Transcript
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Hello and welcome to the consumer VC. I am your host, Michael but
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and. On this show we talked
about the world of venture capital and innovation
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in both consumer technology and consumer products. If you're enjoying this content, you
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could subscribe to my newsletter, the
consumer VC DOT substackcom, to get each
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new episode and more consumer news delivered
straight to your inbox. Thank you,
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rout hoat Kapoor, for the introduction
to our guests today, Michelle Romano,
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Co founder and CEO of clear COO. CLEARCO offers fast, affordable funding for
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ECOMMERCE companies to fund your inventory or
your marketing needs. Michelle is a serial
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entrepreneur and also one of the dragons
on Canada's dragons den. We discuss what's
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understood about scaling ecommerce companies when that
your capital makes sense first for revenue,
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base financing marketing metrics that she pays
attention to in her Aha moment on dragons
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den that led to the founding of
clear COO. Without further ADO, here's
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Michelle. Michelle, thank you so
much for joining me here today. How
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are you? I'm great. How
are you? I'm great. I'm great.
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Thanks, gretally great. Thanks again
for for being part of the show.
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So I know you've been an entrepreneur, a very successful entrepreneur, throughout
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your entire career, but what was
the origin story or the insight that led
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you to found clear bank? At
the time and now it's clear co I'm
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a serial Octur, which means that's
the only thing I know how to do.
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Star Company puts it was an engineer
at a school, said no to
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all of my job offers, decided
or figured out that worldwide supply of caviar
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was down by ninety five percent and
moved to the east coast to build a
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fishery from scratches. My first business
couldn't even make the supper. I tried
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my hands knee deep in like surgeon, literally, and that was actually a
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pretty good business until we had a
giant recession in two thousand and eight and
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I found myself, being twenty two
years old, selling the world's most unnecessary
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luxury product. So I learned very
quickly that the world owes you absolutely nothing
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as an entrepreneur. From there built
an ECOMMERCE company in Canada. This is
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a lot of the inspiration behind Clark, because no one would fund me in
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the Early Day. I mean the
best offer I got was half a million
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bucks for half the company or something, and that didn't make sense because we
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are ready doing like, I don't
know, two hundred K and revenue at
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the time. But I learned really
quickly if you could spend a buck on
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facebook and make three dollars more,
you can keep going. And as results
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of that we rolled up a bunch
of different ECOMMERCE companies. It's now a
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small publicly traded company called to merge. That's a bunch of ECOMMERCE brands in
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Canada. From there built another APP
called snap saves that I sold a group
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on in two thousand and fourteen.
And after that something really interesting happens.
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I get this phone call Mike and
it's like do you want to join the
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cast of the Canadian version of Shark
tank, and I was like, I
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think you have the wrong girl,
but like, I'm gonna just say yes
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to show up to the audition.
So I show up to the audition,
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I get the roll and I'm like, oh my gosh, I must be
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the I'm the youngest person on this
panel for sure, twenty eight years old,
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and I got to be the poorest
person here on a relative pieces and
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I think I saw the pitches way
differently than anyone else. And in a
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single season we see two hundred and
fifty pitches in seventeen days, like even
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if you're a VC. I mean
this is true level back to back.
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These are almost all D Toca commerce
pitches, because television doesn't really work well
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for like B Tob SASS software.
Right. So I'm watching all these founders
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are coming on the show. They're
like look, willing to give ten percent
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of my business for my first two
hundred grand. And you ask those founders
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what they needed the money for and
it's the same two things always. I
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need money for facebook ads, which
is customer requisition and Growth, and I
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need adds, any money for inventory. And so I, you know,
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trying to Andrew and I was like, why are founders using the most expensive
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capital in the world to do something
with a fixed return? Make a mistake.
