It’s no secret that COVID-19 has had a massive impact on the fitness industry. Even before the pandemic hit, the fitness space was undergoing a digital transformation with exciting innovations in nearly every facet of the exercise experience — weight training, group classes, in-home gadgets, wearables…you name it. When quarantine suddenly cut off the use of shared physical workout spaces and limited in-person contact, that industry disruption leapt into hyperdrive.

Caliber is shaping the future of fitness with its full-stack model spanning strength training, cardio and nutrition — all provided via a one-on-one virtual coaching platform.

Beyond the clear market need and timing, we chose to invest in Caliber because of the impressive strength of their founding team (pun intended). Founder and CEO Jared Cluff has a proven track record of scaling brands with an analytical marketing focus and great product sense. He was the marketing force behind scaling Blue Apron to $800M in revenue, where he honed his health and wellness insights through the lens of nutrition. Jared’s co-founders Justin Fauci and Chris Muir have deep domain expertise in the fitness arena, having spent several years creating high-quality content and developing the Caliber training methodology through their work with clients. The combination of these skillsets was extremely compelling, and it was clear they were the right team to go after this market.

At Trinity, Caliber fits perfectly into our investment thesis around when-and-where-you-want-it mobile services.

The magic of Caliber is how it combines the best of both worlds, incorporating human-in-the-loop accountability and personalization, alongside the convenience, engagement and intelligence of a mobile app. The value that Caliber provides is powerful for consumers, given that most in-person training costs upwards of $100 per hour. The platform is also built with AI technology that provides significant leverage for trainers whose livelihoods have been severely impacted by the effects of Coronavirus.

Caliber, with $2.2 million in seed funding, launches a fitness coaching platform

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Caliber to reinvent the future of fitness training. Congratulations, Jared and team!

The Future of Full-Stack Fitness: Our Investment in Caliber was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the direct-to-consumer movement has demonstrated, magical things can happen at the intersection of consumer goods and technology, and ManiMe is a clear manifestation of that magic in the beauty space.

I first met ManiMe founders Jooyeon Song and David Miró Llopis when they were students at Stanford Business School taking the StartUp Garage course that I teach. During the two quarters of the class, Jooyeon and David incubated a novel idea: offering a custom fit stick-on gel manicure leveraging a mobile app to 3D model the users’ nail beds. The consumer propositions of speed, convenience, and affordability relative to salon manicures, as well as accessibility to cool nail art were all compelling, and that was before the Coronavirus pandemic added safety to the list!

Trinity participated in ManiMe’s seed round and today we are delighted to share that we are co-leading the series A with our friends at Canaan. Our excitement and conviction around ManiMe is all about the company’s delightful and ever-improving user experience, its excellent market timing, and the unique community of designers it is building.

An awesome product.

The entire ManiMe experience feels unique and highly customized, because it is. If you’ve never used the product before, here’s how it works.

From day one, the founding team has been building and iterating, listening closely to customers and using that feedback to continually make the product better. Their obsession with delighting customers is clear from start to finish with their beautiful website, super cool nail art designs, easy smartphone 3D scan process, stunning packaging and simple-to-follow instructions for a perfect DIY gel manicure from home.

Their hard work is paying off with impressive growth from word of mouth and enviable earned media for a business at their size and stage. Case in point: ManiMe was named a 2020 winner of Allure’s Best of Beauty Breakthrough Awards.

Excellent timing.

Let’s face it — DIY at-home manicures are having a serious moment. The first case of novel Coronavirus in California was traced to a nail salon and the pandemic has dealt a major blow to the salon industry. One of the core values of ManiMe has always been eliminating the many dangers and downsides of a nail salon experience — chemicals, sanitation, time, inconvenience, cost — which have now only been heightened in the current era of social distancing.

Beyond that, though, ManiMe is well-positioned to capitalize on the broader long term trend toward mobile-first, when-and-where-you-need-it services. Trinity has been investing consistently behind this trend with companies like 10% Happier, Relish, Caliber Fitness, and Zero. ManiMe takes this trend one step further by also incorporating a physical product.

A first-of-its-kind community.

Perhaps the most transformative part of the ManiMe mission is to build a community of nail artists and designers who can use the platform to not only showcase and scale the availability of their unique craft around the world, but also to connect with and support one another. Direct to consumer companies like Minted have demonstrated the power of creating communities for other types of designers, and we are excited for ManiMe to see similar success.

