Elizabeth Edwards of H Venture Partners

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape of the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Behr, managing partner at Behr, Negron, and Troff and president of CMUG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind the decision strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. One of the biggest issues in overcoming the lack of diversity, whether it's in venture capital, private equity, or really any of the investment community, is the fact that 99% of all capital is managed by white men, but no one knows it.

Today in the Puck, we sit down to a fascinating conversation with Elizabeth Edwards, founder and managing partner of h Venture Partners, a venture firm focused on science based consumer brands that are better for human health and the planet. We discuss her commitment to transparency and diversity in the investment ecosystem and how she guides companies in the consumer space working to solve some of the most pressing problems of today. Elizabeth Edwards, welcome to the Puck. Thank you so much. Tell us a little bit about your background, Elizabeth.

So I've been a VC for seventeen years, investing all over North America, first as a generalist and then focused on consumer in 2014. There, the first deal that we did for consumer was Peloton, and that was hugely validating. Like, oh, yeah. Consumers may it's a big opportunity space. We should do more in consumer.

Freshly, Farmers' Fridge. We like to say that, you know, we invest in New York, San Francisco, and everything in between. So here at h Venture Partners, a firm that I started after leaving and doubling down on consumer, but then to really also focus on underrepresented founders because consumer is a pretty female dominated sector. And like most venture capital firms, or I should say that most of the firms that I had, you know, worked with, they were mostly male. But in consumer, we were talking to, and still today, this is true, over half of the founders that we're talking to are female or from some other diverse background.

So not the cookie cutter kind of Silicon Valley entrepreneur that you see. And so here, we invest in pre seed, seed, series a, series b, really companies that are 0 to 50,000,000 in revenue, exclusively focused on consumer, though. And all of our capital comes from very recently retired executives of consumer and retail who love to help these founders with their knowledge and their networks and their domain expertise, grow billion dollar brands and exit to one of the many, many, many strategics and consumer that's looking to capture younger, more diverse, or just a different set of consumers, a global set of consumers with science based brands that have a real impact on human lives. So, typically, the things that we're investing in are better for human health, better for the environment. The vast majority of them have quite a bit of IP associated with them, which is candidly a surprise to a lot of VCs who are not focused on consumer, that it is a pretty highly technical sector, and there are a lot of scientists in consumer.

I love it because I get to learn something new every day and work with really great founders. Tell me a little bit about how you made the transition from a strategist at Deloitte to becoming an investor and a little bit about the differences in those roles. So at Deloitte, I was really lucky to join a team that was doing front end m and a work. So we were looking for health care technologies and consumer technologies for J and J to license and acquire, basically trying to answer the question, what should Johnson and Johnson look like in the next twenty years, and where are the big consumer needs, and where are the big technological breakthroughs that they can commercialize? And this was right out of grad school, and so here I am, you know, working with a small team of really smart people led by Michael Rayner, who is Clayton Christensen's coauthor on the Innovator Solution, a team that is very international, young, smart, and really hungry for new technology.

Our clients, whether it was J and J or some of the others, really J and J was the big one, kind of very corporate and very experienced. They knew exactly what they were looking for. I just fell in love with the people on the other side of the table. You know, the entrepreneurs and the inventors, the technologists that had taken serious risks, emptied out their IRA, quit their job, and just put it all on black. Those risk takers, were very inspiring to me, and I wanted to figure out a way to work with them, you know, more directly.

And that's how I made my way into venture capital very early on. It's a great story, and it's funny. I haven't shared this story before, but I always thought of myself as an entrepreneur when I started out when I was going to law school. And when I got out of law school, I went to Gibson Dunn, which is a big large corporate law firm and worked with Deloitte a ton. But before I went to Gibson Dunn, I met with a guy named Andy Galov and Frank Gressani, who were these turnaround guys back in the eighties.

Mhmm. I was basically talking to him and saying, oh, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and all this. And and they said, kid, you're not an entrepreneur. We started businesses in college. We put it all on red.

You're going to Gibson Dunn. And then they said, but you'll still be successful because in life, it's all who you know. And if you go to Gibson Dunn, you're gonna meet a bunch of interesting people, and think about headhunters. They can make a single phone call, and make a million dollars. So there's different pathways, but I am an entrepreneurial lawyer.

I mean, I'm doing the POC. I've got a restructuring firm. It is amazing. You're absolutely right. These people who literally get up every day and they throw their backpack over the wall, there's no fear.

The ones that make it, they're wired differently. Yeah. There is a persistence, I think. You know, there's a lot of fear. I talk to entrepreneurs day in, day out, and they are taking a calculated risk.

And the thing that strikes me the most is how much grit. They are not gonna give up. You know, they've pitched to 99 people over the past few weeks, and then they're pitching to me. And then they're gonna pitch to somebody else right after that. And that's really what it takes.

I wanna reiterate for our listeners. This is a dialogue. And when I said there's no fear, of course, there's fear. Courage is not the absence of fear, it's moving forward in the face of fear. And I love what you just said.

Have you read that book called grit? It is really what is separating people. It is moving forward with that tenacity. They will not let go of that bone. They are not gonna fail.

Exactly. It's funny. I've tried to teach that lesson on my own children in terms of, it's not if you fall off the horse, you're gonna fall off the horse. It's whether or not you have the grit to get back on and keep going when they knock you down. You just keep, like, the Eveready battery.

So tell me a little bit about that. I mean, in terms of the companies you're looking at today, these women entrepreneurs and everything else, what kind of grit stories do you have for us today? Oh my gosh. Too many. I mean, one of my favorite all time grit stories, Rachel Drury, when she was raising the series a for daily harvest, I actually I had a little one at home.

I I had a a baby who was not quite one. I was just getting back on the traveling bandwagon. She was pregnant with baby number two, and she took a meeting two days after giving birth in her Brooklyn apartment to close out her series a. She has a brand new baby, and she has a toddler, you know, in the background. She's got a team of nine women who are working with her in the office down the street, and those numbers just look great every single day.

And so whether it's stories like that where you know that these women are making it all happen no matter what, that's pretty impressive. And also founders that are finding themselves talking about either topics or I'll give you a great example. We have a portfolio company, Hazel, that is focused on incontinence. And I gotta be honest with you, like, most VCs would have no reason to know anything about incontinence. Right?

You know, here they are, they're talking about a delicate topic basically every day, really trying to get across the point that, like, it's a huge, huge market. There's a big consumer pain point, but we're talking about adult people who have urinary incontinence. That takes a bit of courage, you know, every day to, like, overcome that. Absolutely. Or, you know, founders that are sharing personal experiences about either their, like, beauty routines or hair care routines or any of that and displaying just an incredible amount of vulnerability because their skin might look different, their hair might look different.

Quite frankly, their culture is different. It takes a lot of fortitude because still, like, even in consumer, it is a pretty homogeneous group. And that is, by the way, to all of our detriment because there are huge blind spots. Morgan Stanley calls this the trillion dollar blind spot. At the same time, the entire investment industry is about 70,000,000,000,000.

That $70,000,000,000,000 is managed 99% by white men, even though they're only 30% of the population. And so we've got a lot of women, a lot of people of color, the fastest growing demographic, which is Hispanic people in The US who aren't really represented. And so I think a lot of those opportunities are going unnoticed. They're missed, and the investment community is not necessarily, one, aware of them, two, dialed in enough to those groups to really see where they're missing opportunities. And so we focus a lot on that.

As a white male Yeah. And not knowing what I don't know, but also somebody that respects strong women and understands that people do see the world differently and that we do have different subjective realities. Can you share with us just some examples of things where with the consumer product industry, women are approaching it differently and that we can learn from? Oh, a 100%. So I like to say, I can't catch you up on thirty nine years of being a woman.

Right. And the same is true vice versa. Right? Our lived experience is just so different. Our brains are wired different.

My corpus callosum and the insula portion of my brain are just bigger. There's an interview with Andrew Sullivan who's from Britain who has his own podcast, and he's an interesting guy. But he had a woman on the other day because in this environment, we're we're not allowed to talk about differences between men and women. And so it's fascinating to me when I see a smart entrepreneurial woman talk about the differences between men and women. You know, you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.

The reality is, are there great women scientists? Sure. Are there great women football players? Sure. But we are different most of the time.

Not always. It's a bell curve. Yeah. So I love where you're going with this. And the only thing I would say to our listeners is please be open minded because at the end of the day, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A 100%. Yeah. I think it's important to approach topics like this with, like, two things in mind. One is the success of one group doesn't take anything away from another. So I can be successful, and it shouldn't take anything, and I don't think it does, it doesn't take anything away from you.