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I wish we could have used clear
go to build Clerko and I loved
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our seat investors, but we have
now paid our seat investors three hundred and
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eighty four times their money and there's
they just keep riding the curve as we
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grow. So it's very, very
extensive capital. When you give up a
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PC your company because you there's just
no way to get a bath. So
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I came back the next day dreamed
of this new deal type with the Andrew
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and I said look to the founder, I'll give you that hund thousand dollars
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you were looking for. Instead of
taking ten percent of your business that I'm
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going to own forever, I want
ten percent of your revenue every day.
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So like I paid my capital back
plus six percent. So for a hundred
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grand, I wanted a hundred six
thousand dollars back, as I use money
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on ads. For the hundred granted
ADS Beend, you're probably four hundred thousand
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dollars in sales. For six hundred
six thousand dollars is a great deal for
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you and founderies like this is a
loane and I was like, no,
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this isn't alone, because alane would
have a personal guarantee. So if you
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did pay me back and take your
house and it would be down on your
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business. If you didn't pay it
back at also take your business, which
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is super punative. And I don't
have a fixed payment timeline, I don't
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have compounding contristas that. This is
just a ref share and he's a.
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The only hitch of my deal is
that I have to see your facebook data
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and your payment processing data so I
can understand if your business is really performing.
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So that was the beginning of Clerko, if you could believe it or
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not. From there, Mike,
we have now, you know, invested
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more than three point two billion dollars
and more than sevenzero different founders, so
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we're definitely the largest commerce investor in
the world. The other thing that puts
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in a sense of scale is the
entire US venture capital industry put out twenty
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three billion dollars last year. So
the fact that we are even a piece
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on that pie is, like,
pretty incredible for a company that was started
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out of my apartment with Andrew six
years ago. We think that we're giving
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founders a really cool option in terms
of another way to grow up their business
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where they don't have to take dilucian
but they can get the capital to grow.
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Certainly that's awesome. It's so the
inspiration behind it was on actually a
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dragon dens episode, right, yeah, believe it or not. What was
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the reaction? Just because obviously was
very different. Hadn't seen before anything like
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this on Dragon's end. What was
the action reaction from other investadors where they
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kind of like you're out of your
mind, Michelle, for just making his
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offer. Oh my gosh they were. They thought I was Vance. First
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I didn't think I close the deal
because they were like, you know,
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a royalty deal on chartanger dragons den
is usually like I wanted ten percent royalty
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forever or till I get five times
by money back, where they're very,
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very aggressive. I mean this was
till I got my money back plus six
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percent. I mean it was it
was almost nothing. So the first thing
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they said is she's never going to
close that deal and I was like you
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watch me, I'm going closest to
you. But the second round of questioning
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that is even more fascinating. Is
that the only way we could put out,
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you know, billions of dollars is
big going to Wall Street and I
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had two hundred people that told Andrew
and I onwill street that we were out
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of our minds. I think the
rudest one said, may I don't think
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you understand credit and I was like
no, I think I understand e commerce.
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Is what I understand, and I
understand the data sources. I'm looking
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for to indicate if these businesses will
be good investments, and that was hard.
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The first guy that backed us was
a guy named Ali from covent sure,
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he's been on the show. He's
great. He's great, he's he's
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amazing, he's like. I mean
Ali has a tattoo of a formula on
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his arm, like I just I
can I can tell you that like him
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and I get along really, really
well. But he took it. He
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took a big risk on us in
the early days and he said look,
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I believe in this model and it
got really big. So I am,
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I've always been super grateful to him, for sure. Yeah, all he's
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awesome, really great episode a few
months ago. So, as you said,
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well, you trusted, was you
understood. You know the metrics when
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it comes to facebook ads. Obviously, when you first talked that entrepreneur on
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the show, you said, okay, this is the deal I want to
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do, or these my terms,
but I need to see, obviously,
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your facebook ads and kind of get
been to the metrics. And obviously now
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you've seen, you know, thousands
of, not tens of thousands, of
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companies with clearco what do you think? What metrics do you think are most
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misunderstood for ECOMMERCE brands and one of
the best measures of success. What we
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are looking for is your unit economics. We are looking for, you know,
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can you sell a basket size of
a hundred dollars of stuff with thirty
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dollars of cogs and twenty bucks of
customer acquisition cost and you have that margin
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of you know, whatever it is
to make money every time you sell unit?
