Meera Clark of Redpoint Ventures

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. I think the change we're seeing today, which is exciting and terrifying, is everything that's happening in AI.

And I think that will entirely transform the consumer landscape as we know it. Transform the consumer landscape as we know it. Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Mira Clark, an early stage investor with Redpoint Ventures. Clark shares her passion for supporting companies working towards a more equitable and sustainable future, shaping a meaningful environment for consumers and the best and worst cases in the development of AI. Mara Clark, welcome to the Puck.

Before we hear about your experience at Redpoint, let's take a little bit of time and tell us about who you are and how you got to where you are today. Yeah. Absolutely. And thanks again for having me. It's such a treat.

I guess for me, you know, so many people when they talk about their professional backgrounds start with the, I went to college at x and I entered at y. And I think for me, a lot of the reason I do what I do and a lot of the reason behind why I do it the way I do it actually starts far, far, far before that. And for me, a huge part of what gets me excited about consumer or climate or wherever I'm spending time in a given week or a given month comes back to the fact that I grew up in North Carolina. I grew up surrounded by normal friends, normal family members, kind of scattered across the Southeast, who did not think like a Bay Area consumer, who did not have the professional opportunities of a Bay Area consumer. And so for me, that was very powerful because people in those areas are happy.

They're curious, but they just think with such a different lens in mind because the opportunities and priorities are quite different. That for me was also kind of married with a little bit of a contrast at home, where my mom was, you know, an immigrant that moved to this country in her late twenties. She worked my entire childhood as did my dad, and so seeing a little bit of this melting pot from a cultural perspective at home, as well as having a little bit of this seat at the adult table growing up, kind of thinking through these business conversations very early, I think deeply informed my perspectives and this curiosity to always ask why. So kind of with this question of why, why do people consume what they consume? Why do they care about what they care about?

How do you drive shifts in their behavior? I candidly wanted to see something as different as possible from what I saw kind of around me in North Carolina. And that's actually what drove me out to California for the first time. That and I will say I'm pretty weak when it comes to weather. And so, you know, being in a state outside of this year where you can get sun three fifty days a year, wasn't a bad thing to add on to that.

But landed at Stanford knowing in many ways so little about technology and thinking I was going to change the world by going into politics or what have you, but had, you know, the good fortune or the opportunity at Stanford to begin exploring, okay, how do you drive change? Actually, a lot more of that change is happening in the private sector than the public sector. As you think about the levels of change you wanna drive, are you doing that as an IC at a tech company, or are your interests and skills more well equipped to do it in more of an advisory capacity where you are much more informed by interdisciplinary learnings? I kind of found myself in the ladder bucket post a few stints at tech companies, and so that's what actually drove me into the world of finance for the first time. And so my first foray into finance was actually landing on the Trading Floor in the lovely Times Square at Morgan Stanley, where I was on the firm's cross asset desk.

What that meant was that we were effectively looking at disruptive trends in the market. So, I think the evolution of the automotive industry, for example, and then thinking about disruptive ways to trade around that, that could be taking a position in the fixed income markets, it could be taking a position in the equity markets. And so, in terms of that fun, you know, future dream the dream exercise, it was quite similar to venture, but what I found is that I was at the end of the day watching lines go up and down on a screen, and that a lot of the most interesting innovation was actually happening in the private markets. And so that's what really led me to want to move earlier stage and towards a role where I was much closer to the businesses themselves. And so from the trading floor, I transitioned into banking, worked at Morgan Stanley's tech banking practice out here on the West Coast, and then actually finished up back in New York as I, you know, got the investor itch but wasn't quite ready to leave home, which was Morgan Stanley at the time, and ended up in the firm's accelerator, a group called the Multicultural Innovation Lab, and within that group, we were actually investing off balance sheet in women and multicultural founders.

