YouSaid · the spoken record

Kirsten Green

lines on the record: 132
first: 2020-01-20
most recent: 2020-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As an investor in the public markets for a long time and really knew kind of their monopoly position and what the advantages they had, but what the disadvantages for the consumer and what the other needs in the market were. But truly Warby Parker was as much about the team as anything. I met them when they were in business school. They came and shared this idea, the vision for the brand, the vision for the value proposition on the glasses and how they would reach consumers in new and unique ways. And a lot of it, I thought, was”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was broken, right? The glass is broken. You look at the Think about Warby Parker. What did you see in that? Obviously, the optical market had been so broken for so long. And I'd follow local”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needs to be reinvented to meet that need. Right, it was broken, right? The glass is broken. You look at the beauty space, it's a five, six billion dollar business in department stores. It's cultivated off of sampling and trial. And people aren't going to department stores anymore. So how do you reinvent that? And so I thought, you know, this was a new day. This was where there was young, fresh energy coming to the category with unique ways of thinking about reaching consumers with different offerings. And we could metric their progress as it went along and that made it feel like it could work in the context of this type of investing.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had still been stuck in this what I felt like was this one dimensional view of like what a great retail experience has been until suddenly there were some opportunities that caught my attention and the two that kind of stand out as early investments in my Angel Fund along those lines were Warby Parker and Birch Box and both those teams were in business school and to me they were thinking about the consumer where the consumer was headed they were thinking about how do we meet them with an offering in a category that”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to pick a name, that one came to me, and I think it's stuck and it works. So, I'd been on this path of investing in kind of early stage companies. There were some common connected themes, and a lot of it had to do with, yes, good business and good business fundamentals that I felt like were in the path of progress, but also afforded me the opportunity to learn. And at some point along the way, while I was honing a thesis and getting kind of more clarity around on what did it take to get a company off the ground, how would you think about kind of really having something where you could metric milestones along the way, which I think is a really important thing for venturous, right? Which is you have to be able to put one foot in front of the other and prove out parts of your thesis to kind of earn your way into the next thing and earn your way into your next fundraise. And that really wasn't very possible in retail before. You had to have a lot of money to open up a store and it took a long time before you figured out. So, you know, that dynamic was unfolding as businesses were moving digital.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't necessarily But you know, it was interesting when I was at the Washington Post, I remember seeing some of the early internet stuff, and that's when I started covering it. And I literally one day I was like, we are fucked. Like this whole thing is going to collapse our businesses. And it was just, it was a day. Like, I were classified. I was trying to place it classified. I'm like, This is going to be all digital. And then I was like, and then and then and then. And so it was a really interesting moment from a media point of view.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when I left my job at Montgomery Securities, having covered retail stocks, having invested in retail in a modestly expanded group of companies, I did think that I wanted to leverage that experience. I did feel like I had really learned, again, how to kind of marry some instincts around the consumer and some understanding of that behavior with the investments or with the business models. And I wanted to lean into that. But part of the reason I made the move to quit my job and kind of send myself on that other trajectory at that time was because the cycle had played out. The businesses weren't that interesting anymore. There was a big threat from online and everybody's attitude was either I've got a close-up shop or no change is going to happen. And neither of those seemed the right things to invest in. So I was open-minded about what that would look like. And along the way, I think part of the path of it being six.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that people like human nature is you sort of think that you have advantages or strengths or opportunities that other people aren't going to be able to see in the same way. And so while they saw them encroaching on parts of their business, I don't think they felt like it was going to be the end of their business. Maybe it would push them to think about, okay, we can't just have stores. We have to have an online business to compete here too. But not that our stores or that our service or our value proposition will become irrelevant.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was fascinating because I was like, they're coming. They're coming. And I had covered Walmart sort of taking over Main Street, essentially, which was the Amazon before Amazon, essentially, putting out local businesses. And it was so obvious what was happening. And especially, you know, and then when Amazon got there, I was like, they're going to move into adjacent businesses every single day of the week. Like they're just going to go from one to the next the next because it makes sense from a strategic point of view. And what was interesting is retailers, I remember Barnes& Noble, all kinds of them. Like whatever area they were in, it was sort of caught flat-footed for some reason. And I was always trying to figure out why when it seemed so obvious.