"Give us what you dread" — a compelling promise from Duckbill, the personal assistant service that takes to-do lists off of people's plates. Meghan Verena Joyce appears on CBS to explain Duckbill's AI-powered, human-in-the-loop approach. Today, Duckbill is scaling the historical luxury of hiring a personal assistant to offload the admin of life: https://lnkd.in/dc-9Z7CR
Forerunner
Investment Management
San Francisco, California 18,507 followers
A venture capital firm that understands the evolving consumer; we invest at the intersection of innovation & culture.
About us
Forerunner is a venture capital firm dedicated to the modern consumer and the ambitious teams reshaping categories. Since our inception in 2012, the consumer has been our North Star. We commit ourselves to having a constant pulse on what people are doing and why, and we closely observe how world events shape the way we live. We study subtle changes in people’s behavior and mindset, and project how needs and priorities might shift as people seek solutions for critical problems and new aspirations. We’ve invested in category-defining companies like Faire, Chime, Glossier, Hims&Hers, OURA, The Farmer’s Dog, Ritual, and more. With over $2.3 billion in assets under management and hundreds of investments to date, Forerunner is amongst the first women-led venture capital firms to achieve such milestones.
- Website
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http://forerunnerventures.com
External link for Forerunner
- Industry
- Investment Management
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2012
- Specialties
- Venture Capital
Locations
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Primary
1 Letterman Dr
Building C, Suite C5-100
San Francisco, California 94129, US
Employees at Forerunner
Updates
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The generational companies of the past decade were largely based on accessibility: opening up access to products and services that were historically confined to certain gatekeepers, high price points, geographies or other barriers. In our latest thesis, Kirsten Green lays out why Access is post peak – and conversely, why the current AI technology shift is so well suited to usher in the value that will drive tomorrow's generational companies: Edit. We believe the shift from Access to Edit is grounded in a few themes: • Decision paralysis is present across nearly every corner of consumers' lives, as an onslaught of options and decisions now compete for their mindshare and dollars. This means Access becomes counterproductive, doing more harm than help — and in turn, companies that Edit this vastness with acute personalization and specificity become exponentially useful. • "Price, Convenience and Quality — you have only have two" is a common framework for business building. Access-focused companies have typically focused on winning with price and convenience, while maintaining quality parity with the legacy standard. With Edit-focused companies, we'll see a new focus on quality, where they'll win by advancing the core quality of the product or service while maintaining pricing parity with past standards. • From the consumer standpoint, the primary promise of Gen AI is to effectively edit our digital worlds, taking broad swaths of legwork off of our plates and offering up personalized insights with more comprehensive context than any one person could have themselves. This ultimately takes back some of the optionality and responsibility that Access let loose onto consumers in the years past, and reverts us back to more “traditional” pathways where we rely on the quality of outsourced expertise — even if this time, AI is the engine. • We are already seeing companies driving these shifts, whether they are replacing elements of the sprawling, unilateral search engine experience with interactive, actionable, expertise-driven services (Daydream, Joy Parenting Club, Fora Travel) or building the essential trust stack that underpins these behaviors (webAI, Persona). We're eager to hear from Founders building in this space and from anyone with new perspectives about these shifts: https://lnkd.in/gjGPw2eS
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We're growing our team! We're hiring a Research Associate to help build out investment theses and sharpen our market perspectives. This role with work alongside Jason Bornstein, Mengmeng Fu and the entire investment team. Apply here! https://lnkd.in/grdUjsQu
Forerunner Careers
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Forerunner reposted this
Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly thought about the growing sense of bloat and superfluousness that’s weighing on the consumer. There’s a deluge of options, information, purchasing research, and comparison inherent to nearly every dimension of our health, finances, personal interests, home lives, and so forth. Rather than empower us with optionality, this degree of access is bogging consumers down, leading to an acute sense of decision paralysis at seemingly every turn (new research shows that 74% of consumers abandon purchasing decisions simply because they feel overwhelmed by the volume of choice). This is without doubt a byproduct of the past decade+ of tech innovation focusing on access. “Democratizing access” has underpinned the thesis of the lion’s share of startups — and it has been an excellent place to build from. But access now feels counterproductive. More is no longer more, signaling that the prevailing value proposition of the tech industry is post peak. At Forerunner, we obsess over values shifts and technology shifts — and an intersection of the two is where things get really interesting. This shift away from access is significant, particularly because it dovetails with the current major technology shift: gen AI. Rather than wanting more options or the agency to do things alone for themselves, consumers are now craving products and services than edit the vastness of what’s available to them and do things with them, or better yet, for them. Gen AI is uniquely suited to accelerate this value opportunity, and on a scale that we haven’t seen before. In our latest research efforts at Forerunner, we explore this shift from Access to Edit, and how that’s changing the way companies are built, where value is created, and what opportunities are poised to capture consumers’ hearts and minds in this new paradigm.
