Forerunner

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 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 ourselves, 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. https://lnkd.in/gUwrYfiE

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

"In our view, many future AI winners will look more like historical offline stalwarts of the services world than the sexier SaaS-powered solutions that have dominated the past decade. That’s because — as technologies mature and AI-driven knowledge work moves up the stack to more nuanced tasks — there will be far less proprietary value in selling AI-generated outputs into firms, and thus far greater incentive for new firms to centralize AI productivity in-house alongside the irreplaceable, uniquely human aspects of the business." In our latest thesis, Brian O'Malley and Alex Brussell suggest: don't just sell AI tools into services firms, *be* the firm.

"We believe the next evolution of search won’t look much like search at all. Rather, discovery will take the shape of tailored, dynamic services, where users can not only access information but interact with a highly personalized, actionable edit of what’s uniquely relevant to them." Our Founding Partner Kirsten Green shares her perspective on the evolution of search to service, where the diminishing value of search engines is being eclipsed by new AI-driven discovery services that are context-aware and actionable. Our investment in Daydream marks an early iteration of this shift: https://lnkd.in/gmcXMXin

If Generative AI has exposed anything, it’s that the prevailing search experience is post peak. Traditional search engines have long served as gateways to the internet for people looking for information, products and services, but as the volume and complexity of options has grown, this value has rapidly deteriorated. The experience is chaotic and ineffective, where ads and SEO take precedence over true personalization. The need for contextual, intelligent discovery is evident. But when it comes to the evolution of search, we believe the future experience won’t look much like search at all. Rather, discovery will take the shape of tailored, dynamic services, where users can not only access information but interact with a highly personalized, actionable edit of what’s uniquely relevant to them. We imagine vertical-specific portals to the world of options: imagine a discovery platform that can book itineraries, style outfits, scrapbook research, turn a mosaic of health insights into tailored action plans, and present financial data in the context of personal realities and goals. Our investment in Daydream marks an early iteration of this shift, where the diminishing value of search is eclipsed by personal, actionable discovery services. Daydream, which opened its waitlist yesterday ahead of launching later this year, is a new approach to shopping. Led by retail visionary Julie Bornstein, the Daydream founding team - including Matt Fisher, Lisa Yamner Green, Richard Kim, and Dan Cary - has spent over a decade operating at the intersection of commerce and AI, hailing from Microsoft AI, Google, YouTube’s Gen AI division, Sephora, Nordstrom, StitchFix, Farfetch and more. We are pleased to share that we are leading the $50M seed funding alongside Index Ventures' Vlad Tenev and Danny Rimer, with participation from GV (Google Ventures)'s Frederique Dame and David Krane and True Ventures' Jon Callaghan. Not only is Daydream poised to transform shopping, we believe it has the potential to inspire the new standard in how people seek out what they want. https://lnkd.in/gWTgMFCg