Brent Vartan (Bullish) - How desires lead to opportunities & Bullish on Consumer Report

The Consumer VC: Venture Capital I B2C Startups I Commerce | Early-Stage Investing I Brands

Our guest today is Brent Vartan, Managing Partner of Bullish. Bullish is an investment firm and Brand Agency designed for consumer businesses living early in an S-curve. Some of their investments include Peloton, Harry’s and Warby Parker. Bullish just released their report “Bullish On Consumer: Operationalizing Demand-Side Themes for Better Outcomes”. We will dig into the report and their three cultural themes within consumer.

Click Here to Download Bullish’s Consumer Report

Some of the questions I ask Brent:

1. What’s the origin and purpose of creating this report?
2. How was the report constructed? What was the starting point? Walk us through how you thought about human desires relates to cultural themes?
3. How did you come out with your three themes
4. What was most surprising to you from this research?
5. How do these themes translate to different age demographics?
6. I’ve had on investors who aren’t thematic in consumer. Who knows they don’t have crystal balls they don’t think about themes or trends, it’s understanding the insight that the entrepreneur brings to the table, researching that insight along with the founder. How can this report help your decision making when finding new companies?
7. What do you think is still misunderstood about investing in early consumer brands?
8. You had this line of should be businesses vs. could be businesses. What’s an example of a could be business or are there certain themes out there that you’ve noticed that you think will bear a bunch of could be businesses that don’t have alot of legs in the future?
9. Do you think this changes how brands are constructed at the get go? For example, if you are appealing to a specific theme, like in the uncompromising self for example. You had Public Goods in there, which went multi-category fairly early on. Now I had on the founder of Public Goods who said he had a really hard time fundraising because they were multi-category. .When I asked a PE investor on this show if they would invest in Public Goods, they said no because the exit potential wasn’t there. Do you think you will see more of these?