira to be?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think we've I think we've very clearly decided as a fund, we love early stage investing. We think we built an incredibly strong brand in it. We think we offer a lot of value as a partner to to sort of early founders. And so hopefully we can have a bunch more funds doing more of the same, building a great portfolio of early stage founders. Maybe over time, we're helping some of our companies with more later stage money with some sort of opportunity funds of various sorts. But generally speaking, we want to be the strongest fund in early stage technology investing in the world.

• 24:18Harry Stebbings?

  The biggest mentor to you? And how it came about?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  My father, for sure. He had me as his son is how it came about.

• 24:26Harry Stebbings?

  That's a very good.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  You know, we've been partnered on investing for a long time and obviously built similar businesses at HuffPo and Thrillist and all that's great, but I think just the way that he's advised me from a business perspective, in particular around making sure that before he worries about the performance of the business, he worries about me being happy is a very good lesson and one that I'm trying to pass on to my son and one that I think in some weird way, I actually try to sort of pass on to the companies we work with as well and just helping them understand that while this is important and is serious and we do care deeply about making a return and the business part of this, that this isn't life or death and that you got to have fun while you're building these things.

• 25:06Harry Stebbings?

  And then I know you're not very passionate about this next one, so I'm not expecting a fiery response.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I know where you're going.

• 25:13Harry Stebbings?

  How nervous are you about Trump winning and would it be that bad then?

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I am very nervous in that if we take for granted that Hillary has a huge lead and is obviously one million times more qualified, we might not show up at the polls the way we need to to put him down and make him never show his face again. So I'm not, so I'm worried just in people getting complacent. Him becoming the president would be the worst thing that has happened in the history of the United States since its inception. I think he is a racist pig who makes other racist, sexist, misogynistic, disgusting people feel like they are allowed to share those opinions and believe those things. And I would feel very uncomfortable having my family live in a country that would nominate

• 26:02Speaker 02

  somebody like Donald Trump to be the president.

• 26:04Harry Stebbings?

  I told you, a very mild response, exactly what I was going for. And then let's finish then, say, on your most recent investment, public investment, and why you said yes.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Our most recent public investment, I think, is a company called EveryTable. And EveryTable is a, think of it as like a Pret a Manger or a Sweetgreen in that it's a fast casual restaurant concept. It's launched in Los Angeles and the. And the idea behind it is that it's really mission driven in that the founder, this amazing sort of reformed Wall Street banker named Sam Polk, had an idea to solve a public health crisis, which is the obesity and diabetes and just incredibly unhealthy eating that happens in less well-off urban neighborhoods around the country. So the concept is that he'll open up healthy,

• 26:57Speaker 02

  incredibly affordable, incredibly high-quality commissary. Well, there'll be a commissary kitchen that creates for storefronts in less well-off neighborhoods that charge anywhere from sort of $3 to $4 a serving, which is competitive with all the sort of very unhealthy fast food in those areas. To counter that, we'll also open up Every Tables in more well-off business neighborhoods, where they'll actually have dynamic pricing, where people in the sort of more well-off neighborhoods will pay more for their food, knowing that they are actually helping to offset food in these other neighborhoods, where there is, you know, the real crisis for him started with something he realized around single mothers raising multiple children

• 27:42Speaker 02

  and just raising their families in incredibly unhealthy ways that led to shorter lifespans and real health problems. And so what I love about this business is he's building an amazing new food brand, but he's doing it with this incredible cause and this real mission behind it. And it's not a fun little charity hook. It is truly the soul of the business to help people. And Sam has just written an amazing book called For the Love of Money, which I believe is gonna, if it's not already a New York Times bestseller, is well on its way to being one. It's all about the addiction to money and sort of living a reformed life around really wanting to help people.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  And I think that that genuine desire to do something that's great for other people will show through in the concept, will endear his consumers to him, will endear investors and VCs to him. And ultimately, Give him the sort of tools he needs to build a really big business. And so that's why we did that deal.

• 28:45Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ben, seriously, it's been so fantastic to have you on the show. I've wanted to have you on for a while now. Huge thanks to Kate Schiller at Galvanize for making the introduction.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Hey, the best.

• 28:53Harry Stebbings?

  She is the best. But seriously, so grateful for giving up your time.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Of course. Thank you so much for having me. And I love the show and keep doing it. And if I can ever help with any introductions, just ping me.

• 29:05Harry Stebbings?

  It's funny, when you listen back to shows, you remember some with, let's say, more fondness than others. And listening back to that episode today with Ben was so much fun to record. And it's been such a pleasure getting to know Ben and a huge hand to him for giving up his time to be on the show. I really do appreciate all he's done for me. And I'd like to say a huge thank you to Kate Schiller at Galvanize for making the introduction to Ben today, without which the interview could not have happened. And if you love the show today and want to stay in the world of the 20 minute VC, then all you need to do is add me on Snapchat at H Stebbings, or you can add Ben on Twitter at Ben J Lyra, or you can sign up to our newsletter on the 20minutevc.com so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. But before we leave you today, do not forget to check out Cooley, the global law firm built

• 29:47Harry Stebbings?

  around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture capital fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50 plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments, and handle the myriad of issues that we mostly hear about on the show that arise through a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also at Cooleygo.com. And do not forget, we mentioned the rise of D to C businesses today with Ben. And Eve is the UK's number one direct to consumer mattress company, because they don't sell through high street stores. Eve cuts out 70% of traditional costs and

• 30:32Harry Stebbings?

  pass those on to the consumer. Developed over four years with thousands of prototypes, Eve are so confident of their product, they give a customer 100 nights to try it at home before committing. For those who don't love it, they even offer a free return pickup with full refund. So go to evemattress.co.uk, enter 20VC for £50 off, and it'll be with you the next day. As always, we so appreciate your support and look very forward to bringing you Wednesday's episode with Brett, partner at Ludlow Ventures.