Category: Startups

Virtual Kitchens

The WSJ had a piece recently on the rise of virtual brands in the restaurant space. Such a novel idea. Given the rise of super delivery apps (DoorDash, UberEats,GrubHub, etc), legacy restaurants such as Chili’s and Applebees can quickly develop new brands that cater to a digital audience. In one such example, Chili’s was able to spool up a completely new virtual brand with no physical stores called ‘It’s Just Wings’ and grow it to $150m in one year –  that’s roughly 5% of Chili’s total business. Furthermore, they can keep their costs to a minimum with no massive advertising budgets, additional leases or significant overhead. Even after accounting for fees tacked on by the delivery apps this business is likely highly accretive.  In fact, the majority of customers had no idea that this food was even being prepared at a Chili’s restaurant which shows having a virtual brand can help create new, non-cannibalistic revenue streams, and serve as an incubator for new food concepts. Startups and ad agencies should take note as there is ample space to create new businesses around this changing landscape. 

What’s at stake is a massive TAM expected to hit $1T by 2030 made up exclusively of virtual brands and ghost kitchens.  Similar to the private label business in grocery, get ready for a crowded, opaque market where it’s harder to tell where or by whom your food was created. 

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Rollups – How to Build a Modern Day CPG

When I was at Jarden (now Newell Brands), we always had clear acquisition criteria when it came to M&A. 

  • Strong cash flow characteristics
  • Category leading positions in niche markets
  • Products that generate recurring revenue
  • Attractive historical margins / or margin expansion opportunities
  • Accretive to earnings
  • Post earnout EBITDA multiple of 6-8x

This strategy allowed us to grow from one brand (The Ball Jar company in 2002) to over 50 brands and ~$8b in sales by 2015 when the company merged with Newell Rubbermaid. 

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Food Delivery and Marketplaces Converge

I continue to see the surplus of food delivery companies and F&B marketplaces on an impending crash course. Is DoorDash a retailer, a logistics company, a brand, a restaurant or even a media/data company? Their vision is likely to be a bit of each and this will be accomplished under a build, partner, buy framework.  Like numerous other industries, the idea of a horizontal play has turned vertical and we’re starting to see each encroach the other’s territory. The challenge in the future will be how to become the super app that customers interact with daily. This fight for share is not without challenges. The average smartphone user has 80 apps on their phone, but they only use ~9 apps per day and 30 apps per month. This means that 62% of those apps don’t get used much, if at all. 

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DTC Startups – The Bear/Bull Case

Brands aren’t built overnight. Some of the most successful brands (Nike, LVMH, etc) have taken years to achieve the awareness (and more importantly relevance) they have now. In the case of LVMH, there is a key element to owning a piece of European heritage that has driven the company to be the largest luxury goods company in the world. Louis Vuitton owns much of their own supply chain. As an example, over the past couple of years they opened a manufacturing center in Texas to create leather goods here in the US that further allows them to create local stories around their products.

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A New Airline

Happy New Year! When I see a chart like the above, it’s unfathomable to believe that it’s a good time to be in the airline business, let alone be a startup trying to enter the capital intensive sector. But that’s what David Neeleman (the founder of JetBlue) plans to do. History is littered with failures of upstart airlines due to a myriad of factors that make it an extremely difficult sector to compete in. Today’s 3 large legacy carriers (Delta, United and American) are the result of years of consolidation and currently control ~50% of the US market. 

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Venture Debt & Revenue Based Investing

If you have a small but growing business selling on Amazon or even direct-to-consumer (D2C) you’re bound to hit a point where you require money to scale. For as much as the media talks about venture capital, the reality is that less than 1% of startups here in the US are able to raise money from VC’s. The challenge, however, is that consumer brands often have working capital needs associated with carrying inventory or affording increasingly expensive paid media.  So where do these types of businesses get the cash to grow? Traditional lenders, such as banks, often have strict covenants in their terms and have not historically catered their products to this cohort, but a growing number of new, innovative solutions are disrupting the model. I should note that pre-revenue/pre-product startups are likely not going to be a candidate for institutional debt – but a convertible note, SAFE or crowdfunding remain a viable alternative at this early stage. As a side note on crowdfunding, the SEC recently increased the cap for fundraising via this channel to $5m (from $1m) which I suspect will open up more activity in this space. 

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How Consumer Brands Can Leverage Fintech

There’s been an interesting dynamic occurring in SaaS businesses over the last 5 years – Fintech solutions have slowly been added to their core software product especially in niche vertical markets such as construction and fitness. An example of this is Shopify, which initially focused their product offering on small businesses. They soon realized that this cohort was in need of more than just tools to build an e-commerce website –  they also needed payment processing solutions, financing for working capital and insurance. Ant Financial, which owns the widely successful Alipay in China, is another example of a company that fundamentally is a tech platform that facilitates relationships with legacy banking partners. Because companies don’t want a lot of disparate tech solutions, it was easy for the SaaS businesses to create new revenue streams by offering these additional services. According to VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, by adding fintech, SaaS businesses can increase revenue per customer by 2-5x and open up new SaaS markets that previously may not have been accessible due to a smaller software market or inefficient customer acquisition. In the same way consumer brands have moved horizontally into adjacent categories to (hopefully) increase AOV, SaaS businesses are following the same path. 

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Expert Networks

When I was at Jarden, a large global CPG, we announced a merger with Newell Brands. Over the next 6 months, our headquarters in Atlanta and NY turned into a conference room full of management consultants who were tasked with finding efficiencies between the two large $8b organizations. What they were providing was a high margin, somewhat commoditized service. Large global companies are often inefficient and can afford to pay these rates, but the same can’t be said for startups. There’s definitely a time and place for management consultants, but like other industries, theirs is also being disrupted. This is good news for entrepreneurs who now have alternative tools. 

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Making the Switch: Corporate to Startup

I spent 10 years in corporate America before making the leap to the startup world. I wasn’t actively trying to make the switch but during my last few years in a big company, I was yearning to be involved with something more nascent where I could have a seemingly sizable impact on the outcome. I felt like I was just another number among thousands of employees at a F-500 and was at a point in my life where I felt I could take the risk. It’s worth clarifying as well, “startup” can mean very different things. A company that just raised a few million dollars will be very different from a late stage pre-IPO startup. Most individuals who do make the switch from corporate to startup typically join the company during later stages as its less of a culture shock. I’ve heard from numerous founders that they are leery of bringing in a hire from the corporate world in the early days of the business for fear that they won’t function well in a world that isn’t yet defined and lacks a matrix org structure. To be sure, it’s not for everyone but here are my thoughts on making the change. 

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