As an example of the power of this community, ManiMe introduced their CARE collection, uniting 11 diverse nail artists to “support marginalized and vulnerable communities” through unique designs that contribute 100% of profits to the Movement for Black Lives Fund and PBA COVID-19 Relief Fund.

In the wake of past national crises, I’ve written about the ways that startups are uniquely positioned to take a stand on important social issues. At a time when all brands are thinking more than ever about their responsibility to drive positive change in the world, ManiMe is setting a beautiful and inspiring example of using the powerful influence of business for good.

With fresh capital, there are many exciting directions that the ManiMe team can pursue as it applies technology to beauty services. We’re proud to provide the rocket fuel to power their ongoing innovation and growth.

Congratulations, ManiMe!

Welcome to ManiMe was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was honored to represent the multifaceted perspectives of the Venture Capital industry and startup ecosystem at the U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights in Washington, D.C in my capacity as a National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) Board Member. This topic is obviously of critical importance not only to the health of the tech ecosystem but also to the health of our broader economy. It’s my hope that whatever actions regulators take will enable founders to retain the incentives they need to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. I was encouraged by both the level of thoughtful discourse as well as the bipartisan interest in maintaining our country’s legacy of innovation.

Here were the core themes in my statement:

• The VC-backed startup ecosystem has been an important driver of the US economy. We would hope that any new regulation would not hamper that critical economic growth and job creation.
• M&A is vital to the tech ecosystem’s ongoing success. While a few standout companies IPO and grow into the next generation of standalone, independent companies, most startups will never meet that threshold. For those companies, acquisition — often by big tech firms like Google, Facebook and Amazon — is an important exit option to preserve.
• Any action that legislators take against Big Tech should not kill the “golden goose” that is entrepreneurship. In other words, we would not want the unintended consequence of actions taken to enable more competition to actually reduce it.

Some of my observations from the hearing:

• Entrepreneurship enjoys bipartisan support. So does concern about Big Tech. The legislators came across as wanting to do what they could to support the innovation economy as well as consumers.
• There was a lot of discussion about the FTC’s past decisions around certain acquisitions. The problem is that it’s a hard task to predict whether a nascent competitor will grow into a strong one.
• Washington’s understanding of the VC/startups/tech world is nascent, but they are making an effort to learn.
• VCs/startups/tech’s understanding of Washington is also nascent. That needs to change, too. Government policies on everything from immigration to CFIUS, data privacy and antitrust impact our core businesses. We can’t afford to be uninformed or uninvolved.

Tremendous thanks to the NVCA for their efforts in support of this hearing and ongoing dialogue with lawmakers.

See below for the video replay of the hearing and here for my full written testimony.

View From the Hill: A VC’s Perspective on the Impact of Antitrust Regulation on Early Stage… was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You have to love a pitch that makes you laugh — and even better that makes you think (while laughing).

I knew superstar serial entrepreneur Lesley Eccles was onto something when she said, “The failure rate for marriages is 50 percent. If there were any product that had that kind of failure rate, you’d throw it out and start over.”

Her sentiment didn’t simply ring true; it embodied the kind of simple consumer and market insight we believe form the basis for great startups.

At the end of the day, nothing is more important than our relationships with the people we love. Yet in our busy lives, it’s so hard to find the time and justify the expense of proactively nurturing those relationships. Plus, much of what’s available doesn’t work. Most advice from self-help books, online searches, and friends and family are inconsistent in quality and are frequently biased, unactionable and backed by opinions, not data.

Marriage counseling has been the only personalized, (mostly) science-backed option, but it’s so massively inconvenient and expensive (while also still inconsistent in quality) that most people only engage with it once their relationships have slipped into distress — at which point 1 in 5 people seek therapy.

Relish is the first-ever truly personalized relationship training app that makes it easy to build a happy, healthy, more connected relationship with your partner. Instead of investing dozens of hours in inconvenient, hours-long, several-hundred-dollar-per-session meetings, couples can spend $99 per couple per year to fit expert advice into small, actionable moments, whenever time allows and whenever, wherever it’s needed. The app packs a powerful punch, with lessons, weekly interactive check-ins and unlimited access to a qualified relationship coach. In short, Relish is an always-available, scientifically-backed personal trainer for your relationships.

As an investor, I’ve been very interested in startups that deliver high-value content through paid mobile apps. While for the vast majority of our internet history consumers have expected their content to be free, in recent years consumers have indicated an eagerness to pay for high-quality, trustworthy content that helps them invest in their own well-being. It started with meditation and fitness, and now with Relish, the model is extending to relationships.