And so, investing behind a mission that I deeply deeply, you know, believed in or felt strongly about in terms of kind of pushing humanity or pushing progress forward. And so, yeah, kinda dip my toes in the water there investing wise and then have the opportunity to move into more of a traditional investing role, you know, four or five years ago when I joined Obvious Ventures and then obviously more recently made the move over to Redpoint a little over a year ago. So it's one of those journeys that in retrospect feels like it makes a ton of sense. But let me tell you, at the time of any of these descendants, it was incredibly daunting and felt like it could have gone in any possible direction. Well, so that's a lot that you've gone through to get to this point, but you've now been at Redpoint for about a year.

How did you find yourself at Redpoint? Luck is the unhelpful answer. I think so many of the best things in life, right, come through luck and are in no ways repeatable. But what that luck meant for me was meeting Annie Cadabby, who's one of the managing directors on the early stage team at Redpoint. Annie, like me, went to Stanford, is actually in the same sorority as me somewhat coincidentally, though several years earlier, but she was a name that for me had come up time and time again, whether it was when I was an undergrad or after I moved into this world as someone you just had to meet.

And so, when I crossed paths with Annie at a conference, it must have been four years ago or so, I went up to her and introduced myself and told her I thought she was awesome. And that for us was the beginning of a really organic friendship or relationship, which, you know, has fans speaking on podcasts together, you know, trading deals, trading ideas, life hacks, you name it. And so having the opportunity to get to know Annie, let's say for three years before making the move over to Redpoint was huge, because I think so much about this business is a people business, and so much is about trust, and Annie was someone that I came to deeply trust and admire. And so as Redpoint thought about expanding the early stage team, particularly in directions that aligned with my interests or my backgrounds, when, yeah, they came knocking, I was ready to jump, and it's been such a joy ever since. So as part of what you're doing for Redpoint, is that your conscious consumer that you're working on at Substack?

Yeah. So I kinda think of my world at Redpoint as straddling let's call them two majors, something like that, that they certainly, in some certain points very much overlap, and then in certain instances entirely diverge. One is to your point, this whole idea of driving a more conscious and intentional consumer. As we think about what that means at Redpoint, it primarily comes down to two, maybe three pockets of consumer. One is kind of consumer apps and consumer social, as we look at where a lot of the largest outcomes have been, we find that bucket to be really interesting.

And then the other being marketplaces kind of thinking about commerce more broadly, those could be marketplaces for services, they could be marketplaces to connect with other individuals, they could be marketplaces for goods, fairly open minded in terms of what those look like, but spend a decent amount of time there. And then the other bucket that I spend a lot of my time in, which built upon some of what I saw at my former firm, obvious, but I think also really began to pick up momentum given everything we're seeing in the world around us was the area of climate. And the fact that I think, and I think we as a fund believe there will be multiple multi billion dollar outcomes in this category. And despite that market potential, which is in large part due to, you know, a handful of tailwinds that have really only picked up a lot of force behind them in the past couple of years, Redpoint didn't have clear coverage of climate. It was a little bit more than up for grabs, depends on what sector it falls into based on the company sort of framing.

And so for me to come in in 2022, which I will say was the best and worst time to be starting at a new fund because you come in hungry wanting to do deals, but in a market environment that's much lower, I have the opportunity or I candidly have the time to spend a little bit more of my energy on thesis development, building out a perspective for us, building out a brand for us, building out a network for us within climate. And so these days, while in any given week, my time allocation could vary on the whole, it's probably fifty fifty between climate and consumer, and then even within those, right, there becomes very creative, let's call it interpretations of what constitutes a consumer deal. Is it a platform enabling consumer applications, or does it need to be something that is going to acquire the users on its own? I don't think we have a super strong perspective on that. Similarly, with climate, is it a company that has climate in the first three words of its description?

Or is a company that now exists as a result of the changes, you know, happening around us due to climate change? And so I would say we are fairly open minded in terms of what both solutions look like or both, opportunity buckets rather look like. But as I think about the lens that I apply to where I spend my time, those would be the primary two. So starting with the conscious consumer in writing about that, what what's been the reaction from your readers? Yeah.