I approach topics like this with the growth mindset is really, in my opinion, the winning mindset. Having a perspective that is that, you know, abundance. There's abundance. Right? And there's kind of an unlimited amount of anything, right, of success that any of us could have.

It's not a zero sum game versus, like, a scarcity mindset. When I made mention of like the corpus callosum and the insula, the insula is the portion of the brain that perceives and reacts to risk. And this makes sense, right? Because if you think of our, you know, millennia, generally speaking, I would be looking after young children and I need to be a suicide prevention specialist, right? It's like, please stop juggling the chainsaw and trying to put your fingers in the light socket.

And so you gotta be on the lookout for that. So always, always, you know, perceiving risk. And then the corpus callosum is kind of this interesting intersection in the brain between the right brain and the left brain, and I'm told that it's one of the things that really enables women to be such amazing multitaskers. So, you know, versus really diligently focusing on one thing or being able to take very disparate ideas and bring them together in maybe a creative way. So, yes, we are built differently.

I don't think I'm the first to remark on that. Right. But the lived experience, when I talk about, I'll pick on the Hispanic population, for instance, I am not a native Spanish speaker. And in fact, a lot of our Hispanic population in The United States is also not native Spanish speaking. But the culture, the tradition, the diet, where they shop, how they think about family and the role that family plays in their lives, this has massive implications for marketers.

It has massive implications for entrepreneurs. We think about consumers. I think it is very, very important for the investment community to represent the population just as, quite frankly, when you look at the largest and most successful consumer products firms in the world, they have a lot of representation there. They're global firms. They're highly diverse.

They are on purpose, especially when it comes to women. Women do 85% of consumer purchasing. They want a lot of female eyes on all of these products and brands because they know that it is very likely going to be a female shopper who is swiping that card at the end of the day. And even Target, you listen to a Target earnings call, they refer to their shopper with female pronouns, right, because the vast majority of the people pushing a cart through Target are in fact women. I think that lived experience when I talk about lived experience, it's everything from, oh, remembering the day that we gave up pantyhose and said goodbye forever, or, you know, the hair products that you and I use are entirely different.

I would be shocked if you've ever taken a curling iron to your hair. Right? You're probably not buying, like, heat protectant, you know, products for your hair, But these are all things that white women, black women, Hispanic women do because that is part of our routine. It is part of our lived experience. Those are the big opportunity areas where, hey, beauty is a really big category.

So is food. We need to, you know, make sure that we have representation around the table to really recognize where the big opportunities are. That makes total sense. So let me ask you something. I love the way you started talking about the differences again between men and women Mhmm.

And the issue about multitasking. Do you have a couple of favorite books that you've read or things you've studied in this area? Yeah. I think Time Life did it's not a book, but it's incredibly well done. We actually have it out in the conference room.

It's called The Science of Gender. It really looks at the brain and the differences in the brain. It was probably two or three years ago that it came out. I studied this at Michigan during my undergraduate. My degree was in cognitive psychology with a focus on neuropsychology.

So looking at the mathematical model of the brain and how people make decisions, like, how do you decide? This was back in like early 2000s. Part of this is like the precursor to artificial intelligence and things of that nature. Our experiences are different and it's important to highlight those. There's a lot of talk about this in the investment community.

I don't think there's actually a lot of action, unfortunately. And the reason for that is when you look at the dollars so my other area of study was economics. And there's one law that I would love to see signed into law before I'm dead and gone because I literally do think it might take that long, but it would have a huge impact, which is transparency in the investment community. I already have a problem that there are wealth managers that aren't fiduciaries. I don't even understand how that can be a thing.

Somebody smart will explain it to me someday. I'm sure it has something to do with cost to serve my client. But one of the biggest issues in overcoming the lack of diversity, whether it's in venture capital, private equity, or or really any of the investment community, is the fact that 99% of all capital is managed by white men, but no one knows it. My mom doesn't know it. My mother-in-law doesn't know it.

Their retirement accounts, despite the fact that that is not aligning with their value system, there's no disclosure that's required to say, oh, by the way, like, if you actually break it down, a 100% of this is going to a few white guys in New York and San Francisco. Hope you're okay with that. If the industry just had to report very simply what many foundations, endowments, and even now some public pension funds have started requiring, which is a breakdown of the gender, race, and ethnicity, and in some cases, disabled and veteran status of their key personnel, key owners. Steve Schwarzman. You know Steve Schwarzman?

He manages a lot of money. You could probably guess. Ray Dalio, Bridgewater, you know, Larry Fink, BlackRock. But what about all of the funds that you're invested in that you've never really heard of, researched too much? Where do all those fees go?

Who's in control? Who has a say? And who's ultimately a carried interest recipient of those funds. This issue, I don't know that it is women so much that need to feel empowered. No.

It's not a lack of empowerment. It's just a lack of transparency. What's interesting is just generationally, if you look back in 1900, very few women worked. Today, 70% of women work, whatever it was, forty years ago. You didn't have so many women going to get graduate degrees.

Now women get more graduate degrees. But even with all of that progress, in the highest echelons of power, there is a pretty entrenched group that's pretty homogeneous. The only thing that's going to diversify that group is transparency. I don't think it needs to go any further than transparency because any smart investor would, if they got that report back, oh, congratulations, you know, you beat the market by two or we, for you, you know, your wealth manager, beat the market by, you know, two points. We feel good about that.

We wanna talk to you about some tax stuff that you need to consider. Oh, by the way, you know, here's this new report, the diversity reporting of fund. And then you'd see, oh, it's all a 100% white dudes. What is that about? Like, is that correct?

Is that a typo? No, it's not a typo. I'm an executive woman. How is this possible? I'm trying to get on public boards right now.

You know, I'm nearing retirement. I'm looking at my next thing and I'm like, is this serving me? I also have to ask the question, is this a meritocracy? Because now I'm wondering, like, I don't think you're really looking at all of the funds you should be looking at. How did you select these funds?

Where did you find them? Why did you put me in these funds? Next time we get together, I would like to see funds that don't fit this, you know, profile because I believe in diversity. I believe in excellence through inclusion. You would never have to put to any of these big banks or or wealth managers any further ask than just tell it like it is.

Be transparent about the ownership control of these funds. And I agree with that. That makes total sense. However, being greedy, when you look at the power of Facebook and Twitter and social media, it can be used for good or it can be used for evil. And so when you look at nuclear energy, you can light a city with it or you can blow something up.

If women collectively, and with those males that understand what you're talking about, get together, and in the same way, they moved, what was it, the world series or whatever they moved out of Georgia, to Colorado. The reality is businesses are dramatically affected by public opinion. If you can continue to get this voice out there and people start to understand this and women stop standing for it, but look at what Me Too has accomplished in terms of getting people fired. It's got a long way to go. Don't get me wrong, but when women organize, just like when any entrepreneurs organize into a team, it's unlimited what people can accomplish.

You're trying to solve, it sounds like, one of the huge problems in that women are unrepresented in terms of access to capital, and that needs to change. And that's gonna bring more people into, you know, we're gonna build better companies. We're gonna grow the economy more. I also think we're gonna have less wars, because I think women start less wars if you look historically at what's going on. Where does wealth inequality get better?

Where do we bring more people in the tent? And from your perspective, it seems to me the more women entrepreneurs and the more women VCs, the more we're gonna build companies that are gonna help people and not just line people's pocketbooks. So in terms of where the world is going, how do you see women entrepreneurs helping us get to a better place? First and foremost, there's a great study First Round Capital did of their own portfolio that showed that female founding teams and diverse teams vastly outperformed companies that were not. I think it was by 63%.

So I do think that women, wine, pocketbooks, period. It's supply and demand. Look at Rachel Drury. I mean, if you're having trouble raising your series a, my goodness, that is the kind of entrepreneur that's some grit. The fact that you only have 2% of all venture capital dollars going to 51% of the population tells me that there is a huge gap there and that there is a huge opportunity there.

Investors, you know, whether it's investors in female led funds this is specific to hedge funds. There was a study that was done, hedge funds that, you know, were coming out of the I think it was the great financial crisis, and female managers of hedge funds outperformed their colleagues, their all male colleagues, by 7%. So they can be, you know, in some ways better managers of risk maybe, but I think what it really is probably is they're just vastly underfunded. So if you've got $20 and you're trying to decide, you know, where to put it, fees are probably a little bit better just because that female entrepreneur has had a tougher time raising capital. That's just a thought.