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You really want to be breaking even, if not more, on your
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first customer and then you really want
to be looking at your retention stats.
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I think everyone is sometimes looking for
a magic formula of what works for tension
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is the metric in every single business, whatever your business, you're running into
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the world. That indicates the health
of Your Business, because I fundamentally believe
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you can trick anyone into doing anything
once any time. Right is like,
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Oh my God, that looks too
good to be true. I'm gonna buy
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that. These shoes are really comfortable, although there's six is Solato's. Yeah,
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okay, we'll all do something once, and we should do something once
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because that creates great animation of trial. But when people do things twice,
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they like something or they need something
or they want something, and that is
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really the health that you should be
using. We have models that I couldn't
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even tell you it's in them because
we have so much data that we've looked
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at over now such a long period
of time, and so I don't think
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that's the value using AIS. I
don't even know every metric, but fundamentally
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I know that what we care about
is younit economics, that we care about
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the retention of your customers, and
that is timeless. Whether the AD platforms
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change, that's time knows. Whether
your products change as timeless, whether the
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inventory suppliers change. Those are the
fundamentals of will build a great brand.
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Where does it make sense right now? Is Well, when it comes because
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we're brands, because your brands are
not really very attractive to VC's overall in
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the grand scheme of things. Currently
there's quite a few consumer investors who are
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now shifting to enter to investing in
more ECOMMERCE infrastructure type companies instead of consumer
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companies. But when does it make
sense for for consumer brands to take to
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go to fort to partner with a
clear co instead of like a traditional VC?
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Let's actually take a step back and
it's like when should equity be used?
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Period Equita should be used when you're
taking zero to one risk and you
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have no idea of the outcome.
So a classic example of this is like
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we want to launch your rocket and
we need two hundred fifty engineers to do
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something before anything's going to happen.
That's true zero to one risk. We
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actually have no idea we're going to
be successful in building our rocket or not.
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So that's the level of risk that
an equity investor should take. And
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the way you figure this out is
what you're going to use your capital for.
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If you were going to raise a
bunch of venture capital or equity dollars
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and use it to buy ads,
that doesn't really makes sense because you know,
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you actually know that really well.
You're actually giving the VC a really
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free ride on that. You know
that you're investing a dollar and you're making
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three dollars out of that. So
why are you paying for that with the
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most expensive capital? You know,
investing in humans and Pay Roll is a
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little bit different. You have to
see if like these have have strong enough
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break even periods investing an inventory.
You should not be using equity capital for
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that. And so when I think
about building extraordinary products that are true zero
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to one that take a lot of
product development costs. I can see that
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being in the equity level bucket.
But for the most part, when I
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look at the balance sheets of thousands
of ECOMMERCE brands, I mean eighty to
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ninety percent of their money goes between
ads and inventory and and a couple of
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humans on their team, and so
that you should be able to fund that
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with far super capital than equity.
And then you need to like look,
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the other thing about an equity investor
is like this is a marriage with no
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sex. You don't get out of
this relationship anytime soon, and so you
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have to really, really like the
investor that you are working with and understand
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that you were signing up for a
really long term commitment with them and that
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that partnerships becomes you really important,
or you can become very, very painful.
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I know obviously your focus is ecommerce
business, but how do you also
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think about helping, you know,
Disney, your brands may be head into
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retail, for example, and like
and actually go more more. I'MI channel
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the cool goal of our platform is
to be way more than capital. When
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we launched, like capital was like
the first piece of coming in, but
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I mean every business of ours.
