To Invest or Not to Invest: The VC Question about Digital Brands

This may be controversial, but I don’t believe there will be another billion dollar digital mono-brand IPO-ing in the next ten years.

Additionally, I’d also posit it’s no longer direct-to-consumer, but direct-to-community.

As Eurie Kim said to me on the phone, “DTC is not a P&L advantage anymore.” Omni-channel is the new normal.

On average, we should expect companies to get to $55–350M in revenues in order to exit — and model exit scenarios off that potential (i.e., not $1B)

On average, all-female founding teams generated a higher exit value than their male counterparts and all-white founding teams raised almost 5 times more (on average) capital than their non-white counterparts.

Raising a lot of money did not necessarily mean a company’s exit value would be higher: 79% of the companies raised less than $50 million in total funding before exiting.

On average, it took most companies almost 6 years to exit, however, the length of time it took a company to exit had no impact on exit value.

There were 5 unicorns in total; The Personal Care & Cosmetics category had the most unicorns with 3.

Companies more often exited via M&A activity (53 of 58, or 92%) than did via an IPO.