So in terms of the companies you're seeing today and things you're excited about, is there any stories or products that you wanna share with us? Oh my gosh. One that we just co led with Greycroft and Lyra Hippow is a company called Prima, and I've been using this brand since I found it while traveling. I'm one of those people that, you know, just has a perpetually bad low back. And it's not from sitting in an office chair.

It's from falling off a horse when I was nine years old. So broke my back. Anytime I kinda, like, overdo it. And it's generally when I'm traveling and schlepping, you know, from point a to point b. So there I was in in New York schlepping around and saw this.

And this was a a really cool pop up right off of I think it was off of Elizabeth Street. Anyway, I walk in. They have all these, like, awesome new brands, and there's Prima, and it's a premium CBD brand. This is a the product that I tried was their R and R cream. It's got, CBD, menthol, and a couple other amazing painkilling ingredients, but, like, sort of like a Biofreeze or a Tiger Balm.

Man, you put that on anything that aches and it is gone. And so I had been using it for a couple years. Turns out they had just launched. I had no idea. That's one that I'm super bullish on.

They are sold in Sephora. This is a brand that is at the absolute highest standard of purity. Their supply chain is incredible. The founders one of the founders of The Honest Company, and they've got a lot of ex Honest Company folks there. Could not say enough great thing.

And then the bath gym. Oh, you're probably not into baths, but I'm into, like, a nice long, like, forty five minute soak with a good podcast. So there you go. Definitely Prima. And then another that I'm really excited about, there's also another personal favorite, Avaline.

This is a brand started by Cameron Diaz. I am a big proponent of Clean Living. This is a brand that the wine is organic. It's clean, transparent. It's actually the first clean, transparent, organic wine brand.

They list every single one of their ingredients, which you may or may not know this. But while you can shop clean beauty and clean hair care and you can shop organic food and beverage and all of that, wine brands do not need to tell you all of the coloring and flavoring and extra sugar and extra extra preservatives that they put in their wine, not even mentioning the Roundup that is still on the grape, not rinsed, not washed. They crush them up and put them on the shelf. And so incredible brands. They launched during COVID.

You can find them in the grocery store. They're at Target. Check your local grocery store. Most likely, they're in there. $20 price point.

I love the sparkling. They won a ton of awards for basically all of them, so that's definitely one. The last one I'll mention is a brand one of the first brands that we invested in near and dear to my heart is a brand called Sara Belly. And this is a baby food line out of Stanford started by a neurosurgeon and is also a neurodevelopmental biologist and mom of three. When I met her, she was one of the only women at Stanford's demo day to be pitching, the only non MBA student.

So here she is. She's a medical doctor and everybody else pitching is an MBA. And she was pitching a consumer product. And I got it because I had a baby. I had another on the way shortly.

And it is a huge challenge to find the nutrition required for for brain development. We're talking about the brain a lot today. You and I sitting here have the brain that we had when we were three years old. Literally have the same brain cells. Plenty of people, including my kids, tell me that all the time.

So Right. And I'm sure I've killed a good portion of it often in college, but but here we are. That window of development is so critical. And so of course, of course, you need the right nutrition to support the development of your insulin and your corpus callosum and your cerebellum and your amygdala and all of those things so that you can be a high functioning contributing, you know, member of society and be happy. I love that brand.

They're doing amazing things. They're They're at Whole Foods and Target and online, so definitely check them out. 19 essential nutrients for brain development. First of all, I have the luxury because I'm gonna be able to listen to this to to not take notes. But one, I have a lower back that hurts.

I have a wife who loves to take forty five minute baths. And I'm obsessed with CBD and all the THC stuff because I have a lot of clients now in that space, and it really is the wild west. It's just starting. It is. My wife just bought some CBD cream.

I'm like, I don't necessarily notice the effects, but a lot of people do. But, I mean, there's so much opportunity out there. This is a system, and I was really surprised to learn this because I thought, well, surely, like, based on what I studied, I mean, I know all the major systems, you know, in the body and the brain. And Christopher Gavigan, the founder of well, first founder of The Honest Company, then founder of Prima, has been on the board of Mount Sinai for years, and he's been studying the endocannabinoid system, which is actually one of the largest systems. It's actually bigger than the central nervous system.

Our body's way of sensing and dealing with and pleasure, you know, really specifically pain in this case, is pretty incredible. And I agree with you, I think that this is a huge area of study. The science really needs to be there. The supply chain really needs to be there. Talk about the Wild West.