As I think about the conscious consumer, I think there's a few things. One is that consumers candidly been slower over the past year. You know, I started the Substack with a desire to put out more thesis pieces, and I had written several at obvious that were relatively well received, but not a ton had changed until very, very recently, which I can get to in a minute. And so I think there was some element of, I don't wanna write things that have already been written or already been said, but is the perspective on what a consumer needs different in February 23 versus February 2022, kind of as soon as we reach that, let's call it post COVID normalization. I don't know if I was convinced that there was.

On the flip side, what was changing rapidly was the macro environment. And so much of our conviction as it relates to where consumers spend is going to gravitate regardless of whether the inherent needs of those consumer remains the same is driven by the economy consumer sentiment, those sorts of dynamics. And so a lot of what we've actually published with the conscious consumer has been much more metrics or charts driven, kind of almost expressing a reflection or a digestion of what's happening from macroeconomic and sentiment perspective. And I think folks have, again, maybe I have a very, you know, very biased viewpoint, but I would say folks have generally been very well it's been very well received, I think, because there is less out there with this sort of data digested into kind of a single place where you can go to get it and then move on with your day. And what's the change that you're seeing?

I think the change we're seeing today, which is exciting and terrifying, is everything that's happening in AI. And I think that will entirely transform the consumer landscape as we know it. I think the question that we don't know the answer to yet is will this happen within existing applications or will this be happening within net new applications or platforms? And so I think there are a few areas where we see very obvious opportunity, whether it's travel, which I think a lot of folks have spoken about education or EdTech, kind of commerce in general, or the personalization of commerce apparel, those sorts of dynamics. And so I think we see some very huge buckets of opportunity, where anytime we hear about a company, we're gonna take the meeting or we're gonna double click to see if it's for us.

But I think a lot of these opportunities are gonna come in areas that we haven't even thought about, which is both exciting and terrifying. I think we're still very early. There are so many AI companies that are coming to market, and we as a finder certainly looking at more companies, and I can probably even count within the realm of AI. That said, I think a lot of the largest companies, particularly given the speed at which this technology is evolving, are not gonna be started this month or this quarter, or maybe even this year. And so I think there's also an element of this where it might pay to be patient, because I think we're gonna learn a lot about what more of a normalized steady state from a technological capabilities perspective looks like, what consumer sentiment surrounding these technologies looks like.

And, yeah, I think there's going to be a few of these unlocks that haven't quite happened yet, which will really open our eyes to not the near term toy, but kind of the societal changing platform in the future. So let's drill down on that a little because in terms of where the puck is going, I've really been, you know, trying to keep up with AI and played around with chat GPT, and we do a newsletter as well, the Puck newsletter. And I actually had ChatGPT write about half of it. How did it deal with it? It is you know, I think you said it really well.

For what we know it can do, it is remarkable. The question is how creative are people gonna be with it? And, you know, you talk about like, we wrote about in this article, deep fakes, calling up, and maybe you're not talking to me right now. This is my deep fake. It could be, right, at some point.

So we don't know how it's gonna be used, and it is gonna be subject to human creativity. What I'm curious in for our listeners is you hear these pitches. Right? So you hear when you say we hear we hear about these AI companies, what does that even mean? I know how AI can help your job writing better, and you can use it to write emails, or you can do research with it.

That I get. But in terms of, like, an AI company, what does that even mean? Yeah. It's funny. I think if you ask different people at Redpoint what an AI company means, they would give you a different answer.

I am perhaps more skeptical with my answer and that I think these infrastructure companies that wanna build a new LMM or whatever it is, those in my mind are, let's call them AI companies, because they are building the infrastructure at the rails to make office possible. Pretty much everything else in my mind is actually just a company, because we don't call them internet or like tech, you know, Internet companies. I guess some people still call them tech companies, but because I think AI will infiltrate every inch of the economy and every inch of our portfolio, which by the way, we are already seeing any company worth its salt right now has at least tested some sort of open AI plug in or, you know, fill in the blank plug in to see if it could be additive or beneficial to their business. And so, yeah, I kind of think every company will be an AI company over time. Yeah.

It's it's fascinating. And as you're talking, I was just thinking about the excitement that came over blockchain, for instance, and everybody was doing Yeah. Coins and ICOs, and they had a blockchain company. But the answer is, what does it do? And no one really had an answer.

