YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Mauzé

lines on the record: 77
first: 2020-03-02
most recent: 2020-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Vibe and water, and then if you look at what's happening now in the marketplace, you had buy maybe five years ago, which would be a lower calorie drink. We have a wonderful portfolio company Spin Drift, which I think meets the needs on that, sparkling water with a little bit of fruit to give it some flavor. And I think that consumer is working on that journey towards a healthier.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we look at this kind of modern consumer and where they're going, they're not making a huge leap from highly processed food to raw vegetable. They're on a journey. And I think the entrepreneurs are meeting the needs of that consumer while they're on that journey. A great example could be in the beverage space. When I grew up, we drank a lot of Coca-Cola, high in calorie, high in sugar. It never crossed our mind that it was an unhealthy drink. We probably knew it wasn't the healthiest drink. We had the opportunity to invest with the folks at Vitamin Water when I was at my former shop. You know, I think Mike Ripoli and Darius Bykoff saw the opportunity to create a healthier beverage than a Coca-Cola, but it was still 50 calories, still had some sugar in the product, but at the time, I think everybody thought it was very healthy. Right before that, Snapple had been out. And people, I think in New York City especially thought Snapple was super healthy than a soda. In reality, it was probably modestly healthier than soda. So you had soda, snapp.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was really supporting Daniel as well as supporting the brand that he built. It was clear that even though the brand was relatively small, he really had a very strong and passionate consumer base. And so we thought that combination of scrappy, very smart founder combined with the passionate consumer base really had the opportunity to grow to something special.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, it was a sub $20 million brand. It was a sub $20 million category. And I don't think any of us knew how large that category could be. But once again, in listening to Daniel, he had a strong understanding and strong belief of where that consumer was going and believed that his kind bar could really meet a long-term need of the modern consumer”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, a great example would be Daniel Levetsky from Kind. Daniel, I think, was a serial entrepreneur and identified this product, which was this fruit and nut bar product that was far healthier than many of the other kind of brands and bars that were out there at the time. I think he recognized that the consumer was moving towards a diet that wanted more nuts and more fruit and saw that bar as a real transformational way of providing that to them and a real convenient way to providing to that. He built a very unique brand around that with that transparency on the packaging and he was an incredibly scrappy founder and he's really built one of the great food companies in the United States over the past 10 to 15 years.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's an example of something that fits that description in the sense that you saw something, there was nothing necessarily in the data that would have said, hey, this is going to be a big category or it's a massively growing category, but there was something about the entrepreneur and the opportunity.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're looking for a little bit of scrappiness. We're looking for someone who has some good insights into their consumer and why they feel that their brand is uniquely suited for that need. And that may not be a need or a niche that is fully outlined in the data. As we say, big CPG is always looking backwards. They're looking at categories and how they have performed. These entrepreneurs are really looking forward. And I think they're discovering these new niches in these very large categories that can be large over time and are looking for support from a firm like VMG to help them grow.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really changed a lot over the past 20 years. 20 years ago, I always said it was a bunch of misfit folks who didn't want to work at big companies. And frankly, I kind of fit into that demographic as well. I think now our entrepreneurs are much more diverse. Over the past year, half of our transactions have been with women founders and women leaders of businesses there. We are finding excellent companies from all different parts of the country. They tend to form in certain areas, Boulder, Colorado is a great place. Austin's a great place. San Diego's a great place. They happen to be wonderful cities to go visit for board meetings, but it's real exciting time for us.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we do have a kind of a minimum size paranormal we like to see. We like to see five to ten million dollars of sales building out there, strong gross margins. But it really comes from meeting with the entrepreneur. One of the things as we kind of bring new people into our investment team, one of the things we always encourage them to do is just to listen. These entrepreneurs are full of information and full of thought and full of belief. And we need to listen to them because they are the ones who are closest to the consumer in their category and they're telling us where the consumer is going to. And so if we get that connection with an entrepreneur, we see the opportunity that they're building. And then we also find an entrepreneur who's looking for our help in building out their business. And they're aware of their strengths, of their weaknesses, and look to VMG as being kind of that partner to go through.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entrepreneur and say, here we are, talk to this person, et cetera. Now, I think in a world of transparency, any entrepreneur can go on to our website, can go onto our LinkedIn accounts, find every transaction that we've invested. They could reach out to any entrepreneur that we've worked with. And by the way, they can work out to other people in our ecosystem that we have not done transactions with. Our goal is that we can be helpful to people in our ecosystem, they'll define the VMG brand. And I think that has been part of the basis for our success.