We are talking about plant derived ingredients, the integrity of those plants and how they're grown and the potency, the efficacy. The worst thing that you can do in the consumer products world is make somebody sick or worse. Right? This is something that we think about and and look at a lot. So this is a team that is just an incredible team, very experienced.

We could really tell they put in the work when it comes to picking the right partners, manufacturing, and the right facilities. Supplements, that's another one. That is another sector, and they have quite a few supplements for focus, for sleep. So definitely check out all those. But there you go, layering on, you know, another piece of complexity there, which is not only do we have to worry about, let's make sure that the CBD is the right supplier, the quality is there, it's organic, all of those things, but then also when it's being made into supplement form, that that supplement manufacturer also has integrity and good manufacturing practices.

There's a friend of mine and a client of mine that we we've talked to about CBD, and THC for that matter, in terms of where the puck is going and recognizing that the person or people that have the Tylenol remember when Tylenol had its well, you were a consultant for Tylenol? Yes. My father was in crisis PR, and he always said, you know, when you make a mistake, you come out and own it. Look what Tylenol did. They pulled them all off the shelf, and people forgot, and they forgave.

When there's an oil spill, you know, you don't make excuses. You apologize and you clean it up. Somebody's gonna nail this CBD and come up with the brand and make people comfortable with it. Yeah. Couple different things.

One, you know, the endocannabinoid system, our body has receptors for these active ingredients. That in and of itself is amazing to me. And there are over 2,000 active ingredients or actives in, you know, the marijuana plant. So I think this is gonna be a huge area of study for a long, long time. I think it will be a long while before we, as a firm, will get into THC without a heck of a lot more research, but I would say more than that without a heck of a lot more federal regulation, which it seems like maybe that's the way things are going.

The other thing I would say though is formulation. You should try Prima. Just any old amount of CBD is not gonna do it for you. And actually, the thing that you might try is the bath gem. It only has twenty five milligrams of CBD, but it also has essential oils.

It has salts, magnesium salts, which are very beneficial to relaxing the body, meadow foam. So it's just all over a fantastic experience. Then their R and R cream has about seven hundred fifty milligrams of CBD. Here's what I've learned though in investigating this space, formulation matters. So CBD is not a tremendously stable ingredient in different forms, especially not water.

Right. Oil, better. Water, not so much, which is why when you look in the beverage space, for instance, you might try CBD beverages. And if they're sitting in your refrigerator for a week or two, it's like they don't work anymore. Right.

Imagine the alcohol leaving your wine. That's also something to look at. Just the potency and then the formulation. So, Elizabeth, I wanna be mindful of our time. Is there any topic that we haven't covered that you'd like to take a couple minutes and talk about?

You know, one thing I'm so glad that you asked that question. I would like to put a plug out there for consumer, which is, you know, a lot of investors think that consumer is not technical. Or sometimes I get the question, like, consumer. I mean, like, how do you know if something's not a fad? The answer to that is we study long term trends.

Just like microchips seem to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller, it's not a fad. It's a long term trend. When we talk about consumer being technical, a Pampers diaper could have over a 100 patents associated with it. Right. And it's everything from the super absorber, the top sheet, the channels, the way that it's manufactured.

Target, those are the types of things that we invest in or when you're walking through the aisles of Sephora and just know that there's actually a ton of technology in each of those products and a ton of science has gone into them. That's my plug for the consumer sector. It's massive. You know, if you like food, you would like consumer. That's what we're about.

So definitely not to be overlooked. This may sound like a naive question, but apparel is not in any way related to consumer? It is. Yeah. My Lululemon four way stretch Silverson yoga pants have a ton of technology in them as well.

I'm not a runner. I'm a, you know, embarrassing jogger. I recently got even better shoes because my back was hurting. I'm stubborn because I didn't wanna pay a $180 for a pair of shoes. Because until I got to this stage in my life, it didn't matter what I ran in.

Yeah. But better shoes make a difference. And this micro fabric and the quality of that material, I mean, it's like a whole new world. Look at things like, Impossible Burgers or Beyond Meat, and I completely agree with your plug. People that think that consumer products do not have high technology, they're not getting it.

