First, what is a Whisper Network? It is an informal, private connected group of individuals who pass along ideas, cautions, recommendations, questions, answers. It’s the idea that “through the grapevine” knowledge exists and thrives in a more potent state exactly because it survives and hardens through this kind of oral history which is made possible by its veracity.

I like the thought of calling them Whispers because they are crowd knowledge, not necessarily attributed to one master author, but nonetheless still contain truth that is known by experience and passed along as private information in semi-secrecy. Gossip, but better. I first heard the term when looking at a marketplace for local beauty recommendations. “No one writes on social media about their favorite botox lady,” the founder said, “those recommendations are carried through Whisper Networks.”

Turns out, she is right on many dimensions. Just in the last month, when asking friends the best things to do in London, I was decidedly told “get Botox” because it’s quality work for a fraction of the price in the US. In the same week, I was also pointed to a half dozen architects and contractors for a reno project, none of which I would have discovered through internet research, AI or other verifiable datasets.

It is also how the best deals flow in venture. Our best-performing portfolio companies were not found through an AI-powered LinkedIn scrape (sorry Harmonic, you are AI slop) or through a YC or speedrun demo day, but rather through a text from an old college friend, an insightful tip during cocktails at an industry event, or as an aside during a call with a founder. It is how we have oriented our entire VC firm, around the notion that we can diligently make known what we are seeking and have as many open lines of communication in as many Whisper Networks as possible. It is incredibly hard to scale, but it is the true product of venture. It is also where we have spent the most time with AI, in mapping, enriching, and nourishing our 15,000 person Whisper Network.

Given my musings on all this, it only seems appropriate to talk about these nuggets below as my top Whispers, sent through the proverbial grapevine, that resonated with me recently, in no particular order:

• Money moves at the speed of trust. A fellow GP sent me this interview with John Kim, who famously raised billions for General Catalyst. It is probably the most salient interview on LP fundraising I’ve heard, and I have had many a shower moment since reflecting on the simple equation to all fundraising =

  (track record + differentiation) / complexity of the story:

• Margin Call. One LP I was having dinner with this summer and I were musing about the SpaceX IPO and he posited that because there is so much leverage in the system, and we are ostensibly forcing retail buyers to carry the bag of private investors, we could face a margin call scenario. Most LPs I have spoken with are bearish on MANGOS creating the kind of liquidity venture needs as an asset class, which I tend to agree with. We are seeing a squeeze moment, and it is a make or break moment for many firms. All this took me back to this scene (you’re welcome).

• Hard left to Hard Tech. Physical AI, Infra. It’s all VC’s can talk about these days. I guess me included. But I think most people do not know how to underwrite founders who build in the physical world, at least that was what I was bemoaning with some of my portfolio founders. And I think that’s because it’s nuanced, hard in ways software isn’t, and requires a level of discipline that building tech alone doesn’t. More on that here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7478799503026716673/

• Proto Town. Was shown this from an investor I respect, and love everything about it from the ambitious vision to the live stream to the idea of a sandbox for Hard Tech innovation. Reminds me of what Tony Hsieh tried to do with the Downtown Project, coalescing bright like-minded builders into a set of shared services and community.

  https://www.proto.town/

• An Aside on Infrastructure Funds. I was also having a conversation with an infrastructure investor in London, and the theme was really consistent: Where does value ultimately accrue for venture equity investors whose downstream capital partners become infrastructure funds? There is real risk is that value gets siphoned out of EquityCo over time, because infra funds rely heavily on leverage and often make their returns on the coupon of AssetCo, which can stand diametrically opposite the value equity investors want to accrue (IP and high margin revenue). Success lies in the balance of a true partnership and flexible MSAs. And selling early… I think there is blood in the water, as capital intensive businesses need access to, yes, capital, but the capital is also not cheap right now, in any sense. You have ultimately expensive MSAs and AssetCos; you have SPACs and IPOs that become expensive when the music stops and you haven’t delivered to a customer; you have overpriced VC rounds in the casino of the private market (look at Atoms and the hurdle to clear). Feels bubbly, but then again, maybe our ever ramping, tacit war with [fill in the blank] and crumbling infrastructure wrenches value into reality as it did in the 1930s and 40’s. Unfortunately, geopolitical agony is the tide rising all ships (funding the race to AI, the race to defense and armarment, the race to reindustrialization). End rant.

  [Ok, now need something more optimistic…]

• doppamineshopping.com - this is a Korean site that allows you to shop and check out without actually buying anything with money. It tries to provide the dopamine hit of the hunt for something great without the hole in your wallet. I love the idea, but when I tried it I found it’s the knowing the sting of the purchase that really gives the risk and rush of it all, so it fell a little flat probably the same way AI girlfriends do (I wouldn’t know).

• Scrolly Chair. The best antidote I’ve heard to doom scrolling. I have now taken this advice and have a second phone at home situated with all my social media in my Italianite pink scrolly chair: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/opinion/culture/phone-algorithm-addiction.html

• My hottest take of all: I am glad that people are stoked on the Knicks, but in speaking with a mentor, she rightly called out that it’s a sign that we need to feel more connected in our lives. I am not sure the fervor would be so shrill if people had more positive community and responsibilities in their lives, and more to be excited about beyond sports. Not to sound acrimonious but I think we need more to live for. Also do better GQ. The orange and blue Chrome Hearts get ups are not giving: https://www.gq.com/gallery/timothee-chalamet-knicks-game-courtside-style

Happy Summer!

Aubrie

I am cringing at the last nine months of posting, quite honestly: “the insight that broke me”; “ “this is genuinely interesting”; “the uncomfortable truth?”; “this realization changed everything.” Staccato click bait sentences that mean nothing and give posts a particular paint thinner quality. Reminds me of when I used an NFT as my Twitter bio, lord have mercy. We all see it, though… and anyone who actually reads is craving the messy human voice, I am willing to bet a lot of $$ on that (long Substack).