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a little bit more holistically about the experience. They didn't just have a flat web page and they were selling books or one thing from it. They were Warby Parker thinking about how do we get in touch with the consumer, provide a try-on experience, think about they were Dollar Shave Club, thinking about how do we meet a customer whose preferences are changing with a product that speaks to him in a mode and a shopping mode that resonates with him.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being reimagined. Right. Yeah. They were companies that were using online and digital tools to forge connections with consumers, but they were thinking”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I found the second time I really lit up in my career where I could combine those things. And that coincided with a time when there was an advent of new consumer retail oriented businesses coming to life.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so kind of in pursuit of all of that, at the time period, I did a bunch of consulting work. I made some one-off investments. I raised money from people I'd worked with before to put pools of capital into specific companies. I tried to be helpful. I took on odd jobs at those companies to learn. And all of that was sort of like getting closer and closer to entrepreneurs. And when I started the public markets, started looking at companies that were on growth trajectories, but already at public companies. And I'm on this pursuit to find my passion. And I get all the way back down to something that's about business. It's about startups, but it's about people.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also did a lot of personal stuff. I went to therapy. I started painting. I took writing classes. I took photography classes. All of that. And I think if somebody had told me that it would be a six plus year journey before I had clear direction on where I was going to move forward in my career, I might have made a series of different choices, but I'm so glad I didn't because I think for me, I really needed to like. Allow myself to keep a goal out there but not be so specifically focused on how it unfolded in front of me and be open-minded to what that journey looked like.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't do that. Unusual for me in particular. I was a safety girl. You know, I really wanted to know when I was 25, like where my health insurance and my 401k plan was coming from. But at that point, too, I felt compelled to push myself to grow and learn. And I wasn't doing it in the way that I needed to at that time. So I almost didn't have another choice. And during that time period, I I said to myself, like, I didn't go to business school. I'm going to use this as my on-the-ground business school. I'm going to push myself in ways I haven't been pushed before. I'm going to go out and make meet people and learn how to network or learn how to ask questions.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get myself in this place where it's like I'm kind of questioning, I'm questioning my role as an employee, I'm questioning the safety of that. Remember, that was part of the reason I was there in the first place. The markets have changed. And I think to myself, like, I need to figure out what I'm going to do with my life or my career. And so I left the job without the next job.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was part of the retail group. I was specifically covering the teen retail stocks when I was on the South Side. I moved over internally at Montgomery over to the buy side. Now I was with the team that was managing investments across spectrum. I was looking at kind of the consumer retail, hospitality services, product companies. Tech was starting to become more relevant in that space because of Amazon, because of eBay, because of that change that we've seen play out over the last two decades, right? But they weren't true internet stocks. They were retail stocks, really.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, absolutely. And this was, I had covered Dayton Huds, everybody. I had covered all the local retailers going into business. So you stuck in teen stocks. You were like, you were, were there any tech companies you were looking at at the time?”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a bad employee, and I was gone. And so I allowed myself temporarily to feel like a victim and said, I'm never going to put myself in a situation where I'm there again. And that coincided with some changes that were happening in the market. Now we're kind of into the early mid-2000s. The cycle has really played out. We've been through the tech boom, the tech bust, kind of reconciling what's going on with the consumer. And the conversation, particularly in retail, had moved to We've overstored the country. Everybody needs internet's taken over. Stores are going away. And being a public market investor was less about bringing some new differentiated thinking and more about really kind of financial engineering, how you get that thing. Sure, absolutely.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chapter one of my career. So chapter two really was about discovering myself and kind of asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of kind of internal searching. But it was catalyzed by this moment where I was at this job, I was doing a good job, I was getting the promotion I needed to, and the bank went through two mergers. And my team got displaced. I got displaced. And suddenly I found myself as somebody who had put so much of my identity and my effort and everything into my employees.