And so, you know, this is still early. And so for instance, when you say, you know, every company, quote, unquote, should be using this, I run a restructuring company. So for instance, I've talked to my marketing people. Hey. When you write something, look at our website.

Should we rewrite this or do it use it for research or otherwise? But, you know, in terms of other ways I should be using it, I mean, it's like, I can't even conceive of those ways yet. Yeah. I mean, with a lot of these things. Right?

I think all of this AI euphoria is happening at a very interesting time and arguably the best time because we are budget constrained given the macro environment. And so unlike the crypto craze, which is, like, makes my skin crawl in many ways where it was absurdity and, like, throwing money to the ceiling to see if it would stick without the there there or without asking the hard questions. Folks are asking hard questions today because they don't have a choice other than to. And so if it's not a business tool, people in that, you know, they'll try it out, particularly consumers. So there's a ton of excitement and interest, but in terms of staying power, if it's not a business tool, people aren't interested.

And as I think about that business school, it is you are driving revenue, or you are saving on costs. And that could be with your restructuring company, reviewing, you know, legal documents, hundreds of pages, thousands of pages. Right. Why should a human possibly go through and, like, miss the one word they were looking for and have to read through it again? When that's actually a very easy use case for AI to do it better.

And so, you know, there are some fields, legal, health care that are massive markets are so driven by these, like, highly repetitive, incredibly manual, candidly, pretty boring processes. And I think those are incredible use cases for AI. We have many of those processes in our day to day lives. You think about, you know, studying for a test in college, and you know, this question or this topic came up. I guess kids these days are reading their textbooks on computers, which just makes me feel old, but I think about flipping through the pages of a textbook looking for the answer, when, yeah, I should be able to type this into a search bar and get the answer spit out.

And then when I don't really understand what it means to say, hey, explain this to me in a different voice or explain this to me like I'm 12. And so having that degree of, yeah, true ROI for me is what makes AI very different. And I think because, again, in this environment, we are asking the harder questions of if you're a business, is this generating revenue or saving me money? If you're a consumer, is this driving true to light or saving me time? Because again, even consumers today are bandwidth constrained, whether it's budget wise or because now they need to budget in a commute in terms of their time.

So, yeah, I think by creating those constraints, you actually build the most resilient and interesting businesses, which is why yeah. In many ways, I'm so excited that this is happening now and not three years ago because I think very different companies might have come out of it, and I don't think that would have been in our best interest. So let me ask you a question. You being smart venture capitalists at Redpoint and thinking about where the quote puck is going. You're focusing a lot on, you know, our carbon footprint and green energy and technology in the in that area.

And we know that you're talking about the macro. We know that we've got the chip act. We know we have the inflation reduction. We know there's a lot of government money and regulation going to push people in these directions. So I totally get the creativity and the the smarts at Redpoint to be focusing on that area.

But what do you see as the macro environment right now? For your portfolio companies out there that are thinking about, well, we're looking for a VC to help us and everything else, but we're really looking for common sense approaches in terms of what are the next couple years gonna look like. From your perspective, where is the macro going over the next few years? I think the macro over the next few years, again, barring any extreme circumstances, which the past five years have all been extreme circumstances, so maybe that's not a very helpful caveat. But over the next couple of years, I think it's gonna be pretty tough.

I mean, we're already seeing it, whether it's with portfolio companies, but I think in terms of much more interesting or more robust datasets with the public markets with, you know, earnings happening now or perhaps being in the rearview mirror by the time this episode is released. These sales cycles are getting extended and these companies are under pressure. They're missing forecast and there's a lot of reasons behind that. I think budgets are coming down, headcounts are coming down. And I think we're seeing vendor consolidation as well across a lot of categories where people over the past couple of years threw money at the problem to get to quick solutions are now doing a little bit of the harder exercise of reevaluating, do we really need this?

Or is there a way to do this at a lower cost or with less effort? And so from that perspective, I think the macro is challenging. As a result, as I think about what companies we want to back, let's say within climate, it again comes back to this business use case of what impact does this have on the business at the end of the day. As it relates to climate specifically, I think there are a lot of interesting dynamics at play, some of them happier to talk about, some of them scared to talk about. To your point, I think there's a lot of regulatory support, not only at the national level with a few of these more headline grabbing announcement or efforts put in place, but even more so actually at the state and municipal level, where, you know, states like California are putting out regulations surrounding organic food waste within restaurants, you know, cities like Boston are putting regulation in place surrounding building emissions.

You're seeing it really across the board and not only in blue states, which is actually quite interesting. And so I think there is that pressure from up above, if you will, that is incentivizing folks to spend on this because they don't wanna get fined. Two, not only are they incentivized because they wanna avoid those fines, they're actually being given money and a lot of it, you know, close to 400,000,000,000, if you will, what the IRA in particular. And so, as folks think about the cost to implement this or where they pull budget, a lot of it is really being given to them for free, or at such discounted rates that the unit economics just make sense, because while the CapEx or installation costs might be higher, once they're in place, it actually makes your overall operating costs far cheaper. So I think there's that dynamic.

I think that dynamic is supported by the volatility and energy prices we've seen over the past, call it twenty four months, which is a confluence of variables, right? It is in part climate change. It's also in large part driven by geopolitical risk, which for better or for worse, I don't see getting that much better over the coming years. And so, I think folks are thinking a lot about how do we kind of manage costs, manage risks on that side. And then the final thing that I think is really influencing how and where companies are thinking about spending is this element of risk and the fact that the cost of these natural disasters is growing exponentially in a very alarming way.

These once in 1,000 year rains or storms or hurricanes or tornadoes that are actually happening not once every thousand years, but like once every thousand hours. And so as companies think about the impact to their costs, their supply chains, what have you, they're having to rethink kind of their reliance on specific suppliers, specific sources of energies, which I think are big catalysts for change. Because, again, as businesses get disrupted, they realize that they can't ignore the problem anymore. And so while I wouldn't put it specifically on regulation, specifically on energy volatility, specifically due to greater natural disasters, and then, oh, yeah, throw in consumer and employee sentiment, or these net zero pledges that all of these companies have put out without any plan in place as to how they actually are going to get there. I think there's just a lot of interesting tailwinds that combined put so much momentum behind the climate movement that, yeah, I personally can't imagine us ever really going back.

In this environmental era that we're in right now and this $400,000,000,000 under the IRA, do you in the cap table, are you making an investment in a company that's in this space and then they're getting the money directly from the government as well as a loan or as an equity? I mean, how is that $400,000,000,000 actually gonna find its way out, and how do you fit into that? Yeah. It's a great question because the unhelpful answers that I don't know. I would say when I say I don't know, I think what it comes down to is this existential question as it relates to the climate ecosystem of we know tremendous value will be created.

What is unknown is where the end value will accrue or whether multiple companies or a sufficient number of companies will be in a position to capture enough meaningful share for it to matter. As we think about what we are looking for are the sorts of companies we are typically partnering with, specifically because we are more software marketplaces oriented investors. I think it is quite different for hardware investors or deep tech investors. They're just very different capital stocks. The companies we're investing in, we're investing in straight equity.

They're not gonna get government money. For the most part, we've looked at some that have, you know, bootstrapped their way with grant funding or what have you, but a lot of what they are doing are driving more of the data insights or data layer that are then empowering consumers or corporates to then make those changes. And when they are making that change, that is when the activation moment is happening to tap these government stimuluses or rebates or what have you. There are other companies, you know, we have not back to date, but I spent a lot of time with and I think we believe to be quite interesting that are, let's say, a little bit more of a middleman. So maybe they are enabling the distribution of these funds or facilitating the calculation of cost savings or ROI assessment as folks think about where to sort of deploy their efforts, whether that's from a dollars or a time perspective.

I think there's a lot there because it is so data driven and to date the data has been wildly lacking and fairly siloed. And so I think there's a huge data interoperability story that's just beginning to play out. That's very interesting to us. Makes sense. No.

That's great. This has been fun. The POC Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.