And part of the brilliance of it is to take technology like Apple did and make it cool is the real brilliance. Yeah. When the consumer doesn't know that there's a lot of technology behind their product, you know, hats off to the entrepreneur who took this kind of clunky thing and made it work in a way where we're not even asking the questions because it's behind the scenes. Exactly. You know, it's funny because Pampers did go through a time when they would just talk about all their technology, like, on their commercials.

And then they realized, you know and and they are brilliant brand managers. They realized that a mom doesn't care if there's some this, that, like, awesome super absorber. She wants her baby to sleep through the night. That's what she wants. Right.

To be able to boil the benefits down in very succinct, direct ways. And hopefully, those benefits are the benefits that the consumer is really looking for and willing to pay for. Right? Another one, and one of our great advisors worked on packaged salad. We take for granted the fact that when we go to the grocery store, there's this clam of, you know, lettuce that is not brown, that is pre chopped, that stays fresh for, like, a week or two.

Well, that's because it's sitting in a modified atmosphere. You know, once you open that, it's releasing a very particular mix of gases that's there to keep it from browning and there to keep it fresh and there to keep it from going bad. So every aisle has technology like you would not believe. They're for us to enjoy, which is the cool thing. It isn't talked about enough.

I grew up where I didn't eat a lot of meat, but for instance, you know, if you buy a steak at the market or you buy hamburger at the market, you gotta eat it within a few days. Well, there are brands out there now that pack their meat in these air sealed bags. Literally, it'll stay fresh for two or three weeks in the refrigerator. And again, I haven't looked into the technology behind things like Impossible Burgers, but it looks like beef it tastes like beef. We want all those experiences without really understanding how the heck they come about.

Yeah. And kudos to all the entrepreneurs that are working in these spaces because when that entrepreneur that figured out the packaging solution to keep that steak fresh for two weeks, The impact on global warming is incredible because there's so much food. Most of our food is thrown away, and that is just a shame because it is going bad before we can eat it. The longer you can keep something fresh, and we've looked quite a bit in these spaces, and the technologies are really encouraging, really promising. You mentioned Impossible and Beyond Meat.

There's everything now. There's that for, like, fish and shellfish, lobster, you know, whatever. Anything that you can imagine, they're making in a lab. And right now, it might not be the kind of margin that you would see if you were putting these cows out to pasture and slaughtering them and all that, but it is gonna be a heck of a lot better, you know, in years to come when it comes to the global warming footprint, the humane treatment of animals, and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, our diet. That is one thing that does keep me up at night quite a bit, which is our ability to mess with mother nature sometimes comes back to bite us in the butt.

We always have to be really careful about that. And we're seeing that right now in our food supply, which is we've come up with ways to keep pests from eating our crops, but it also keeps the iron out of spinach. And so we just need to make sure that we're getting those nutrients still in our diet. You touch on the global warming and, again, in terms of where the puck is going. One of the things that is one of my pet peeves is the way we treat animals.

A lot of us have a hard time just getting through our own days and paying our bills and everything else, so we don't really have time to think about the chicken or the cow. I actually have a friend I grew up with that became a very successful hedge fund tech guy. He's literally like an astrophysicist, Brilliant, brilliant guy. Made a fortune on Wall Street. He literally has a farm now where he will not separate baby cows from their mothers and lets the chickens run around.

And now, again, a quarter of milk or a gallon of milk might be $10. It's not commercially practical for people making $10 an hour. But in terms of where the world is going between the artificial meats they're growing and the farming of fish, if we can bring up a generation of entrepreneurs who are not just trying to think about global warming, but also, like, just be nicer to animals. Developing that compassion for animals then hopefully will translate into compassion for people. I agree with you a 100%.

There are so many investors out there that are focused on ESG, environmental sustainability and governance. And honestly, I think if I were an institutional investor just focused on ESG, I would put all my money into consumer venture and growth equity because that is where the impact will be the largest, whether it's environmentally friendly packaging. So getting away from plastic, getting away from the maltreatment of animals, and getting a healthier diet, a more sustainable diet, ways to preserve food in, you know, responsible ways where it's not chemical, but working with mother nature, you know, to keep food fresher longer so we're not throwing it out and producing like six times more than we need and having that huge impact. There's so much opportunity. And then it's a naturally diverse sector.

So if you're looking to really include include everyone in the party, it is a fantastic sector to be focused on. Well, Elizabeth, this has been a blast for me. Please stay in touch. I'm excited to hear what you guys are up to. It is what the world needs, and we wanna be part of it.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.