Of course, investing is never just about the business model or addressable market. Particularly in the early seed stages, so much of the investment calculus has to focus on the entrepreneur herself. After all, the founder/investor dynamic lasts a long time — longer than many marriages in fact — and has to be embarked upon with eyes wide open.

It’s precisely because I know full well what I’m getting into that I’m ecstatic to begin this journey with Lesley. The former co-founder, EVP, board member and marketing brain behind billion-dollar sports startup FanDuel, Lesley built that company into a global billion-dollar organization with over 500 employees worldwide and 6 million active playing users.

Her amazing journey at FanDuel, which included hugely stressful ups and downs alongside her co-founder husband, is captured in the recently released book Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High Stakes Game Between FanDuel & DraftKings that Upended Sports in America. During the journey, she learned first-hand how hard it can be to nurture the relationships that matter, especially during points of stress and transition. Yet, the two of them made it through to the other side. To survive an emotional roller coaster of this magnitude, they clearly both had to think about, focus on, and make their relationship a priority through that process — and no doubt they learned a great deal through that experience. Lesley jokes that through co-founding a fantasy sports company, she spent ten years of her career ruining relationships through fantasy sports…so the least she can do is spend the next ten years fixing them!

With Relish, Lesley is leaning into her deep app marketing functional experience. She knows how to acquire users, leverage unit economics and test every element to perfection. She’s a data savant, eager to apply machine learning with human intervention in the form of actionable, customized, scientifically-backed relationship plans developed by leading psychologists and coaches to improve communication, deepen connections and rekindle feeling of intimacy among couples.

FanDuel Co-Founder's New App Offers Couples a Relationship Coach

She’s also widely regarded as an amazing leader. Every person I speak to about her emphasizes how respected she is and how eagerly they’d go into battle with her again. She is a leadership force, a highly regarded executive so confident, accomplished and inspirational that even at this early stage, she has already assembled an all-star team of former employees and partners who jumped at the chance to line up behind her yet again in her newest mission-driven entrepreneurial venture.

Relationships must be entered with care, whether they’re marriages or founder/investor partnerships. It’s with that full knowledge that I couldn’t be more excited to partner with Lesley and the entire Relish team.

Welcome to the Trinity family, Relish!

Introducing Relish, the Personal Trainer for Your Relationships was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, you know that working with the right agent can make all the difference in the world. While in recent years, many new models have emerged for buying and selling homes, ranging from instant offers to rent-to-own, each targeting specific consumer segments and needs, we believe that traditional independent agents will continue to play a central role for a majority of home buyers and sellers.

Historically, real estate agents felt compelled to work with large, established brokerages, especially early in their careers. However, the value that large brokerages previously provided to agents — physical offices, a reputable brand halo, and help with client sourcing — has been eroded by new technologies and changing consumer expectations. For many agents, the downsides of working with brokerages (i.e. high fee structures and bureaucracy) far outweigh the benefits.

Buyers and sellers have embraced the web as an integral component of the house hunting process. Ninety-three percent of home buyers and ninety-nine percent of millennials search online. Entrepreneurial agents leverage services like Zillow and Trulia to source leads, and many have built sales teams to help scale their businesses. Over the last decade, this shift has completely upended the power dynamic between brokerages and agents, making traditional residential real estate brokerages ripe for disruption.

I’m thrilled to be backing an exciting startup called Side that is building the real estate brokerage of the future.

Unlike traditional real estate brokerages, Side is:

● White-Label, so it’s the agent that shines, not the brokerage — Side is laser-focused on delivering as much value as possible to agents, helping them to build their own brands and businesses. Side helps agents with everything from logo design to team recruitment to system implementation.

● State-of-the-art technology — Side’s platform (1) automates transaction management, saving agents valuable time and reducing errors, (2) curates and integrates best-of-breed technology for front-end services like customer relationship management, and (3) helps agents manage their teams and their pipelines.

● Fully Virtual — Real estate agents are mobile workers and don’t want to bear the overhead of a brokerage office, either because they don’t need one or because they already have their own for their team. Side recognizes this and has designed its technology to be truly mobile-first.

Side is well-positioned for the future of real estate, given the long-term pressure on real estate agent commissions. With its leading-edge technology platform and virtual approach, Side is able to offer agents low commission splits while delivering the highest service levels. When we conducted our diligence, we heard powerful and inspiring stories from Side’s agent partners about how Side is helping them take their businesses to the next level. Their excitement was palpable and a huge motivator for our investment.