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of data, but you know what we do is that we want to go out and meet with all the small companies out there that we can. And I think that's part of our approach to building relationships. One of the things when we set up VMG, we thought the industry was really changing in private equity from being a very much focused on, as I always said, the PE was the son of the solar system and everything was revolving around that to really, in our case, the consumer and the entrepreneur being the son of our solar system. And we are just one of the many planets rotating around that. Our goal is to be supportive to the entire ecosystem. And that includes meeting a lot of small companies. One of the things that's changed dramatically in my experience in private equity is the move towards transparency. When I first got into the business in the early 2000s, we would have a brochure that we could then slot in the back whatever references we wanted, whatever track record we wanted, however we wanted to position ourselves, we could go to a”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a bit of art and it's a bit of science. What we're really looking for are for brands that have a real passionate consumer. Because we think if a brand has a passionate consumer with a small group, there may be a very good opportunity to expand it to a larger group. So we're always looking for those entrepreneurs that have really built those special brands on that. We also bring in a little bit of science and take looking at the sales through data, et cetera, and making sure that the brand is on the right track and everything the entrepreneur is believing is actually happening in the marketplace. And when we combine that art and that science, we think we make very good group decisions to support entrepreneurs and brands on their journey.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a individual company basis, as you take that initial step back, a lot of that earlier stage entrepreneurial investing these days, you just hear about technology with infinite scale. And these are consumer products. How do you go about thinking about the initial kind of risk reward in these situations?”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What gets me excited is that I think we have this modern consumer today, and I don't think that is a certain age group or certain region group, but it's a large group of us that are all looking for a more fulfilling, a healthier life overall. And I think it's the entrepreneurs that have been building those brands across all different categories to kind of support us as we're going through that journey. When we form VMG, we had that general tend of this is where the consumer was moving to, and we thought it could be attractive place to invest. We also believed that the lower middle market had been a very attractive place for people to invest ever since I've gotten out of college, but many firms decided to use it as a launching pad to create much larger funds. And we thought that we love this. This is our passion. What if we were to invest in this space, hopefully learn from this space, and get better at being a value add partner to our portfolio companies, stay in the space, and continue to”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were wrestling with what to name the shop. We didn't want to name it after ourselves. We reached out to a friend. We asked him for some names on what we should call our shop. And he sent over 10 names. Some were summit partners, Excel partners, many names that we had already been taken that he just didn't know. And at the bottom of the list was one called Velocity Made Good. And it was a term I had never heard before. And what it means is you have to optimize all your variables to maximize your speed from point A to point B, and it might not be a straight line. And it's a term that's used by pilots. It's a term used by sailors, of which I am neither. But Scott Case's father was a commercial pilot. Carol Rell's husband was a Marine fighter pilot. We had other folks on the team who were quite familiar with the term, and we decided to use that as a way of really branding ourselves.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is running the firm, which was an entertainment management company who had done a lot of work for some of our portfolio companies, specifically Vibinwater over time, and said, hey, I'm just leaving TSG. We should get together sometime and chat about finding ways to work together. Dave decided to hop on an airplane that day, and we came up, he flew up to San Francisco where we had lunch at Cocari and we talked about maybe we should do some type of a partnership together and think about investing in the consumer product space but in a different way. Over the course of the next several weeks and months, some more folks who are at TSG reached out and wanted to be part of the team, Scott Case, a young superstar Carrell decided to join the team. Bob Schultz, who was kind of in charge of a lot of the portfolio on the food company side to join, and we decided to form VMG Partners as a group. So we had six of us to go do it. We had a combined maybe 15 or 16 years of private equity experience, so average of two.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think moving from banking to private equity is a big challenge because in banking, you're really kind of focused on solving whatever problem is thrown your way in terms of trying to meet this financing need or trying to put these two companies together. As a principle, you have to decide, is that a problem you really want to solve? And that was a really big adjustment for me. And it was really some lessons I had to learn during that time. I spent five years at TSG, and I was cut from a different cloth than the two founders. And one holiday in 2004, I woke up one morning and told my wife that I just needed to resign. I needed to go do something else. She asked, well, what are you thinking about doing? And at the time, I really had no idea. So after the holidays, I went in and I spoke to Chuck and the other folks and said, you know, this isn't working for me. We need to find a way to kind of separate. I walked out of that breakfast, not really knowing what to do, but I picked up the phone and I called someone I've met in the past, a fellow by the name of Dave Barum, who was...”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lehman Brothers, which my colleagues there thought I was crazy leaving this big bulge bracket firm to go to this very small private equity to go do that with my family. We all moved out to San Francisco and I joined them.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I came back in 97 right after the handover, and then I was recruited by Lehman Brothers to go join them as they were expanding their consumer effort. And at the time, in the late 90s, everybody wanted to move to a bigger shop. And I thought I wanted to move to a bigger shop, leaving Payne Weber that was more focused in the middle market. And in my brief stint at Lehman Brothers, though they were terrific people there, I really did not enjoy calling on Big CPG to try to go do their Eurobond and really miss working with the entrepreneurial companies that I had been working with at Payne Weber, both in New York as well as in Hong Kong. It was in the late 90s and 99 that I got a call from the Shansby Group, which is now TSG Consumer, to join the two founders as the third partner there. At the time, they were a sub-200 million dollar fund with a very strong track record, really focusing on the consumer product space exclusively. And I thought, well, this is my opportunity. And with that, I resigned.