After you're doing, you know, more
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than a hundred thousand dollars a monthly
revenue, gets your own coach, and
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so we help you connect with our
other products, whether that's like the partners
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you should be working with at this
stage in the company. You know your
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insights tools that you should be like. We can show you how your benchmarking
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relative to your competitors. We also
have our whole clear x platform, which
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is we had so many people come
to us being like we're looking to buy
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commerce companies and we're like, we
have a lot of e comference companies.
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So it's like a B cell market
place where if you're interested in selling your
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business at one point we can connect
you with the veted buyer. We've actually
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sold twelve companies through our our team
so far, which is really, really
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cool and a huge added benefit to
being part of our portfolio. What actually
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goes into maybe launching like new products
for founders, for for obviously, companies
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and commerce companies, maybe partners to
like one of the things that you and
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your team thinking about where you believe
that clearhood can be helpful. What we
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can do is we can tell you
where you can improve in your business,
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because we're seeing, you know,
I can see so many stats across how
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adds are performing on facebook, so
many steps. We can be like hey,
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you should spend your money here right
now. This is actually going in
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a better direction. We can your
last question. We can give you advice
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on being like your business is probably
the size and scale where you can start
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looking at offline sources of revenue and
you know, if you're looking for a
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way to do your first pop up
shop, we can connect you with another
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founder that really grew very strongly starting
with either wholesale or offline pieces of revenue,
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and so that's like one of the
benefits of being in our community is
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that there's no perfect playbook on how
to build these things, but we definitely
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have some some best practices. Our
team is spending a lot of time coaching
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our founders how to get through two
major changes right now, number one,
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the supply chain issues that we're seeing
in the market and number two, the
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big changes on IOS fourteen and the
ad platforms. And there's lots of companies
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that are figuring out how to make
it through and drive during this environment.
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It's just about, you know,
figuring out the right things on the marketing
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piece and obviously with the IOS update
and as well, as you know,
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when we talked as a lot on
the show about how there was no longer
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really clear like facebook, Arbi charge
opportunities that you have in their early two
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thousand and ten. How do you
think about building a brand today? We
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say this all the time on the
podcast about how it's easier than ever to
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build like any commerce company, but
harder than every than build a brand.
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When you're thinking about, you know, providing capital and part room with brands.
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How do you think about this question? I think it's a trap when
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you say something is over and I'll
give you the best example of this.
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So it's two thousand and ten and
I'm running effectively a group on competitor in
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Canada and if you everyone, I
think, remembers this era. But Group
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on got big because we didn't just
start sending weekly or, you know,
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biweekly or monthly emails, we started
sending daily emails for like the deal of
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the day. Are Rids in your
inbox at eight in the morning and everyone
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was super excited because it was like
twenty dollars for forty of Thai food and
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everyone was so excited and for the
first year and a half. That was
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like absolute gang busters. I would
say most daily deal sites were making eighty
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eighty percent of their revenue off their
email subscriber list. And then at some
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point a combination of you know,
Google didn't really like that, so they
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moved you know, promotional emails from
Your inbox into a tab called updates.
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That was a big or promotions.
That was a big blow. Consumer stuff
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liking it, because now every single
company was increasing their email frequency, and
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I actually remember seeing this chart.
We were seeing something like ten percent optos
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month over month, and so this
is what it felt like like. It
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just felt like email was dying,
like no one was ever going to use
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email again. It was going to
be a disaster. And this is,
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I think, the same thing that
people are feeling about facebook working. facebook
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marketing is not going away, but
instead of being able to use a sniper
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to find exactly who you're looking for, you're now getting something that's probably closer
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to a billboard, and so that
just means we're going to need more creativity
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and more different platforms. I would
look at something like Tick Tock. That
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has a ton of organic traction.
Still the people are still seeing you know,
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a massive amount of free eyeballs on
as like coming upstream. I would
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see social selling. We've just start
at the period where people are going live.