Side founders Guy Gal, Ed Wu, and Hilary Saunders possess deep empathy for agents. They are highly strategic about how they can create maximum value for their agent customers, and they bring strong technical and product chops to the table to execute their vision. We couldn’t be more excited to support Guy, Ed, Hilary and the rest of the Side team with our Series B investment. You can read more from Inman’s Teke Wiggin here.

Welcome to the Trinity Family, Side!

Side Helps Real Estate Agents Shine was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Less than two years ago, as we announced Turo’s Series C financing, I wrote that Turo’s peer-to-peer car sharing platform was shifting into high gear. Back then, Turo was just hitting a key inflection point that is critical for the growth of sharing economy firms, when power users realize the potential of a platform to enable their entrepreneurial dreams. It’s comparable to early eBay power sellers and Airbnb renters first realizing the potential to build real business on those platforms and as a part of those communities.

If back then Turo was shifting into high gear, today as they announced their $92 million Series D, the company has officially shifted into overdrive.

As an investor in Turo, I see today’s announcement as a validation of Turo’s truly global opportunity to help the world rethink the notion of car ownership. Thanks to Turo’s mission to make mobility accessible to everyone, millions of consumers will be empowered to go where they want, when they want, in vehicles of their choosing. Rather than belonging to a generic fleet lacking either vehicle choice or convenient locations, those vehicles will belong to Turo’s vibrant community of newly minted car rental micro-entrepreneurs spanning North America, Europe and beyond.

The sky’s the limit for what Turo and their four million users can achieve, and I know we’ll all enjoy the ride!

Turo Shifts Into High Gear

Originally published November 3, 2015

Today, Turo shifts into high gear with a new brand and a $47M Series C round to expand its peer-to-peer car sharing platform internationally. It’s an exciting milestone for the company formerly known as RelayRides, and one that positions it to leave U.S. competitors in the dust as it undergoes the next stage in its evolution into a category-defining global marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces typically start with casual owners/sellers interested in making some money on the side, but hit an exciting inflection point as power sellers begin to recognize the economic opportunity to scaling up their activities into bona fide small businesses. Turo has hit that inflection point.

Turo is following in the footsteps of other iconic online marketplaces like eBay and AirBnB. eBay started with hobbyists and collectors selling idiosyncratic inventory to buyers who couldn’t find the same items anywhere else, but progressed to full-time small business owners who found they could make a living selling on eBay’s platform. Similarly, AirBnB started with urban apartment dwellers hoping to earn extra cash to make ends meet, but now attracts sophisticated owners who rent out multiple properties as a steady source of cash flow. Today, as activity on Turo’s platform is accelerating exponentially, savvy vehicle owners are doubling down by reinvesting car sharing profits into new vehicle assets that can be used to expand their earnings potential. Turo’s marketplace allows these microentrepreneurs to thrive, providing marketing and distribution infrastructure that they could not develop on their own. When you start to see sellers engaging ever more deeply with your platform, you know you’ve hit on a winning formula.

Turo’s evolution as the world’s leading peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace has been accelerated and magnified by a generational shift in Millennial attitudes toward asset ownership. Specifically, Millennials are more willing to share their assets as part of Shared Economies that offer them greater flexibility (“Why not rent my car when I’m not using it to earn extra cash?”) and are more willing to tap into assets provided by these marketplaces in lieu of formal ownership. When it comes to cars in particular, studies have demonstrated that many Millennials care more about the freedom afforded by car rentals than they do about the status afforded by car ownership, a dramatic departure from previous generations who looked at car ownership as an important rite of passage. Millennials are also a diverse and globally aware generation interested in opportunities for cultural exchange with the global community, another advantage presented by Turo’s focus on building a trusting community for peer-to-peer car rentals.

We are thrilled to be investors in Turo and are looking forward to the road ahead. Congratulations to the company and to KPCB as the leaders of this latest financing. With CEO Andre Haddad and his talented team behind the wheel, we know Turo will go exciting places!