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Businesses really require you to find a balance between being in tune with your customer and then leading your customer. And then obviously having the right processes in place to figure out what inventory do you buy, how much of it, and how do you monitor that? When do you mark it down? Anyway, so I like fell in love with investing because I found a way to be successful in.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Washington, and they started something called Boogie's Diner, but they had a bigger chain. They went public. And I remember covering it and saying to the CEO, you're one pedal pushers away from disaster. If you pick the wrong pedal pushers, because it was such a trend-oriented routine. Kind of thing. And he was like, what does that mean? I'm like, I just don't understand how you're going to stay in business. You're never going to get the right turn. You're going to miss a turn no matter how you”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, but there's one There were so many of them. I mean, back in the 90s, there was a lot of small, there was an opportunity for a small and mid-cap stock. A lot of those companies went public. A lot of them sort of, you know, rode the plan that they had been doing as private companies. And then that stalled out and they had to think about reinventing themselves. Right, it was really fascinating.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And that's exactly what I was doing in his late 90s, you know, kind of into the early 2000s. And it was an exciting time in the market. And I was covering teen stocks. And it was really kind of teen retail stocks. So, you know, it was the rise of the mall. It was all those specialty retail stuffs that went up.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I thought about getting to know the consumer and I spent a lot of time kind of leaning again back on that intuition and that people aspect of it about thinking about the consumer and putting myself in that seat and trying to reconcile that against the business that I was looking at or evaluating. And for me, that's on the sell side? I was on the sell side and then I moved over to the buy side, but both on the public markets over a span of 10 years. And what really lit me up around investing then was the combination of the two. It was kind of taking the quantitative part, bringing in the qualitative part, and having that allow you to have some original thinking and find an investment that maybe other people weren't drawn to that had you were doing via recommendations.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking for patterns, that felt safe and something I could do. When I Had a job like that. I think the thing I realized when I was in that role was I needed to do something that I needed to bring something unique to the table to stand out or really be successful. And I was a young person just starting working and everybody else had more experience that they could lean on. And so I really was looking for the things that I could uniquely contribute. And at that point in time, I was covering retail stocks. And I thought about...”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going back to being an introvert type of person, even though I liked people a lot and I was really in tune with what was going on with people, I liked that I could sit and read and learn about things and apply that concept of investing. And so, you know, that was sort of the early draw to investing. So looking from”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways, that would have put me on a path to be something like a therapist. But I had this other side that was just really practical that said that I wanted safety and security and sort of a traditional idea of success, which meant some success in business. And so that is where I directed my attention when I thought about what a career looked like. I was an economics major. I worked at Merrill Lynch while I was in college. I think that was my first experience kind of in investing. I immediately was turned on by the learning aspect of it. And I felt like”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, so you know, if I think about kind of things that have been formative for me and in my career specifically, it's really more about people than it is necessarily about being analytical. So when I was young, I was a quieter person, a more introverted person, a person who would watch what was going on around them. I had a certain set of circumstances in my life that really made it important for me to pay attention to people and their moods and their motivations and their personalities. And I think through that, I learned a lot of empathy towards people and I kind of became the person in my friend group or my expended friend group where people would come and sort of sit on my couch, so to speak, and share things with them, with me. And I think that gave me more opportunity to kind of hone that skill. And I really liked that. And I really valued that a lot.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that in a lot of ways, I was interested early on in investing because I appreciated the variety it offered, the chance to learn about a lot of different things. I liked that it was an analytical and model-based type of business. Sure. I think that suited parts of my personality. Why was that? And I liked that it was practical. Why was that? Well, you know, education.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've talked many times before at one of Jason's events in Las Vegas, but you're one of And I'm not going to focus on you just being a woman, but you're one of the few women venture capitals I get to talk to, although there's many more coming down the pike now. That's good news. Which is good news.”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Eric, that's really bad. A podcast about power change Tech and beyond Very much And managing director of venture capital firm, forerunner ventures. Glossier ritual dollar shade club”
2020-01-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Kirsten Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT