Ben Lerer
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Lerer Hippeau’s Ben Lerer shares his priorities for scouring seed deals
Enterprise software startups are changing how they infiltrate companies, and investors are taking note.
Last week, I chatted with Lerer Hippeau‘s Ben Lerer after his firm had just led a seed round in Air, a digital asset management platform. I used the opportunity to pick his brain about what he’s searching for in early-stage investments and which trends he believes are shaking up enterprise software.
Below is a chunk of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: What kinds of things are you looking at recently? Anything notable?
Ben Lerer: The market is always shifting, but 40,000 feet up, nothing has changed in that we’re always just focused on investing in people. But, beyond people, there’s certainly been various areas of opportunity that over the years we have had different kinds of focus on. One that I’ve been most focused on traditionally has been a category that would’ve been called direct-to-consumer brands. Now you would probably just call it “future of consumer” or “future of retail.” Now, I think direct-to-consumer is not the entire pie but just a piece of the pie. So generally my focus is doing consumer deals and then sometimes I focus on deals that are not necessarily consumer, but they’re SaaS businesses, often SaaS businesses that my consumer companies are current or potential customers of.
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Group Nine hires Brian Lee to lead its commerce business
Group Nine Media has hired Brian Lee as its first executive vice president of commerce.
Lee held a similar role at Maker Studios before its acquisition by Disney, and he also founded the New York-based accelerator SKIG. Group Nine — which was created by the merger of Thrillist, NowThis Media, The Dodo and Discovery-owned Seeker — says Lee’s job will include licensing, merchandising, affiliate advertising and direct-to-consumer products.
“Group Nine has some of the most loved and impactful brands, coupled with the ability to leverage a host of deeply powerful insights,” Lee said in a statement. “I believe we are uniquely positioned to make huge strides in this space and can’t wait to get started.”
When I met with Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer earlier this year, he laid out his vision for the company moving forward.
“We’re successfully building brands — not to be distributed over a paid TV pipe, not to sit back and watch on your TV passively,” Lerer said. “Instead, we’re building brands for the kind of content consumption that someone who’s grown up with a smartphone in their pocket patronizes. What we’re doing is shows and characters and telling stories that are meant to be delivered via Facebook, via YouTube, via Snapchat, via Twitter.”
That kind of strategy, where a publisher relies on third-party platforms to reach their audience, has been disastrous for other digital media companies, but Lerer sounded pretty confident, particularly as the company gets smarter about which shows to invest in: “We’re making less and less content that is disposable every month than we did the month before.”
That approach seems to tie into Group Nine’s commerce strategy. In today’s announcement, Lerer said, “We have some of the most engaging brands on mobile, built around deeply dedicated communities of loyal fans so it’s imperative that we make the most of the opportunities that presents.”
Citing Nielsen, Group Nine says its content reaches nearly 45 million Americans every day. Business Insider also reported recently that the company is in talks to merge with women’s lifestyle media company Refinery29.
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Group Nine Media hires Stacy Green as its first chief people officer
Group Nine Media has hired Stacy Green to lead its human resources team. The company was created at the end of 2016 by the merger of Thrillist, The Dodo, NowThis and Seeker. CEO Ben Lerer said that at the time, he assumed there would be a “Lego-like” process of combining the best teams from each organization — and since Thrillist had the largest HR staff, it seemed natural… Read More
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Ben Lerer, Gary Vaynerchuk and Andy Dunn join the board of nonprofit RaisedBy.Us
RaisedBy.Us, an organization that facilitates charitable giving at startups, has added three entrepreneurs and investors to its board of directors — Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above), VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk and Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn. The nonprofit works with startups so their employees can donate a set amount of each paycheck to the charity of their choice. (The system… Read More
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