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I downloaded this great Chinese APP that
was showing me how they were like
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selling products and there was literally fruit
venders on the website and there was a
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guy showing me a hundred different ways
to chop his radishes and I watch this
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because it was fascinating for like six
minutes. Right that that trend has barely
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even started in North America on social
selling and life selling. So I think
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it's always a trap when you're like, well, what happens to these companies
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when email disappears? Well, what
had to happen is facebook marketing started to
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happen when emails disappeared, and then
we had to figure out the next iteration.
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And so this will always be a
combination of figuring out where the arbitrage
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has we are definitely going to see
the decline of some of these platforms in
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a lot more creativity around using them, and then remember at the end of
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the day, the way you build
brand ultimately is community. Brand is not
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what you say about yourself, it's
what other people say about you. That
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is what build a brand, and
so by reinforcing your community, by building
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referrals, by building strong repea customers, that's what builds extraordinary brands of people
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come back to time and time again. I mean you'll get a brand like
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next where, I mean these are
really high percentages of referrals and people just
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post their content all the time because
they built something that a lot of women
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stand for. After you've got the
investment from a coventure and Ali like,
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what was kind of next in terms
of the actual growth of clear code?
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How did you think about partnering with
entrepreneurs or kind of getting entreprenurs on board
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that even this was like a new
option, because this is obviously a very
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new type of capital that that you're
offering? We had to explain it to
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them. I don't think anyone understood. People understood what a bank loan was
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and people understood what an equity investment
was. No one understood what revenue capital
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was. It largely didn't exist.
So we went out there with the sales
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team and started explaining what we said
and we contacted e commerce standards and we
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got in front of them, whether
it was through instagram or Linkedin or whatever
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and started explaining our product and I
think in a decade from now absolutely every
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entrepreneur will know that this is an
option that exists. We are still just
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scratching the surface of how many entrepreneurs
could use this as an option, because
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the reality is is we don't at
this point. We don't just fundy commerce
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companies. We can fund SAS businesses. We can find mobile APPS and games.
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We funded, you know, anyone
that's effectively using capital for customer acquisition.
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We can really fund. And then
we've expanded that into, you know,
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three different continents, and so we've
been able to grow. But the
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you should not feel bad about having
to explain your product in the early days.
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That's when you know you're on to
something and you should take all that
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feedback. But I can tell you, I mean if we had just run
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facebook ads hoping that people understood what
we were doing, I mean it wouldn't
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have worked. What were some of
the learnings? Is obviously you've grown extremely
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rapidly over the past few years.
What were some of the learnings that you
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thought maybe were like most surprising on
your journey? I think one of the
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things that's really interesting about our story
is that we had been you know,
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I had seen this deal on dragons
and we were running this experiment in the
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background. But the original company started
by funding freelancers. So we were funding
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Uber Drivers and we were funding airbnb
hosts and I remember actually saying like look,
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it was ninety percent of our business
at one point was airbnb host and
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we were running the SEC commerce thing
in the background and everyone said to us
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like you shouldn't pivot the whole company
around this. But when you actually see
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your own data and when you're not
lying to yourself, it's really important the
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founders truss they're got. You can
always make data look really polished and when
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you put it out to market,
but you know, you can lie to
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a lot of people. You should
be lying to yourself. And so we
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looked at how well the commerce book
was doing, we looked at how fast
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the market was growing and we decided
to make that bet, I think,
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very, very early on, when
that wasn't always clear, and so I
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think most people would be surprised at
at how scary that was. I mean
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we had deployed thirty million dollars in
the AIRBNB space. This was not like
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a small business. I mean we
had raised a whole series a on that
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business. It was not like a
this was not like a small pivot that
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we did, you know, day
two of the business. This was.
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This was a lot different. What
do you think for any entrepreneur that's building
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a brand from bill an ecommerce band, what do you think is still maybe
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misunderstood when it comes to brand building
today, or maybe something that they should
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be thinking about more carefully in the
beginning? If you build a killer product,
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people will come and I think sometimes
any commerce are's still too much around.
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You know, did you build good
marketing? Did you put it together?
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I think that this still the companies
that get really big are fundamentally things
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that you know, do you have
a product that when someone left their home
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and they went on a trip,
they would be really pissed off if they
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forgot to bring with them? Like
that's really your litmus test and it doesn't
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have to be good, it has
to be great. And you know,
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we can talk a lot about creative
marketing and all that, but fundamentally,
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companies that make it fifty or hundred
million dollars from revenue have just products that
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are so much better and whether that's
like the newest type of flip flop that
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doesn't hurt your feet, that's organomical. We just funded a company in that
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space to clothing that just fits so
much better than the standard or made with
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better materials, like constantly that.
That makes a big difference. And then
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I think it's being honest and authentic
with who your audiences. That's like.
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The other part is like, can
you not be afraid to be a little
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bit controversial in your marketing? Often
and it's not just about building a pretty
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brand. I think those are the
ones that don't have that lasting power.
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It's about, you know, building
something that stands up for the for the
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crowd. Yeah, isn't it is, because we've had this discussion a few
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times on the show of do you
need prior differentiation in order to build like
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a big business within good summer brand? And so I think your first point,
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you do need probably differentiation if you
do want to build like a very,
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very large business. I always think
about like the protein powder business,
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like how many people have tried to
like brand and do that and like there's
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a couple of them that had become
Bigas I think fundamentally they do have better
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products. Some of them are probably
mostly, mostly branding and creativity with influencers,
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but I just don't think they have
the repeat race. But they're looking
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for. Do you also add clearco
also look when you're evaluating whether you should
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partner brands? You also know,
obviously you look at, as you say,
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like retentions, number one, break
even and UN economics. Do you
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also pay attention to the actual category
itself? We don't. Actually, for
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the most part we look at your
growth numbers, because I think that leads
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you astray. I have a great
story in our early days where I had
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a VC COM me and they're like, Michelle, have a referral for you.
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I was like, Oh great,
what is company do? And the
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guy goes they make shoelaces. He
goes there really ugly shoelaces and I was
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like how much they sell in shoelaces? He goes they said they make eighteen
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million dollars a year selling shoelaces.
I'm like, who the heck are you
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to be like eighteen million dollars of
purchasers did not think these were ugly shoelaces,
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and I think that is the perpetual
bias that happens in VC. Is
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like people talk about the gender bias
for the geographical bias. The real bias
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is that if you are not going
to use the product, it is very,
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very difficult for you to invest it, and so that's why I wasn't
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hard when Peloton was running around Silicon
Valley being like okay, a two thousand
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dollar stationary bike with a giant ipad
taped to it, of course I'd buy
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that, whereas I think the average
person is like no, that's actually kind
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of a bit crazy. And I
think we've seen this time and time again.
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There is so many great businesses that
work for what people think are niches,
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you know, small groups, but
they end up being massive because the
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founder really understands how large these groups
are. Yeah, I mean it's interesting
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because I've had on VC's where some
of them say it's tough to know,
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to really understand a category if you
are not the consumer right to actually invest
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in it yourself. But then I've
had others who say that actually they much
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prefer investing in categories where they're not
the customer because then there's no actual bias
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towards them that they would if they
would actually purchase the product or not.
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So I think that part of it
is pretty fascinating. I feel like,
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even if they say that, there's
still a bias, like it's like marketing,
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right. You have to show a
human something three times for something to
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feel familiar. Right. So you
see one billboard and then you see one
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retargeting at and then you know,
someone mentions to you like, Oh,
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yeah, I have to buy this
thing and your brain, like there's lots
381
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of psychology on your brain, produces
this familiarity concept. was something that now
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seems normal or the thing to do, and so I think it's great that
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people are saying that. I have
a harder time believing that. I think
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generally it is very, very difficult
for us to make personal equity investments.
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That are things that we that we
don't, you a fundamentally understand, and
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it's it's the reason when we look
at our portfolio it looks so much different
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than a BC's. Right, we've
backed twenty five times more women than the
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00:24:07.799 --> 00:24:11.079
venture capital in street reader folly.
Like that's mind blowing to me that that
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didn't happen because we were like specifically
targeting women. That happened because we said,
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look, if we just use data
to make the decisions, if we
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don't care about category, if we
don't care about where the founder went to
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school, we would do so much
better at this. A third of our
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founders are BYPAC we funded a founder
in every state in America. Like it's
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just it's a huge group of people
that I think for the most part,
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we're overlooked just because they didn't know, if you see in their network.
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And also, I mean that makes
sense on the wind front since obviously,
397
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like in consumer the women are the
majority when it comes to making the actual
398
00:24:37.799 --> 00:24:41.880
purdacy decision right. So it makes
sense that you that actually, if you
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00:24:41.880 --> 00:24:45.200
have a representation of who actually buys, you would think they'd be a lot
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more products for women right and make
a lot of saids. So what is
401
00:24:47.839 --> 00:24:52.559
one thing that you would change about
either investing consumer brands or just overall investing
402
00:24:52.640 --> 00:24:56.759
or or financing consumer brands landscape?
I don't know if this is something I've
403
00:24:56.839 --> 00:24:59.960
changed, but this is just something
I'm observing. I think we're going to
404
00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:03.839
head into a period of a lot
of consolidation in the space. I think
405
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this is we've gone through ten years
of a lot of digital first brands being
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built and now we are seeing,
you know, starting with the Razzio and
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in the Amazon space. But we
are seeing increasingly amount of these companies being
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bought. I think a good thing. It's giving founders, I think,
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sometimes the exit they're definitely looking for. I think at the same time we're
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also seeing the top of the funnel
just start with recreated all over again.
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During covid we saw double the amount
of new business is being created in the
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US than any other year in the
last eight years. So when people talk
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about the great resignation, I mean
people truly sad at home and they're like,
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man, if there's going to be
a virus, I'm going to build
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my dreams, I'm not going to
go work for something else. And you
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know, most people talk about this
in the media as well. People are
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leaving their jobs. What are people
leaving their jobs to do? They're leaving
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their jobs to start companies. And
so I actually think we're going to see,
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and are starting to witness this in
incredible surgeons of the next wave of
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these commerce companies. So I think
at the top, when you're a lot
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larger, I think we're going to
see a lot of consolidation and I think
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in the top of the funnel where
people are just starting. We're going to
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see a huge amount of creativity come
as a result of people leaving their jobs
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to build their businesses. That's a
great point. That's a great point.
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So we shall tell us a little
bit about your Vegean Kepeal Scout Program Yeah,
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so it's not a venture capital fund, but it is a scout program.
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So there has always been this elite
thing that's happened in Silicon Valley where
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you could be a scout for a
venture fund. So if you brought them
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a deal, you've got a portion
of carry in that deal or a little
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bit of the upside of that deal, and it was a great way,
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if you were thinking about getting into
vc, if you were a founder yourself,
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or if you are part of the
startup community, to be able to,
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first of all, help the people
in your network get funded and,
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second of all, you know,
share a little bit of the upside on
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that. And so that's actually what
we were able to launch, is our
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founders fund, which effectively allows people
to become the scouts in the clear couttetwork,
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where we pay a portion of how
we fund our founders, but also
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allows you to effectively build that VC
portfolio where you're getting to know founders,
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you're figuring out how to get them
funded in your understand any part of their
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journey so that they'll our launch partners, like conclude, the founder of Andy
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Swim and Jada Cedar, like we
have clemnetic, like we have a lot
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of Brat e commerce founders that have
agreed to be our venture scouts and we're
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pretty excited about it. That's awesome. So, instead of being a venture
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scout in terms of, you know, Investine for equity, it's actually becoming
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a partner of clear coome. Is
that right? Exactly. So Venture Scout
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for getting your company's Rep sure deals
is the best way to think about it.
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What is one book that inspired you
personally, one book that is aspired
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00:27:30.519 --> 00:27:33.400
you professionally? I think they kind
of all blend for me. Look,
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I love reading books of other entrepreneurs
and I love the less varnish they are
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the better, because I remember that
it doesn't matter what company you built,
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there was so many times of that
company was close to death. And so
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I loved the story of Hallulahm and
it's built, that it was called little
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black stretchy pants. You know,
I love the story of how Apple was
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built at the end or the story
was written at the end. I think
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one of the best books that every
entrepreneur should read is influenced by robot Shelgini.
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That goes through really the six big
psychological selling techniques that we all use.
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It is a classic. I try
and reread it all the time and
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then I think never split the difference. Is the best book I've read a
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negotiation. That's a really important read
for most unders. Very original. I
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00:28:12.680 --> 00:28:18.079
don't think we've had anyone mentioned Lulemon
story or or how apple was built or
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00:28:18.160 --> 00:28:22.880
influence. Mostly when people talk about
entrepreneurial books they all point to shoot dogs
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00:28:22.880 --> 00:28:25.880
as I'm a book up that that's
been mentioned the show so so I'm glad
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00:28:25.920 --> 00:28:27.960
that you gave us some new ones
there, Michelle. Yeah, it's great.
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What's the best piece of advice that
you've received? You think? My
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best piece of advice is always just
to start now. I think it's simple,
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but it is something that most people
don't do. Most people are fully
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analysis by paralysis. Most people are
thinking way too much. Compare this is
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this is a swimming pool and you're
going to have to jump in and the
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water is going to be cooled.
There is no way you're jumping into that
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swimming pool and it's not going to
be pleasant. And so the longer you
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wait, the more scared you get. And Businesses Start and get built not
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on great early ideas. This is
another huge myth is that these every idea
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that was massive started as a massive, huge idea that come on. Even
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00:29:03.880 --> 00:29:07.880
Ubert did not start, as you
know, inventing peer to peer ride sharing.
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00:29:07.960 --> 00:29:12.599
It was a autodialer to a black
card company and could you put a
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hopefully a location coordinate. It was
so much iteration to get them to the
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point that they got to and I
think if you're not willing to start as
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a founder, that that is what
you have to I would be constantly going
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in and then I have to dig
deep and be extremely resilient. Right,
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like everyone has a plan until they
get punched in the face, and this
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00:29:33.519 --> 00:29:37.000
is a job where you're constantly in
that ring, you're constantly having things go
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00:29:37.119 --> 00:29:41.519
wrong and you constantly need to show
a lot of encouragement from your team even
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when things are not going well.
My final question to you is, what's
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what piece of advice, particularly that
you have for founders of brands? Never
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forget that you are number one a
product company and your product needs to keep
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00:29:52.799 --> 00:29:57.079
getting better and better as of everything
you can do working with your manufacture is
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so, so, so important and
and instead of thinking about creative being,
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you know, coin, operate a
machine or I can buy this many ads,
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think about how you build creative that
people will want to share when they're
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not being paid. And that is
ultimately what creates organic growth, create strong
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retention and create strong community and is
always excelled off these companies. Michelle,
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thank you, guys, so much
for your time. It's been a lot
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of fun. It's been great.
It's awesome to be here, Mike.
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And there you have it. It
was such a pleasure chatting with Michelle.
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I highly recommend following her on twitter
at Michelle Romano. If you enjoyed this
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00:30:32.720 --> 00:30:34.519
episode, I love it if you'd
read a review in the apple podcast.
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00:30:34.759 --> 00:30:38.039
You're also welcome to follow me,
your host, Mike, on twitter at
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00:30:38.079 --> 00:30:42.359
Mike Guelb, and also follow for
episode announcements at Consumer VC. Thanks for
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00:30:42.400 --> 00:31:03.240
listening, everyone,