Anyway, as summer rolls around, I always have a little more time to write as LP and founder communicae die down. So here is a round-up of things I have read recently that seem interesting, plus a “HOLD YOUR CAL” little easter egg at the end:

• Clout-as-a-service: a growing trend of paid-for-FOMO where consumers can pay to seem like they are at an event or interesting cultural moment by purchasing credible-looking location tags (while they rot away on their bed). This is digital looksmaxxing for those who can’t afford peptides or PJs:

  girl online

  clout-as-a-service

  girl online is a reader-supported publication reporting on the evolution of digital girlhood. If you’re a regular here (I love you!), consider buying me a coffee to help me keep all issues free to read…

  Read more

  4 months ago · 29 likes · Abha Ahad

• Die Yuppie Scum: We are set to have a higher level of very wealthy people (Technocore Landowners for those who practice Aquarius) over the next decade and a greater sign of inequality than we have seen in two lifetimes, as I reported a few years back. Today, there are 300,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals defined as having >$30M. So all that striving does seem to have paid off, right? … A couple of interesting observations in the mass migration of the upwardly mobile middle class graduates to urban centers over the last 30 years: the leisure of this class has somehow become more competitive with the panopticon of social media: “For yuppies then as now, leisure is just another form of work.” Apps like Dorsia allow us to skip the line at Torrisi and Instagram has made the Amalfi Coast untenable with all the boat traffic (as I write I am headed there…yes, it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me). And it is all built on the myth of meritocracy, that somehow working 75 hours a week and spending disposable income on the new Taiwanese fusion restaurants nearby will free us from the shackles of the system and grace us with ultra net worth… or will the brewing resentment from the rest of the country and the rise of AI lead to our demise? Really interesting Times profile and guest essay on Yuppies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/opinion/yuppies-merit-society-politics-cities.html

• Conviction drift: the idea in stock picking that you abandon your initial belief based on changing circumstances. A convo I had recently with a founder is that this trend also happens in AI building. Because product is no longer a moat, and it’s so hard to gauge if Anthropic’s next release will obliterate a whole swath of startups, there is a seen trend of founders lacking conviction in what they are building… instead playing it safe, waiting for release, building and rebuilding, waiting for a “perfect moment”. This is the time to pick a non-obvious lane and stick with it (and for the record investing in metals is quite obvious rn): https://www.juniorstocks.com/rich-dad-poor-timing-the-silver-lining-that-wasn-t

Last little easter egg is to mark your calendars for October 14th in NYC! We have an amazing invite-only event coming together with world leaders on where the future is going and hint: it relates to our white paper, which now has over 2,000 downloads and listens!

And yes, KISS will be on one of my travel playlists if not my yacht one1

What started as a “short white paper” on AGI’s impact turned into something else entirely. Multiple identity crises. Countless rewrites. Debates over whether we were being too sci-fi or not sci-fi enough. And somewhere in the middle of it all, we found ourselves mapping out an entirely new economic framework we’re calling the Aquarius Economy.

Why We Wrote Every Word Ourselves

Early on, Josh Jagota (Alpaca VC Principal) and I made a pact: no AI assistance in writing this. Every word had to be human-generated. Yes, it was painful. Yes, it took months longer than it should have. But there was something important in that friction.

We used AI for research, sure. Fed our ideas through every major LLM to create imagery to pair with them. But the actual writing? That was us, struggling with syntax at 2 AM, debating whether “Technocore” was too derivative of Dan Simmons (it is, we kept it anyway).

Because if we’re arguing that human Spirit will be our greatest differentiator in an AGI world, we better practice what we preach.

The Paper in a Nutshell: The Transition to AGI, or The Last Economic Cycle Built on Labor Scarcity, will Lead to The Aquarius Economy, Where the Human Spirit Becomes Our Greatest Differentiator

The transition to AGI is well underway. And the closer we get to AGI, the more machines move from complementing to substituting human labor.

However, what we discovered is that this transition faces massive blockers - coordination problems that must be solved to unlock and distribute AGI. They will take capital, and time. We need:

• Energy abundance, lest we forget 60M people lost power in the Iberian Peninsula from excessive voltage. Maybe LLMs are efficient but our grid certainly isn’t.

• Foundational industry resilience, because something like ~450K manufacturing jobs are unfilled every month, but until we fix our robotics data issues, how are we going to fill the gaps from retiring welders/electricians?

• Agent and human coordination -- Do we trust agents in our data walls, transacting on our behalf? What if they speak to us or we can see them in our headset? Trust and emotional resonance are a long ways away.

Here’s what made me lose sleep, though: This isn’t just another technological shift. It’s the last economic cycle built upon labor scarcity. If we assume full automation is approaching, it begs the existential question: What is left for individuals to do?

The answer lies in human agency - our ability to be efficacious, optimistic, and imaginative. In the Aquarius Economy, our envisioned end state, the human Spirit prevails amid society’s incumbent power structures.

In this economy, where intelligence becomes as abundant as water, humans find their comparative advantage not in industrialized labor, but in labor of the Spirit - in the wisdom that humans uniquely possess. Get ready to read a sci-fi style narrative on how this all plays out…

The Thank You Section

This paper wouldn’t exist without the brutal honesty of early readers. To everyone who read drafts and told me I was either overthinking or underthinking various sections - thank you.

Special recognition to:

• Those who caught every Hyperion reference and demanded more

• The literary angels who corrected our sources and definitions down to the citation

• The group chat that devolved into existential philosophy

• Everyone who pushed back on my apocalyptic predictions of the future

• Josh, who truly took this thing from good to great

Your fingerprints are all over this work. I am profoundly grateful for your collaboration.

An Invitation, Not a Conclusion

The white paper is live now. All 40 pages of it. It’s dense, it’s terrifying, it’s hopeful, and it asks more questions than it answers. But I think that’s the point.

This isn’t a typical VC white paper. It’s part investment thesis, part science fiction, part philosophical treatise. It might change how you think about the next decade. Or it might confirm your worst fears.

Either way, I’d rather be wrong and thinking about these questions than right and ignoring them.

The danger in the Aquarius Economy isn’t that AI replaces humans. It’s something far more subtle and far more profound.

But I’ve said too much already. The rest is in the paper.

DOWNLOAD WHITE PAPER

P.S. Where should I share this paper next - who should hear about it?

P.P.S. Hot top: If you don’t want to read it, listen to Burt Reynolds read it. That voice, man…

What started as a "quick white paper" has become a 30-page exploration that, frankly, caused us multiple identity crises along the way. We're calling it "The Aquarius Economy" - and before you roll your eyes at the woo-woo name, hear me out.

The term takes inspiration from astrology (yes, really), which charts Pluto entering Aquarius for the first time in 250 years. Millions of people believe in these cycles and make business decisions based on them. People do what they believe. It's in the ether. And whether you buy into the stars or not, the timing is uncanny: we're entering an era where human spirit becomes our greatest differentiator, where intelligence becomes as abundant as water, and where the paradoxes of our technological future demand entirely new frameworks for thinking about value creation.

Here's what's been keeping me up at night (besides Lucky James, who is now eleven months and has opinions about which pizza is tastiest):

The Cost of Everything Goes to Zero

When inference costs drop to near-zero, what happens to our entire economic model? We're staring down a future where labor scarcity - the foundation of capitalism - evaporates like morning fog. The implications are... well, that's why this became 30 pages instead of 10.