From Access to Edit: How AI is Meeting a Values Shift Among Consumers | Forerunner
forerunnerventures.com
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Scaling to $30M in ARR in two years is no joke — but it's also not necessarily a big surprise for anyone who knows John Hu, Stan's CEO and Cofounder (the only founder we know who cold-called his way into a job with Goldman Sachs and built a following of 100k+ within a few years). With Stan, John has achieved what many believe to be contrary to conventional startup wisdom by entering a seemingly crowded, overhyped space — creator tools. In John's words: "There’s an analogy: when Google started, there were dozens of different search engines with nominal points of differentiation. Same with Stan — there were dozens of 'link in bio' companies competing for the same opportunity. At Stanford, they teach you all about the significant advantage you get in being a first mover. And when you reckon with the fact that all of these companies in the Creator Economy had raised hundreds of millions of dollars by the time I got started, you could reasonably say that Stan was objectively a stupid idea. But I went with my gut, and knew that we'd build something better — and looking back just a few years later, we've surpassed most of our competition. It may sound silly, but the reason why our growth is so strong is simply because we care about our customers the most. We are our own customers, we talk to our customers every day — we are not just our customers’ champions, we are our own champions alongside those whom we’re building for." True to John's commitment to fully aligning with customers — as a leader and as a creator himself — he's a fan of building in public, sharing the good, the bad, and the messy in-betweens of startup-building on his vlog. The videos are well worth a watch: https://lnkd.in/gZ_dJiah Check out our Q&A with John Hu for more on Stan's opportunity ahead, and the honesty and openness that makes his leadership style so powerful. https://lnkd.in/gnazmVjR
How Stan Scaled to $30M in ARR Within Two Years While Building in Public | Forerunner
forerunnerventures.com
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Fortune takes a look inside Fora Travel's mission to empower people to work for themselves and turn a passion into a side hustle or career by enabling anyone to become a travel agent. "Most of [Fora's] advisors weren’t traditional travel agents. They’re the 20-somethings who were already planning trips and bachelorettes in their group chats, the retirees who specialize in empty-nester travel, and the women looking for extra income without heading back to an office. The traditional travel agency industry preferred to employ agents who booked high volumes of travel, while Fora seeks to capture the 'long tail' of advisors who will book travel as a part-time gig." We continue to be inspired by Fora's fast-growing, powerful community of advisors who are reshaping the travel agency model to cater to modern consumers: https://lnkd.in/giKfKgsV
Forerunner-backed Fora wants to make travel 'the new real estate'
fortune.com
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Earlier this month, our Founding Partner Kirsten Green took the stage at Fortune Brainstorm Tech to present on how to win with consumers in AI. We received a lot of interest in her slides, so we've now made them fully available for anyone to review. See Kirsten's presentation for our view on: • The broad behavioral shifts we're seeing amongst consumers, which is giving way to new demands that AI is uniquely positioned to address • A more technical analysis of what kind of consumer AI experiences are best positioned to thrive, and frameworks for how entrepreneurs can successfully build here • The "trust stack," an essential building block in broader consumer AI adoption https://lnkd.in/g9fdkWuu
Winning With Consumers In AI | Forerunner
forerunnerventures.com
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We're proud to back Joy, which launches today to provide consumers with the essential companion guide for navigating parenthood. Congrats to the team on the $10M seed round!
At Forerunner, we’re big believers in building for enthusiast communities: sets of consumers with a deep, burning passion for a certain element of life, who sweat the details and expect excellence in the support and insights they seek out. Few demographics embody this dynamic more than new parents, who are navigating one of the most profound and all-consuming parts of life — but without much standardized care. We’ve long wanted to invest in the parenting space, but were stuck on the inherently amorphous nature of the parenting journey (as soon as you’re done with one problem, you’re onto a completely new one) — making the lifetime value of customers very challenged. Joy Parenting Club immediately stood out to us for its opportunity to grow with parents throughout the many stages of parenting, being the essential companion guide that brings together specialists, experts, parenting coaches into a single service. Joy’s initial product, Joy on Call, features 24/7 text-based access to a wide range of resources — from feeding and lactation specialists, sleep experts, financial experts and shopping assistants — ready to answer day-to-day questions like finding the best daycare, setting up life insurance, starting solids and sleep training, getting great deals on gear, and more. In the coming years, Joy will expand further down the parenting life cycle to help toddlers, young children and beyond — building on the trusted relationship it forms with parents in the earliest stages. As a mother of two young kids myself, I know firsthand the kind of impact Joy can have. I’ve panicked wondering if my baby was getting enough food, sat for hours on hold with my pediatrician’s office weekend advice nurse, and been up at 2am down the google rabbit hole only to become more worried about an issue I didn’t know that worrying was warranted. I craved an expert source of readily available, empathetic support to help me through these moments with guidance specific to my babies, my family, and my needs. Instead, like so many others, I pieced it together manually — stitching disparate services and referrals from friends in a hurry, and often shelling hundreds for out-of-network specialists over the course of my kids’ earliest years. We are so proud to partner with Alan Charming Chan, Emily Greenberg, Charlie Carpenter and the entire Joy team on the important mission to help people navigate parenting with confidence. Check out http://Joy.co and send it to the parents in your life!