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a young man's goal and ambition and not a lot of thought going into that decision of mine to do that. But there was really over in China at the time, there was really no great distribution network. And it was all big state-owned enterprises, which also made it difficult to kind of work out relationships. So I was over there for three years and frankly didn't get a lot of traction out there, but learned a lot and also learned that within failure, you can kind of dust yourself up and get out and try it again.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in my travels with Hercule said, if you have ever chance to kind of move to the principal side, you should think about doing that. And at the time, there really wasn't much in lower middle market consumer investing out there. Most of the deals were being done by generalist firms. But I had this entrepreneurial freaking want to do something different. So in the mid-90s, I moved over to Hong Kong and helped open the Hong Kong office for Payne Weber, where I really focused on the M&A and consumer products and tried to bring U.S. companies over to China and tried to put deals together there.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Kirk, I learned a lot. Number one is I would go to Kirk with the spreadsheets and say why this one company should buy another company or why this one company should sell a brand. And even though he was the number one research analyst on Wall Street, he didn't really understand the numbers very well. But he was asking me questions about the brand. What did I know about the management team? How did the sales going? All these questions that I had no idea on the answers because I was just into my Lotus 123 spreadsheet. But in working with Herc he kind of dragged me all over the world being these great consumer product companies. So I would go to Germany to meet Myersdorf and Cow to meet Japan. And I really fell in love with the consumer product space and the brand building area.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really enjoyed the people on the trading desk because they were really a bunch of characters. They had these really kind of bold, loud personalities, et cetera. And there was a lot of trading that took place at the time that was much more kind of gut and feel and kind of relationship, et cetera. And they were really interesting folks. At the end of the day, I was just really more interested in this corporate finance. Something I've always wanted to try and want to give it a go. And so I ended up in the corporate finance department and I started working for a guy named Hercules Segalis, which was probably one of the great.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the chance to work in corporate finance. I had the chance to work in municipal finance on sales and trading. I worked in a retail office. Really learned a lot about the business. They picked four kids a year to go back to business school. So they would send us up to Columbia full scholarship, full salary, and it was a wonderful thing. I applied, I assumed that I was not going to get into the program because I set my wedding date during the first term of business school. And shockingly to my fianc ⁇ e and now my wife, I was accepted to Columbia. And off I went and did that for two years and then came back to the corporate finance area of Fane Weber.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was trading oriented. And I was told I did a good job because I had long skinny arms and I could get the tickets into the pits of the commodities exchange. So it was kind of pre-technology and having these long skinny arms I think was a real help back then. And as I was going more on Wall Street, I heard about this program, these financial analysts working in the corporate finance area. And at the time, there weren't a lot of those on Wall Street and there were this really wonderful kind of glamorous job and I wanted to do that. I was getting turned down by everyone as I was writing letters to try to interview, with the exception of Payne Weber again. And they invited me to come in for an interview and I interviewed there. And that went well. And during that day of interviews, they said I should also consider another program that they were opening up. And that was called the Corporate Intern Program, which sounded like a terrible name, but it was an interesting program where they hired 10 kids out of college, and we rotated around the firm for two years to really understand the business and really learn all the different”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I grew up in St. Louis and Summit, New Jersey, and I was a soccer player. I was going to head down to Davidson College to play soccer down there. And I needed a summer job. Some of my father's friends said I should get a job on Wall Street because they don't work very long hours and they make good money. And as an 18-year-old, I thought that would be a great job. So I wrote a bunch of letters to all these Wall Street firms and got turned down by everyone with the exception of one. Payne Weber sent me an acceptance letter without even interviewing me. So I showed my first day. They didn't know what to do with a summer one. I think it was probably a mistake that they sent me an acceptance letter. And they ended up working four summers for Pain Weber on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Commodities Exchange, and the back offices, and really learned a lot about the guts of Wall Street.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's first meeting is Mike Mose, the general partner at VMG Partners, which is one of those little-known closed-capacity private equity firms that a small number of top institutions have loyally invested with since its founding fifteen years ago. VMG manages $2 billion focused solely on building iconic consumer brands and has an astonishing record of delivering a forty five percent IRR to its LPs since inception. Our conversation covers Mike's path from banking to private equity investing, VMG's thesis in the CPG space, its investment criteria, sourcing, work with portfolio companies, assessment of brands, and exit strategy. We then discuss the firm's decision-making process, how it built a business with a core group of LPs, and the global Of brands and work in China. Please enjoy my first meeting with Mike Mose of VMG Part.”
2020-03-02 · Capital Allocators · Mike Mauzé - Escape Velocity for CPG Brands at VMG Partners (First Meeting, EP.16) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source