The Paradox of Hyper-Connection

We're more connected than ever, yet loneliness is an epidemic. We have infinite choice, yet decision fatigue is crushing us. We can be anything, yet identity crises are rampant. These aren't bugs in the system - they're features of a transitional moment between economic operating systems.

The Rise of New Archetypes

Forget traditional career paths. We're seeing the emergence of entirely new human archetypes: Gurus who monetize wisdom, Nomads who reject geographic constraints, Incels who retreat from connection altogether. Each represents a different response to the same underlying question: what does it mean to be human when machines can do almost everything?

Why This Matters Now

McKinsey projects AI could automate up to 30% of work hours by 2030. But I think they're being conservative. We're not just talking about job displacement - we're talking about the complete reimagining of what "work" even means. When AI can write, code, create, and even empathize, what's left for us?

The answer, I believe, lies in what I'm calling the Aquarius Economy - where human creativity, authenticity, and spirit become the core economic contributions. Not as a nice-to-have, but as the foundation of value creation itself.

Here's Where You Come In

This draft is raw. Unpolished. Probably controversial in parts. Josh and I wrote every word ourselves (no AI!) because we believe in practicing what we preach about the survivability of the human spirit.

But before we publish, though, I need your brain. Your criticism. Your "wait, but what about..." questions.

If you want an early look and are willing to share honest feedback, reply to this post. I'll send you the draft. Fair warning: it's dense. We cover everything from the cost of inference to nomadic communities, from energy abundance to the paradox of choice. If you made it through Hyperion (or even if you didn't, like me), you'll appreciate the sci-fi lens we use to imagine our future.

Your thoughts, reactions, and gentle mockery will shape the final version. Because the best ideas don't emerge in isolation - they come from heated debates over group chats and dinner tables.

Let's argue about the future together.

💫 What is the Aquarius Economy? 💫

The term takes inspiration from astrology, which charts Pluto entering Aquarius for the first time in 250 years. The transit started in January 2024 and is widely cited as a signifier of large societal transformation bringing forth “dramatic and painful experiences in order to shed light on truth and bring us incredibly profound growth."

Sound woo woo to you? That is because it is… but that doesn’t matter: what matters is that millions of people believe in these cycles, and make business and life decisions based on their reality. It’s in the ether. Search it on TikTok or Instagram and you will see for yourself…

It’s that new new; a way of existing as humans amid new technologies and societal structures. And while I do not possess a crystal ball, I do know that things will change dramatically from now on — it’s like opening a window in your house; once you see what’s in the window, you cannot unsee what you saw.

So what happens after AI eats all software, all knowledge work, all engineering, and addicts the masses to offloading their brains from the burdens of critical thinking, writing and complex contribution?

In my view, the Aquarius Economy emerges: where distinctly human agency gains social clout and takes new forms; where imagination, empathy, and connection are as critical to commerce as algorithms and AI. The paradox of “humanity v. technology” comes to a head during this time, and we as humans learn to co-exist–with each other and technology– to create new normative priorities for business and work-life.

I am working through a white paper to detail exactly what I mean by this in vivid detail, but for now, let me highlight one example of the paradox of the Aquarius Economy and how it plays out:

Let’s look at the Ghibli ChatGPT-4o moment. ChatGPT released their new flagship model that “can reason across audio, vision and text in real time” and the internet went wild, posting renders of their teams, friends, and themselves in the style of Japan’s Studio Ghibli cartoons.

What are the paradoxes that exist here? Hayao Miyazaki’s vision and mastery was plagiarized without his consent or compensation; but on the other - everyone knew the images were fakes, and his legendary status only heightened with the mass proliferation of his style (many people in my network didn’t know what Studio Ghibli was until that moment, surprisingly). An MLM created these images at a pace humans never could; but human connectedness and desire for community created relevance for the images, without which they would be rendered (pun intended) meaningless. Human agency and technological agency are co-dependent, but at the same time their unique and independent value heightens with the advancement of each.

These paradoxes are intrinsic to the Aquarius Economy, and push us to consider what value human contribution retains in the long-run. I have ideas on this, but I don’t want to spill the tea too soon before my research is complete…

Follow along as I attempt to draft this paper by end of July. I will be curious what my readers think. Also, importantly, I will not be using AI to write the paper. It becomes increasingly important to note where authentic human expression lives and it will be alive and well here on Substack.

Speaking of Human co-existence with AI…

In what might be the most audacious job listing of 2025, No Cap – the world's first autonomous AI investor – is seeking a "flesh-based servant" to serve as its physical embodiment in the human world. This isn't a satirical headline from The Onion; it's the latest experiment from No Cap's creator Jeff Wilson, designed to upend our assumptions about the irreplaceability of human venture capitalists.

While some might view No Cap as a threatening vision of our economic future, it could alternatively be seen as liberating. Perhaps humans are best suited for the aspects of business that machines cannot replicate – imagination, empathy, relationships, and the fundamentally physical aspects of existence.

Check out my latest on this in Forbes.

Happy Father’s Day

For those who celebrate. A dad joke for the road:

“Want to hear a joke about pizza?”

“…naw, it’s too cheesy?”

A couple weeks ago, Alpaca VC hosted our first-ever in person AGM and it went off better than we could have dreamed. A friend said to me at breakfast this week, “it looked like the event of the season” and it truly felt like it.

See my partner David’s recap HERE.

What really stood out to me was the power of bringing people together. There is no replacement for humans interacting in person (yet); organizing an ecosystem together creates interesting collisions of participants that would not happen otherwise, and it’s highly beneficial to serve as the organizer. I was reminded of the late Tony Hsieh (my largest investor in my startup, Bow & Drape), who always talked about ROC (Return on Community) as he was building the Downtown Project, and I still ascribe to that philosophy of creating collisions and helping different people and communities interact. LINK.

As such, I am also starting a Breakfast Club (where aforementioned friend complimented me) with a few friends (Hayley from First Round and Jordan from Betaworks were the first to say “yes”). What the Breakfast Club? Though I’d like to be Molly Ringwald, this Breakfast Club version is a monthly-ish series where we are gathering intentional and intimate groups of founders and investors from the NY tech ecosystem to connect, meet, and help one another. The format is to provide a “give” and a “get” - reciprocity, the true definition of community.

Our next event is March 10th. Join the waitlist if you’d like to be included in future ones: https://lu.ma/3wdwkb51

Other things that Caught My Attention (CMA) this week:

• Nuclear’s Sensitivity to the AI market. We’ve been delving into Power Availability as an investment theme for the past eight months, and nuclear has risen to the top of our interest areas (see our Field Study here). That said, it’s been interesting to see AI’s fickle future influence the market’s expectations on power stocks. I am long on any dense, deregulated power source, though, as the US just doesn’t have enough power to meet demand. LINK.

• Eugene Healey’s take on Parenting as the new luxury. He argues having children = the aspirational aesthetic that brands are marketing as the new flex because 1) you are optimistic enough about the future to have children and 2) you have enough time to live your old stylish life alongside your children. Move over Bernar McFadden: parents are the new leisure class. LINK.

• Pickle! I hope to write more on my AI Operating System in a future post (i.e. how I use AI interfaces to power my work), but for now, I wanted to post about Pickle because man - this is nuts. It creates an AI body double to replace your live camera feed in real time, so you can join meetings without having to be on camera. Let’s see if you can tell next time we catch up… LINK.

• The Crip Walk. My final internet deep dive this week was on the Crip walk (a la Serena at the Super Bowl) and its origins. History is strange. Serena is still an icon. LINK.

Who else is excited for the return of White Lotus? See you in the chat…

On top of all this, 2025 feels… insane? LA is tragically on fire, Trump is about to step into office, TikTok is going dark, and the world seems to be shifting below our feet. Censorship is eroding just like our beaches. Though one thing is clear: entire industries are emerging from the rubble of yesterday's excesses.

So what's next? Inspired by Fred Wilson's recent post where he calls his predictions more provocations, I gave my take on 2025 predictions recently on LinkedIn. I got the biggest reaction from something I call, “The Aquarius Economy” - where human creativity will become a core economic contribution as AI automates so much of our workload… and jobs. SEE LINK.

McKinsey projects AI could automate up to 30% of work hours by 2030. I believe as this shift happens more people will turn to artistic expression, craft, and improvisation as sources of income; “side hustles” that, with the help of e-commerce, social media, and new technologies that do not yet exist, will become primary income drivers.

I also asked some of the top Venture Capitalists working in Commerce their predictions as well for my first Forbes contribution of the year, published this week. LINK HERE.

Which do you agree with and which are you like "nah"? I want to know!

In other news that came across my desk,

TikTok will go dark: the US Supreme Court upheld the ban of TikTok. It’s messy, to say the least, as the NYT reports, but it continues the trend of countries levying access to citizens’ data as political weapon. India banned TikTok in 2020; Australia banned all social media for teens late last year.

What I find interesting is that this is all under the guise of national security, but as you know - I have argued for a long time there are economic reasons for banning TikTok and hoping a US company purchases it… to control the share of eyeballs that TikTok gets (which is at an all time high, by the way, with US users spending an average of 95 minutes per day on TikTok, while Instagram usage has declined 30%)… said another way, this is a strategic move to control our data… data that, as @dashofpaprika argues, is the new oil. SEE LINK.

Some companies are clapping back, though… Bluesky is supposedly raising at $700M to allow users control of their data to fight the tech oligarchs. I, for one, am not sticking around Twitter/X to see the ship sink…

Lastly, besides having a baby, I had one other big “arrival” while I was out on mat leave: I co-led the investment round of Hopscotch Labs, which builds things that exist at the intersection of "recently possible" and "newly ubiquitous.” Their first project is basically a mashup of OG Twitter, OG Foursquare, and Waze, with some AI fairy dust glueing it all together. Dennis Crowley, Founder of Foursquare, is the CEO of Hopscotch Labs and back at building things at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. The beta is so rad. LINK HERE.

Things that caught my attention, though:

» As promised, I interviewed long-time friend and fashion advocate, Maxine Bedat, for Forbes on her work to make fashion more sustainable, which includes her writing the book Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment as well as her most recent sponsoring of The Fashion Act, which is endorsed by countless brands and celebs Angelina Julie, Jane Fonda and Rosario Dawson. Don’t worry about it? Maxine says otherwise:

“Through the research and writing of Unraveled, I was able to have both on the record and many off the record conversations with people from across the fashion industry. Through those discussions, it became crystal clear that the voluntary initiatives created by industry would never be prioritized over a public company's goal of maximizing short term profit. And because of that realization, it became clear that the government simply needed to step in and lift the floor so the whole industry can thrive, not just today but into the future. We have been raised in a generation to believe that regulation is per se bad. And, I would agree that ill-thought out regulation can have bad outcomes, but there is also good, and critically important regulation. It's why we generally feel safe in planes, taking medication and following road signs. The job of the government is to set up the basic rules of the game for our economy to thrive today and tomorrow.” Couldn’t agree more. LINK.

» Trad Wives are such a fascinating phenom to me. A trad wife glorifies homemaking and caregiving to a high art, effusing that making homemade butter and cleaning in full gowns and makeup is a happy, fulfilling and aesthetic pursuit. This results in rich, aspirational social content that is, honestly, entertaining and fantastical in its own right. It is the cult of the domestic for the 21st century. At the same time, trad wives undermine feminist ideals of independence, free thought, and a rejection of the male gaze; they are often women of faith who ascribe to patriarchal norms, by the likes of Harrison Butker who herald that women do not care about careers, but rather “that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world”. Trad wives are also oftentimes wealthy and - like so many influencers - neglect to acknowledge the privilege of taking care of a whole, say, farm with hired hands all around them. My favorite of the moment? Nara Smith. She is wholly enchanting to watch, with her kitten voice and spidery nails creating homemade bubble gum and late-night BCTs (buffalo chicken tenders) for her hubby. I just found out she is Mormon, which to me made all the pieces of her performance fit together a bit more clearly, and honestly gives me compassion for these women’s stressful pursuit of absolute perfection: “Perfection is a must. Submission is a must. Abuse is rampant.” Great opinion on this linked HERE.

» As a long-time Uncrustables fan, they have been a mainstay snack during this pregnancy. What I didn’t know was that it’s a $1B brand fueling Smuckers fifth-generation CPG brand’s growth. With a $1.1B manufacturing plant slated in Alabama, and the celen endorsement of the most-talked about couple of the last year (at least one half of the Travis Kelce / Taylor Swift PB+J sandwich) Uncrustables is marching toward snack category domination. But what is an Uncrustable?

“‘Let’s revisit, now that we’re part of the Uncrustables family—are Uncrustables dumplings?’ Jason Kelce wondered in December on New Heights, leading the brothers to muse: ‘Either dumplings or empanadas.’ ‘More of an omelet.’ ‘A jelly-filled doughnut.’” LINK.

» Marc Jacobs’s team is serving a lesson in Gen Z influencer marketing recently. They have partnered with incredibly niche, viral/trending creators to make quirky, organic content that places in the brand in a zany world of internet fiction. It’s frankly genius: it’s undone, surrenders control to the influencer, post-modern (which you know I think is the key to modern marketing, which I wrote about recently re: The Frog Club) while still acknowledging the brand. As The Digital Fairy put it, the marketing is working because:

💡 Utilises creators who have gone viral within very niche communities on TikTok, thus greatly increasing reach

💡 Utilises post-internet memes that speak to the current zeitgeist who enjoy post-irony

💡 Creates content that feels “authentic” despite them being ads (post-irony!)

💡 Doesn’t take themselves too seriously despite being a high-fashion brand

If you have not seen these, @sylvaniadrama is definitely my favorite and most unhinged of the bunch:

@marcjacobsHappy mom’s day @Sylvaniandrama 💐

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Hope everyone survives the heat wave this week and Happy Juneteenth!

It is amazing to get the notoriety, no doubt, but now four years in to investing, I have not yet produced enough DPI to really cement my title. And, for as much as these lists are encouraging, what I found even more rewarding - and frankly, real - was the outpouring of support from my existing founders. They have their pick of investors, and work alongside many besides me, and so their vote matters more to me than any list ever could.

I screenshot a text I received from a particliar founder because this encapsulates truly what it’s about:

This week, these other topics also caught my attention:

• France approved a Kill Bill (my fave Tarantino movie) that would penalize fast fashion retailers like Shein and Temu, who largely use under-waged workers to create price arbitrage on items. The bill would restrict the advertising of those companies in France and also impose a fee of up to 10 euros per garment by 2030. The EU continues to lead the world in consumer protections and sustainability. Though, as I continue to hypothesize, these moves are as economically motivated as they are socially - China exports 65% of the world’s apparel and fashion makes up 3% of France’s GDP, more than the automotive and aeronautical industries combined. LINK.

• A long-time friend, Maxine Bedat, introduced The Fashion Act in New York in 2022 and it has gained momentum since. Similarly, in the US, it would require brands doing over $100M to disclose their supply chain and agree to impact reduction targets, with the aim of curbing environmental and social damage caused by the fashion industry. LINK.

• I am interviewing Maxine for Forbes, and wanted to know what questions you have for her! Please enter into the comments below and I would love to incorporate some.

Lastly, Happy Mother’s Day. Emily Oster (great, no BS doctor/writer who was recommended to me when I became pregnant) posted this and I found it comforting to all the ways we talk about moms today which are far more complicated than a Hallmark card could ever encapsulate.

Working with your hands has proven benefits on cognition and mood, according to the New York Times. Theories root in the notion that complex hand movements engage the brain more vigorously and aid in the maintenance of more neural pathways. And whether we can attribute the lifted mental state to the hand movements or the novelty of the task itself, the evidence that working with your hands has positive effects is clear. LINK.

I believe in this practice so much that I am actually starting a new-age Sewing Circle in Brooklyn, where founders, investors and friends can come together to work on hand-based projects like drawing, knitting, or embroidery. We are hosting the series monthly at BigNight, and by reading this you have gotten your official invite! LINK TO INVITE.

Often, when I crochet for multiple hours, I end of listening to podcast or audiobooks. Occupying my hands while listening actually aids in my comprehension, which is also why hanging out with other people while crafting creates deeper conversation (hence the above Sewing Circle slash art therapy sessions).

This week, I was recommended an audiobook from Reddit on the future of capitalism post AI, a book called Techo Feudalism, What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. It’s a fascinating historical catalogue of late-stage capitalism and the future of our survival in a new era the author coins “cloud capital” where our attention, identity, and content drive capital reproduction (rather than physical labor as contribution in earlier epochs). LINK.

An added benefit to crocheting is that I can be present in the physical world while I listen to the future of the digital one. My current project? A teddy for my new bebe (coming in September).

Let me know what YOU do to decompress!

Frog Club is a new West Village restaurant founded by Liz Johnson, same chef from LA’s popular celebrity den Horses, and whose restaurant’s main quirk (of many) is that there are absolutely no phones or photos allowed. It’s become an impossible table, not just for the food but for the right to see what’s behind the wizard’s curtain.

The Row’s FW2024 presentation in Paris also had a no phone, no photo policy, which flew in the face of the fever-pitch social media streaming and nepo-baby pumping that have become hallmarks of recent fashion weeks. Attendees were provided refreshments and a notebook where they could note what inspired them about the show.

For some reason, it really got my gut. But why? How do I articulate why this strikes me so? I have been asking myself that, and I think it’s because it crystalizes a new phase of social media, one that is self referential, self-aware, and metafictional: without sounding grandiose, I would argue this is a new form of social media postmodernism. Let me explain that a little.

First, let’s start with postmodernism in literature (oh god, cracks knuckles to attempt to remember sophomore year lit theory). Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and others all heralded this reaction to modernism, marked with a distinct level of fragmentation, self-reference, irony, intertextuality, and a rejection of the idea of universal truths. So much of what postmodernism does is highlight the commodification of experience, embracing the absurdity and pervasiveness of consumerism. Take this passage from DeLillo’s “White Noise”:

"We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book."

In this scene, the “Most Photographed Barn in America” becomes a self-perpetuating spectacle, where people visit just to take pictures of a barn or buy photos of the barn that they are also looking at, which has been reduced to a tourist attraction and an image that can be bought and sold.

It’s easy see how prescient these writers have become. How often have we gone to a fill-in-your-celeb concert only to see a sea of people not watching the show, but watching their phones which are taking videos of the show in order to post on social media and broker their lived experience, which is sold to other voyeurs for likes (the primary digital currency) and for affiliate clicks.

Social media, in its most evolved state, distills and commodifies experience. Content creators, all 1.1 million of them in US, are the fastest growing segment of small businesses, and their success is predicated on the consumption of their lifestyle - vacations to Mexico, beauty regimens, energy drinks, vitamins, classes. We as the consumers have become accustomed to knowing that any experience broadcast on social is underpinned by an economy of brand.

As I have written about before, brands spend massive dollars on social media; in our Brand Discovery study at Alpaca VC, social media was the primary traffic driver for 41% of brands. And that is not counting offline appearances and sponsorships with a clear social megaphone - the prime example of this being the “influencer dinner” where twenty social media stars gather, often wearing or donning the brands’ products, to celebrate some conjured milestone and to create reels of content for those at home to watch - and hopefully convert. With so much money going toward paid posts, affiliate marketing, and content creation, social media can be argued to have become an artifice of experience, and many yearn for the good old days of “just being in the moment”.