Turo Goes Full Throttle was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, Turo shifts into high gear with a new brand and a $47M Series C round to expand its peer-to-peer car sharing platform internationally. It’s an exciting milestone for the company formerly known as RelayRides, and one that positions it to leave U.S. competitors in the dust as it undergoes the next stage in its evolution into a category-defining global marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces typically start with casual owners/sellers interested in making some money on the side, but hit an exciting inflection point as power sellers begin to recognize the economic opportunity to scaling up their activities into bona fide small businesses. Turo has hit that inflection point.

Turo is following in the footsteps of other iconic online marketplaces like eBay and AirBnB. eBay started with hobbyists and collectors selling idiosyncratic inventory to buyers who couldn’t find the same items anywhere else, but progressed to full-time small business owners who found they could make a living selling on eBay’s platform. Similarly, AirBnB started with urban apartment dwellers hoping to earn extra cash to make ends meet, but now attracts sophisticated owners who rent out multiple properties as a steady source of cash flow. Today, as activity on Turo’s platform is accelerating exponentially, savvy vehicle owners are doubling down by reinvesting car sharing profits into new vehicle assets that can be used to expand their earnings potential. Turo’s marketplace allows these microentrepreneurs to thrive, providing marketing and distribution infrastructure that they could not develop on their own. When you start to see sellers engaging ever more deeply with your platform, you know you’ve hit on a winning formula.

Turo’s evolution as the world’s leading peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace has been accelerated and magnified by a generational shift in Millennial attitudes toward asset ownership. Specifically, Millennials are more willing to share their assets as part of Shared Economies that offer them greater flexibility (“Why not rent my car when I’m not using it to earn extra cash?”) and are more willing to tap into assets provided by these marketplaces in lieu of formal ownership. When it comes to cars in particular, studies have demonstrated that many Millennials care more about the freedom afforded by car rentals than they do about the status afforded by car ownership, a dramatic departure from previous generations who looked at car ownership as an important rite of passage. Millennials are also a diverse and globally aware generation interested in opportunities for cultural exchange with the global community, another advantage presented by Turo’s focus on building a trusting community for peer-to-peer car rentals.

We are thrilled to be investors in Turo and are looking forward to the road ahead. Congratulations to the company and to KPCB as the leaders of this latest financing. With CEO Andre Haddad and his talented team behind the wheel, we know Turo will go exciting places!

Turo Shifts Into High Gear was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Looking Picture-Perfect

Today thredUP announced an exciting milestone: an $81 million growth financing led by Goldman Sachs. Trinity led thredUP’s Series A financing 5 years ago, and we wanted to take this moment to congratulate the team and reflect on the company’s journey to this point. Startups often begin their lives like fuzzy pictures where you can make out some of the major features, such as the founders, market size, and customer pain point, but where there is blurriness around how the business will actually work; over time, with perseverance and hard work, the startup’s “picture” comes into sharper focus. Indeed thredUP has followed this trajectory.

When we first invested in thredUP, the company had half a dozen employees and was based in Boston, though the team was willing to move out to the Bay Area. The parts of the thredUP picture we could make out at the time were the following: the CEO James Reinhart was a charismatic leader, passionate about improving second hand clothes buying, and a deep and careful thinker about the consumer experience; he had attracted a talented group of co-founders and initial employees; and the size of the market for second hand clothes as proven by brick and mortar retailer, Savers was significant. As a mother of three, I was living first hand the pain point of perpetually cleaning out the clothes in my kids drawers and having few attractive alternatives for getting rid of them.

But many specifics around thredUP’s business model were not yet clear. thredUP started as a peer to peer box-swapping model but there were two critical unknowns: how many consumers would go to the effort of selling their own items directly to others, and can the buyer experience be consistent enough to drive high repeat purchase behavior? The answers turned out to be not enough, and no. So thredUP pivoted to an “augmented marketplace” model whereby it does all the work for the seller and ensures a consistent experience for the buyer.

Over the last few years, thredUP has achieved a number of milestones that have brought greater clarity to the potential of the business. Perhaps most importantly, the company expanded its leadership team to include world-class operations and marketing talent. It then expanded beyond kids’ clothes into women’s clothes and accessories and opened a second distribution center on the east coast. At the same time, thredUP relentlessly fine-tuned the economic levers of the business to drive profitability while providing great value to suppliers and buyers.

Over the years, thredUP’s mission has remained consistent: to inspire a new generation of consumers to think second-hand first. Today the company is clear on how it will fulfill its mission and, thanks to this growth financing, it has the fuel in its tank to deliver.

The thredUP opportunity is now crystal clear — and it’s a beautiful picture!

thredUP was originally published in Trinity Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.