"yes, although it's always the founders' company, esp at seed stage, you just structurally have less influence when there's a larger investor involved who is taking a board seat, etc"
- hunter walk
"yup. plus production was more difficult - my dad used to work in menswear at JC Penny for 20 years and I remember all the sourcing trips he had to make to get it right, etc plus the size of the orders required.
The business was entirely different, most notably the lack of direct relationship with your customer (as you point) out, unless you were the one opening retail storefronts."
- hunter walk
"hi! i describe our themes as a white picket fence, not a barded wire fence, which means we use them as guiding frameworks but will be opportunistic as well. We like vertical ecommerce brands because they allow new direct-to-consumer models to be built and scale. Imagine how different it would be to start Primary 10-20 years ago!"
- hunter walk
"love machine actually formally occurred after i left (if i recall correctly). i think we had some way to send kudos to teammates while i was there :)"
- hunter walk
"i've done a few different Five Question interviews over time and enjoy them so decided to do more. I try to pick out people who aren't necessarily already prolific online so their story isn't as well known. Because we're friends and I'm not a journalist, i usually get honest answers :)"
- hunter walk
"chicken and egg argument though. also, not everyone gets a response on every topic. what community i have is interested in this stuff. if i wrote about a different topic, i'd get crickets. and that's fine too."
- hunter walk
"I have no grounds to challenge the woman part of your statement, not being, uh a woman :)
But I would say that "i need to prove myself first" is another one of those (pardon my french) mindfucks. If you're honest and humble about what you've done and not done, i think ppl are willing to listen rather than wait for you to be a golden god."
- hunter walk
"hi! yeah, so we've got most work to do there because our platform only works if we can be successful in our own right! So far we haven't done this in totally scalable ways but i'll give you an example or two. We've gotten founders together who are working in the same space but not necessarily competitive and hosted them for off the record discussion of common challenges, opportunities w a speaker who has direct experience in that market. We don't tweet/blog/etc about it bec would defeat the purpose of doing it off the record."
- hunter walk
"all these subtle distinctions are crazy. If there's a capital imbalance, it'll last for at most a single fund cycle before it resolves."
- hunter walk