Without trying to cast moral judgement, I believe both The Row and Frog Club are touting no phone policies in order to bring participants into the moment. In theory, it is a way to sever the connection from online to offline and to create a present-tense, ephemeral experience. One that casts aside the dizzying and self-perpetuating spectacle of social content creation, and centers on a more special, intimate relationship to the environment around us.

I would also argue, though, that no phone policies are a higher form of marketing exclusivity, a sort of social postmodernism, where the act of being present offline is again being commodified and branded, where the value of the exchange still exists in the void of the experience online, in the allusion to it, which subverts the uniqueness and splendor of the experience itself. To me, this concept is epitomized in the photo people take of Frog Club stickers they receive at the restaurant’s door to cover their phones; a photo that simultaneously creates a digital trophy, a sort of neo postcard, of the aspirational offline experience while claiming to transcend social media altogether.

To me, it feels forced and ironic, the way that creating a paid membership social club feels like a forced way to cure loneliness. Perhaps this is me being a curmudgeon, not hip to the new wave; or perhaps this is my authentic psyche pushing back on yet another capitalist infiltration of some of the last safely humanistic corners in our lives. Buying “living in the moment” feels dystopian in the way that a DeLillo novel does; and I am curious how the trend continues to evolve.

Who hasn’t seen (or been that person themself) someone at WholeFoods or Kohl’s or UPS with an IKEA bag full of inexpensive items to scan back for an Amazon return? This fall, I stood behind a twenty-something while she unloaded no less than sixteen stretchy Halloween costumes, ripped out of their packaging, back to the UPS guy who was lethargically rescanning and packing them with a podcast in his earbuds. And who knows the amount of lace onesies that Amazon instructed her to just keep instead, quietly implying “here - YOU throw these in the trash.” She turned to the line behind her. apologized, but I don’t think my admonishing stare created a lasting effect on her purchasing behavior.

This story is all too familiar and it’s got a thorny set of issues in the way of a solution. Why would a retailer accept so many returns? Why would they tell you to keep them instead of taking them back? Can this continue ad infinitum?

It likely cannot; when I speak to executives at large retailers, returns are one of the top issues they face, given that 30% of e-commerce purchases and 17% of in-store buys are sent back, and often, those items if open-boxed or out of season, run the risk of sitting in warehouses and on balance sheets without a good course of disposition. You see, the problem compounds itself; the longer something takes to get returned, graded, refurbished, and restocked, the harder it is to dispose of. Let’s follow an example of a return journey:

A $450 Balenciaga hat gets returned from an online purchaser back to a retailer like Nordstrom. That hat needs a shipping label printed back to the DC it came from, which Nordstrom pays for ($4-7 on average - and that is not counting some of the new at-home courier pickup options like Veho or Returnmates, that charge an additional $5-10). Depending on the condition of that item (let’s say the tag was ripped off, there is a mark on the brim, and the plastic polybag it came in is gone), the item needs to be graded and refurbed, which can cost up to $18 all in. Then the item has to be resorted and re-stocked back at the DC, which costs on average about $0.50-1.50. If the items is still in season, it can be resold for full price, but if it comes back late, the item will need to be price matched on sale, call that $270. At this point, Nordstrom is breaking even on the item’s cost but already at loss from a profit standpoint! But now, let’s say that item doesn’t sell through after 90 days on sale, then the item is resold via liquidation, where the retailer will keep somewhere around 10-20% the value of the good (while accumulating implied warehousing fees). The math on that looks like this:

And this hat is still far more salvageable than other items, because it is luxury, sizeless, and high margin. What happens to the goods that are not so name brand, or expensive? Like a Halloween costume from Amazon (whose wholesale cost is likely less than all these fees above)? That answer is, just like Oscar the Grouch, it is destined for life in the trash can.

So what can brands and retailers do about all these returns?

For one, retailers are clapping back. The Cut published a story last week, highlighting how some retailers are beginning to track and ban bad actors from returns, in an attempt to curb bracketing (buying 3 sizes and keeping one) and wearing/styling items with tags before returning. In the future, brands will be able to look at customer behavior and generate a tailored return policy for each shopper, to reward good behavior and curb the sinful (startups like Orita are doing this).

Retailers like Zara are also beginning to charge for returns and restocking, in an attempt to bring transparency back and acknowledge there is a cost to all this convenience.

Mostly, though, we are seeing an enormous swell in liquidation. New startups are cropping up in every major consumer category to deal with excess liquidation stock, largely caused by returns. We see it in luxury (YaySay, ShopThing), mass apparel (BinStar, Ghst), food (Martie), electronics (B-Stock) and even industrials (Amplio).

Sadly, I do not see an end to the gluttony, and so I don’t see an end to the need for returns reform or the continued need for liquidation solutions. It will be interesting to see if retailers can start reward customers for keeping items, and it will also be interesting to see if MSRP pricing will have flexiblity and tailoring as as a means to ensure a satisfied sell through. For now, we should all think about the real solution to this problem: how do we buy less stuff?

HBS wrote a case about this journey, and the many missteps we took along the way to uncovering our winning product. I figure you don’t need a quarter million dollar education to get the highlights of my lessons, so here they are, in no particular order:

• Product Market Fit is about finding a profitable product that you cannot market to customers fast enough. As one student said, “the snowball stops pushing itself”

• When trying to first understand who your customer might be, don’t talk to them (especially about your solution) - listen. Listen to their lives, how they spend their money and time, their frequency of certain behaviors, and try to understand how a product might fit in (not the other way around). Also, poll a diverse enough group to get meaningful, unbiased feedback. Apps like Pollfish allow you to survey thousands of participants in a certain range of demographics literally overnight, for example. Don’t rely on friends and your mom, like I did!

• Test and iterate until the data screams at you. We tested different silhouettes for over a year before we found that women wanted more casual attire (not dresses and formal wear, which is what our early surveys indicated to us). Once we hit on launching the sweatshirt, the data was clear: it was 30% of our sales the first quarter (as one SKU) and before we knew it, thousands and thousands were ordered and it became clear that virality had taken hold.

• Good founders don’t have an ego about their solution, and are relentless about being proven wrong until they are proven right. To our credit, we didn’t quit hunting until we happened upon our soft, chic sweatshirts.

• Once you hit on PMF (product market fit), don’t capitulate - go full steam ahead. One misstep we made was to continue launching our new collections as planned, instead of scrapping them and running hard right away at the sweatshirts. In hindsight, it is fair to say we were “mitigating risk” by not going full hog into sweatshirts and launching more dresses, but I submit we knew we had a hit and should have been unafraid to run at it. Startups are a race against time; eventually, in enough time, you run out of money.