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Access to therapy is one of the most glaring issues within the mental health system, primarily because 70%+ of therapists don't take insurance. Headway is tackling this head-on by enabling providers to easily run their practice through insurance and scale — and in doing so, is building a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access. We couldn't be more motivated by the vision and proud to partner as investors!
2 things are universally true about the US’s mental health crisis: 1) its growing urgency, and 2) its enormous access barrier, with the price untenable for most due to the prevalence of out-of-pocket practices. Today, ~1:4 Americans have a treatable mental health condition, but most don’t get care. Accessibility is the primary culprit — finding a therapist that’s a great fit is a notoriously painful process of trial and error, let alone the added layer of trying to find someone who accepts insurance. Historically, therapists have been forced to make the painful trade-off of building their practice efficiently on their own terms or go the cumbersome, costly route of accepting insurance. The upshot is that only a third accept it, hence the cost hurdle keeping countless consumers from care. Exhausted by his own search for a therapist that accepted his insurance in San Francisco and then all over again in New York City, Andrew Adams built Headway to eliminate this bottleneck. The company’s business-in-a-box offering leads with the ability for providers to accept insurance, and in doing so builds a mental healthcare system that everyone can access. At Forerunner, we’ve been doubling down on opportunities that reshape small business growth for SMBs & solopreneurs historically late to benefit from modern commerce tools—e.g., independent retailers (Faire), independent travel agents (Fora Travel), restauranteurs (Table22), local home service pros (Topline Pro), registered dietitians (Fay)—and Headway has proven therapists to be a highly consequential class of small business owners to build for. The platform’s value to consumers, therapists and insurance providers is abundantly clear. In the burgeoning market it pioneered in 2019, Headway has scaled its network to a market-leading 34K providers leveraging its platform to run their private practices, and is in-network today with 40+ commercial health plans across 50 states. Next up: Medicare Advantage and Medicaid. Andrew & the Headway team are building to win in a category of the utmost consequence to society. Forerunner and I couldn’t be more motivated by the vision, nor happier to back the next chapter alongside William R. and Spark Capital, Thrive Capital, a16z Bio + Health and Accel. CC Forerunner & good ole Buckingham Browne & Nichols School
Exclusive: Therapy enabler Headway valued at $2.3B
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Forerunner reposted this
Investors and builders often emphasize the importance of a founder's firsthand experience with the problem they're solving, along with grit and resilience. Few entrepreneurs embody these traits more than the founding team of Alma, a new law firm revolutionizing immigration services. Alma’s CEO and Cofounder Aizada Marat spent 5 grueling years navigating the US immigration process after attending Harvard Law School for a graduate program and kicking off her law career. Getting to Harvard from her native Kyrgyzstan wasn’t easy, either. Unable to fully cover tuition costs, she crowdfunded her own education, and hustled her campaign all the way to the President of Kyrgyzstan (he granted her ~$9K...no big deal). Later, when working to secure a visa to work at Cooley LLP, she dealt with mountains of paperwork and costs, and repeated, inaccurate guidance and dead-ends that ultimately led to her not being able to work for almost 1.5 years. A process this cumbersome and expensive might have led many to abandon efforts, but Aizada’s determination was only sharpened — and she decided she would solve this problem one day. When it comes to firsthand passion and grit, Aizada’s energy is unmatched — perhaps except by only her co-founders, Assel Tuleubayeva and Shuo Chen, who immigrated here from Kazakhstan and China, respectively, and went on to perform at the tops of their fields. Launching later this year, Alma will make it dramatically easier, faster and cheaper for immigrants to come the US to work. Alma’s offering is especially powerful within the context of its market, which is highly fragmented and inconsistent: 90% immigration law is dispersed across 20k+ firms, with no clear place for consumers to turn. Not only will Alma provide transformational value for the millions of people looking to bring their talents to the US, and enrich the fabric of our country along the way; the model also fits squarely within our thesis at Forerunner about AI-Native Services Firms, where a new generation of firms are being built that centralize AI productivity in-house to operate with fundamentally greater flexibility and scale. Let’s go Alma — excited to be a part of the journey, alongside Benjamin Ling & Bling Capital, Conviction, Village Global, NFX, MVP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Silkroad Innovation Hub. https://lnkd.in/gUxep8cn