• Ironically, though startups are a race against time, they take time. We didn’t sell Bow & Drape until 2019. That’s almost eight years after I started tinkering. Every overnight success story takes more time than you realize. Success is really more about resilience than anything else.

There you have it. Free education by subscribing to I’ll Buy It…

A couple other noteworthy callouts that came across my desk:

• Shopify Editions came out. There are many enhancements to product categorization, search, and checkout, including the ability to bundle and create limitless SKUs via API and the ability to put ShopPay on any checkout anywhere. The news was also a warning shot for companies building things like subscription apps in their ecosystem. Shopify continues to make its storefront the most powerful monolith platform in commerce. LINK.

• A Higher Bar for Series A. I was speaking to an LP last week and it was clear the bar for Series A is incredibly high. Some estimate up to 25% of all venture went into seed the last two years. Additionally, many companies raised seed round extensions via insiders or new outside capital, and extended their runways to avoid raising these last two years. The result? More companies than ever going out for Series A this year, and I predict the bar is going to be WAY higher than people anticipate. If you’re at $3M ARR but it took you 2.5 years and $6M of inside capital to get there? No chance. As this LP said, “IRR is too important a metric for that kind of slowness.” Early stage companies beware.

Until next week!

I struggled to get this one out, mostly because I didn’t love what I have to say. But it’s better to put something out than to perfect it.

These are the bits that caught my attention this week:

• Shein IPO Woes. Once the third biggest startup (by valuation, at $100M at its peak in 2022), Shein has big shoes to fill and bigger dreams to deliver to its investors and consumer startups everywhere. But as of this week, in private market deals the company has been trading closer to $45 billion, which is far lower than its hopeful $90 billion valuation at its much-anticipated IPO. It’s one to watch: regulators are coming down on Shein for forced labor claims, and the downward trend in its trading value could spell bad news for the consumer sector, who is looking for redemption in a big win like this public offering. LINK.

• Tweens <3 Anti-Aging. Adolescents spent spent 33% more on cosmetics and 19% more on skin care this year compared with last year. Let that sink in. Before their skin even begins to mature, eleven and twelve year olds are slathering on anti-aging creams and serums, and driving up major sales at Sephora and the like. Some argue it’s a way to congregate (the new mall); some argue its finding self-soothing in an era of chaos; I think Gen Z and Alpha watch too many TikToks on this stuff (TikTok surpassed even YouTube for this demo’s most-watched channel) and perception - even digitally - becomes reality over time. LINK.

• Maison Margiela’s Viral Makeup Moment. All I saw on my feed this week was MM’s couture show. Fashion as theater. John Galiano being John Galiano. But, to me, the makeup was the real star of the show. Pat McGrath created looks that mimicked porcelain dolls to match Galiano’s dystopian London fairytale, and the internet exploded trying to figure out how she did it. In glorious mystery, McGrath said all will be revealed soon, which many posit means she is launching her own product off the heels of the furor. In my view, that would be the most gangster product launch of all time, and beauty brands should take note of how she is (or should be) capitalizing on a moment. LINK.

Stay sunny.

This week, I noted a few things to write about: 

• Curses. I had a couple surreptitious conversations about curses this week. One with a founder and one with a prolific commerce founder and angel. The first is the curse of the intelligent, defined as the lack of patience to persistently execute specific details. It’s a curse that befalls smart people interested in models and strategies, but who don’t stick around when the momentum stops or the model breaks; when roadblocks are hit or when minute attention to details must be maintained for longer periods than anticipated. The second is the winner’s curse, evidenced when the more and more successful you become, the less and less interesting people you are surrounded by. Yerp.

• FedEx Announced fdx. Usually the olds don’t innovate too well, so it was impressive this week to see FexEx unveil its new platform at NFR’s Big Show. The gist? They now have an end to end platform that can help brands of all sizes manage their forward and reverse logistics, complete with carbon tracking, real-time network capacity, and ship times. If it proves to deliver all tjat it says, it’s a great step forward for carriers to embed further into the customer and brand experience. It does make me wonder, though, how brands will surface this data to end customers (will a Net-a-Porter really only put a FedEx estimated delivery date on a PDP and not any other carrier? And will brands opt for the FedEx RMS over the dozen others that are also carrier-agnostic?). I also wonder how much arbitrage this will give fulfillment teams in their routing decisions. It also jeopardizes a bunch of startups' livelihoods as middleware for brands around these exact solutions (delivery, carbon tracking, route optimization, returns); or does it put them in the buy box for the next large carrier to drive innovation? Set to roll out in fall, should be interesting to watch. LINK. 

• Dive. Turn. Work. One final story that has been going around my female founder circles is the story of Kiki, the NY-launched subletting start-up with 5 male founding team members that recently pivoted to creating a “girls only club”. The whole story sounds like a viral marketing campaign in itself, but it does seem the young male hubris is in earnest. The Gen Z CEO claims to be enlightened “to this problem I never even knew existed where so many girls in the city have moved here thinking that they’ll live their best possible life, but they’re just living not thriving.” And who better equipped to know how to make New York girls (no, not women - girls) thrive than a twenty something Aussie cis man? LINK. 

I will leave you with this addendum: Despite the slight appropriation of the name, Kiki still threw me back to one of the best internet jams of the last two decades. LINK.

Since writing this blog fell off, I am trying something new, which is to write shorter quips for everyone instead of my longer thought pieces. brrrrrrrrrr (that’s my drumroll):

• 2024 predictions are abound (Rex Woodbury and Fred Wilson were two I liked), and I asked my favorite Commerce VC’s their predictions in Forbes this week. LINK.

• What we didn’t predict for 2023? Bows. It was the year of the bow, and as someone who founded a (ahem) likeminded company, I disagree that it’s gone too far. Fundamentally, there is a fissure happening between day to day life and what we identify and celebrate online - more and more, digital life is an escape from reality and disconnected from it. Bows and balletcore celebrate digital hyper-feminism in a real world literally being stripped of joy and levity… of girlhood and innocence and rights to said girlhood. LINK.

• As Katie Sturino put it best in regards to Lululemon’s former CEO, “the patriarchy does not go away quietly; they gotta let you know what they think on the way out”. LINK.

• Ending on a *somewhat* high note, women get more funding as long as they have a male by their side. Mixed gender teams raised 26.1% of all venture capital allocated this year, a jump from the 18.2% last year. Companies with founding teams that are all women raised 1.8% — the lowest percentage of venture capital allocated to such teams since 2016. Cognitive diversity through lived experience is the way to go! LINK.

Off to our partner offsite this week - wish us luck strategizing the year ahead!

To break it down if you don’t know about Shops: TikTok Shops officially launched a little over a week ago, after a summer of beta testing, to allow users to transact (check out) directly on the platform. They also launched a Shopify integration and a FBT (Fulfilled by TikTok) facility in the US. This is a HUGE deal, as TikTok is the fastest growing social media app in the world and has over 150 million US users alone.

The ramifications of non-US content turning on commerce are far-reaching for our country’s largest marketplaces and technology companies. It’s already happening in Indonesia - in December 2022 Shopee’s revenues were down 40% after TikTok Shops launched there, and the government has since stepped in.

Granted, the live shopping conventions of Asia are not necessarily 1:1 in the states, most notably we don’t have celebrity talent for live shopping, but we do like Chinese goods, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of Temu and Shein.

What does it all mean? I break it down below.

Special shoutout to Ammar Moiz (of Mayple) for debating with me and to Renee Russo (Glow Labs) for introducing me to her mom (!!) for an interview as a beta use.

https://www.glossy.co/fashion/op-ed-the-real-tiktok-threat-is-in-shops-and-cross-border-commerce/

I am in awe of Jess often, and during our trip I could hear my ego knocking with a big bravado at the door, billowing how adult and under control things are for me. It’s easy to get insecure around people we admire. But Jess has long understood and believed in me, and that awareness can quiet my loudest doubts. 

She has been one of my longest and oldest supporters, since I stepped out on the world stage with nothing but my life savings at the time ($50,000) and a garment bag full of samples. I met Jess when I was twenty five and was convinced I was going to leave my finance job, which I took to pay my student debt off in order to start one of my life’s dreams: a fashion company. 

We met in Kendall Square at Tatte Cafe after first connecting on Twitter, and I got there early. I was excited that a female investor had reached out to me, and I thought there was a chance that she might understand my vision for the brand. And, as I think I had read on some entrepreneurial blog at the time, I brought my product samples as any good entrepreneur would. A whole season of them, in fact, on felted hangers in a black tumbledown garment bag that had come with a BCBG work dress I bought for my job. It was elephantine - at least 30 pounds between the metal hangers and the dozen items - and I lugged that thing up the Red line and down Mass Ave. like a henchman doing dirty work in the Sierra desert. It was my only set of samples, the only one I could afford to get made, and so my body bag accompanied me everywhere and to every investor meeting I got, no matter if it was a partner meeting in Palo Alto or an MIT cafe. 

So there I sat in my vintage pink teddy decal sweatshirt and striped Forever21 dress, samples cascading over a small wooden cafe chair, nervously awaiting our fated meeting…

Though I cringe at the memory, Jess laughs when we talk about it now. She was not phased. She ended up becoming one of my first angel investors in Bow & Drape, and supported us in the roughest of patches - those times when additional investment (or in some cases, spot loans) makes all the difference. And Jess is as cool a capitalist as anyone: I know she did it not out of charity, but because she believed. 

This notion continues to validate that we have people in our corner, no matter what we show up like. It’s so rare in life to have someone who believes in you and is not incentivized to do so. Family kind of counts, but it also kind of doesn’t. The truth is, even if our parents or friends believe in us, it doesn’t feel as awesome as it does from someone we look up to. To have a version of yourself you would like to be more like one day look back and you, extend a welcoming hand, and whisper, “Come sit over here at my table. We have champagne. And possibly caviar.”

Everyone should be so lucky to have someone like Jess in their lives. A stunning creature who has traveled the depths of the human ocean, gathering stories, and sharing them with a younger version of themselves. Everyone needs a friend like Jess.  

This week, I took to Forbes to write about what I think Barbie, and her Movie, manifest for women today. I also relay some predictions about what this successful use of female-focused, nostalgia-rich IP means for future film and product lines.

Click over to read the full piece - and let me know what you thought of the movie!

READ ARTICLE HERE

It does not escape me that I am privileged to get to come here with other VC’s to make memories and work remotely, a treat that I would not have imagined growing up in WoodDale, Illinois. Capitalism and the free market, along with the genetic lottery and some hard work, have made it possible for people like me to create wealth, more than I could have imagined growing up. Being in New York at the doorstep of opportunity helps, too. 

That said, I am barely in the top 10% of all earners in New York, let alone the top 1%. Our globally identified one percenters generally fall into two categories: The High Net-Worth Individual (HNWI) and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individual (UHNWI), whose net worths are >$1M and >$30M, respectively. 

While I may get to take advantage of a European trip in the summer, these UHNWIs are the folks like Bernard Arnault whose superyachts are banned from Naples and whose Titanic submarines stopped the news cycle last week while 100-people refugee boats sunk without coverage of similar kind. Why spend time talking about this group, who are often sirens for the world’s inequity and benefactors of mass exploitation, you may ask me? Because no matter what you think of UHNWI, whether you are one or not, people pay attention to what they do in an outsized way, and their purchasing power has an outsized affect on our markets. And, moreover, because it’s a group that is growing incredibly fast. 

This chart from McKinsey shows the rate of growth in these segments, growing 5-9% per year. In North America, we will have over 300,000 UHNWIs by 2026. That is astounding to me. Given the average Louis Vuitton trunk is, call it, $40,000 (conservatively, not counting something more collectible), the market for these trunks in N. America alone will expand by three billion dollars. 

The ultra-high-net-worth individual has no problem spending on big ticket items with high AOVs (the top 2% of the population buys 40% of the luxury market), and I believe we will see a growing segment of novel luxury goods and services, in particular things around wellness and the Quiet Luxury of outliving everyone else. 

It’s also important to note that, within this demographic, GenZ and Millennials are growing 3X faster than any other segment of the UHNW. By 2030, they will make up 30% of the overall luxury market, which will usher in an openness to new brands and services beyond what we previously offered, with many of these residing online in a way they previously were not. Things much more conscious, less conspicuous; much more green, much less polluting; and perhaps even more craft, authentic, rooted in the essentialism of the everyday. 

It’s something to keep eyes on, whether it’s luxury cars, high-end birthing centers, VIP stores with minimum spends (enter Chanel and Balenciaga), or any of the major spend categories in luxury: 

• Luxury Personal Goods, both first- and second-hand

• Luxury Hospitality

• Luxury Cars

• Fine Wine + Spirits

• Fine Dining

• Fine Furniture

• NFTs gatekeeping premium experiences

For now, I will cherish my time at the Surf Castle, a retreat run by people far richer in spirit than any billionaire I have met or can think of.