So the number one consumer preference wasnt matched by assortment. In just three years, it expanded rapidly with direct-to-consumer sales online, reaching revenue of $140 million last year. You sort of look back at the end of the month and go, Man! . He said that Oftentimes the companies in the space that have raised the least money are the long-term winners because they have to focus on their consumer. There are a lot of examples of this. Before teaming up to found Chainalysis, CEO Michael Gronager, 49, cofounded cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, while CTO Jan Moller, 47, built the Mycelium cryptocurrency wallet. The most recent transaction was a purchase order of 55,000 units , worth Click here to see the complete history of Stuart Landesbergs form 4 insider trades. The New York Giants were playing. The work that I was doing was a lot of junior-level stuff: running analyses, bringing in our presentations, working closely with management teams to make sure that we could accurately portray their businesses and understand their businesses as we considered investing. But I dont think theres ever a moment, and I still dont feel like theres a moment of like liftoff. The first round was like $280,000, and I was so proud of it. The company had raised $150 million in its Series D round, led by Lone Pine Capital, General Atlantic, and Glynn Capital; along with new investor Greenspring Associates. Stuart Landesberg: From Is he going to fund the term sheet? The day they funded, we had $40,000. So what was the experience for you guys? The program also is designed to improve the working conditions of participating member companies. I think thats a little bit of whats behind the A-players hire A-players saying. It was so close, and this group Serious Change out of New York; they didnt blink. So we started guiding to the flywheel, and it felt really good. I love the potential that our category already has for a positive change. Chris and Jordan both are I cannot say enough good things about them as individuals, as partners, and I cannot stress how important or how valuable it is to have great people as partners on this entrepreneur journey. That was cool. Then do it again, and over time wed look at the aggregation of those results, and its been a very solid run. I cut a personal check for like 10 Grand to make sure that we made payroll. Other key executives at Virgin Group Acquisition Corp II include The stock was acquired at an average price of $0.34 per share, with a total value of $20,400.00. 16. Currently, Lee is practicing the smidgen of Chinese that he picked up while visiting the Chinese mainland in hopes of someday being able to read certain historical texts in their original language. Grove has a partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation. Stock quotes provided by InterActive Data. sale Yan forecasts revenue will hit $120 million this year, helped by large contracts with retailers Dollar General, Rite Aid and Steve Madden. And it wasnt like there was a breakout moment. Chris, actually, had a small sock business that was sold; argyle socks called Oberon Socks. You think of them as a big machine and greater than any one person. Seventy-five or so took muse with us. Just enter your email below. 10. 2. Ken Martin . While working on cybersecurity in the military, they came up with the idea for Cybereason, a cloud-based cybersecurity platform specializing in continuous monitoring and response to advanced cybersecurity threats. At TPG, I had the opportunity to cover the grocery space and learned that Seventh Generation is actually a relatively small company in the consumer package good landscape, and that non-foods TPG is a category that has two really interesting characteristics for their division. Only the transactions in Open Market or Private Sale at the market prices are included. What makes a great partner, at least in my mind, I suppose there are three accesses that I think about. Grove has been able to effect change in the natural products market because the Grove community believes in the importance of having a noble mission and following through on protecting the environment while offering excellent products to its consumer. To scale up quickly, the Mountain View, California-based company offered a free, open-source version to hook developers. When we closed our Series A, I had more money on a personal credit card in the business than we had cash in the bank account. Jordan actually went to a rival high school. We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. So how was TPG Growth for you? Then raised our Series C from Norwest at the end of that year. In summary, during the past 3 months, insiders sold 0 shares of Virgin Group Acquisition Corp II (VGII.U) in total and bought 0 shares, with a net There were a lot of small angel rounds. Each shopper is provided with a personal shopper and solution provider which the company names as a Grove Guide. and Stuart Landesberg: Yeah. What was the big takeaway for you from this experience? I wish that I could have that time back and put it back into the customer. We had a really great 2017. Thats because the store brands have an average of 95% excess water. : So two co-founders: Jordan Savage who is our Creative Director and fantastic guy, and Chris Clark who is also terrific, whos our CTO. Yeah because at the end of the day, youve got to prepare your board members as best as you can, and share all the issues that youre dealing with, not making anything look good or any of that stuff because just being transparent and like you were saying, authentic with whatever the companys facing, youre ultimately preparing your board members better to help you. That was cool. Then do it again, and over time wed look at the aggregation of those results, and its been a very solid run. I think thats a little bit of whats behind the A-players hire A-players saying. Stuart Landesberg: It was a crazy experience, sad, educational, and really formative. The company has the same belief system as its customers. Grove, which has been a B Corp since its founding, serves hundreds of thousands of households in the U.S. At least it was for us, and so I would remind myself that we could not put too much energy into that customer interaction. I am far from the primary source of leadership at this time. Financial institutions use the technology to screen customers and comply with regulations designed to prevent money laundering, while government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can identify illicit transactions and investigate alleged criminals. I have the pleasure of knowing him personally, so a really great guy and probably one of the best investors out there today. He says it is part of the DNA of Grove as a company. How was that experience for you? A couple that I remember in particular, we raised our seed round in January of 2016, I think. I had a lot of conviction that the category could move from offline to online and also from conventional to natural, and at the intersection of those two trends, it was possible to go into business that was both very big and that had a positive impact on the world. Stuart Landesberg: So two co-founders: Jordan Savage who is our Creative Director and fantastic guy, and Chris Clark who is also terrific, whos our CTO. They sit on a lot of boards. He went above and beyond in creating a really awesome video that shows what the lifecycle of a particular shipment from getting picked to going out the door. It was close a lot of times. Grove does factory audits before the collaborative does business with them. Those folks have been, again, really terrific capital partners. It was scary. Companies started to use their own bunny logos to let customers know they were in some way animal friendly. I suppose those two things had to adjust for a little while to understand how to actually put them together. Mr. Landesberg co-founded Grove Collaborative in 2012 and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since inception. If anyone listening ever has an opportunity to work with Josh Mehlman or anyone from the Serious Change family I cant speak highly enough about the folks at Serious Change, Nestle Ventures, and MHS Group, and Pennington Capital Ventures Group, the four largest participants in our seed round. This is when the founder Amar G.Bose first opened his doors, Read More The History of and Story Behind the Bose LogoContinue, Karat Packaging is an American manufacturing company that offers printing and packaging services to its customers. Those are a few suggestions, and I think as always being clear upfront about board expectations is really important. That stuff is really exciting, and so I, as you can probably tell, think extraordinarily high of our management team, so I try to incorporate our management team into board meetings as much as possible. I mean, I see at least a publicly-reported 165 million. But what was the experience before that happened? Throughout his time in finance, he focused on global technology and retail investments. Read More 10 Companies Similar to RobinhoodContinue, Bose is a firmly established American company that specializes in the manufacture of sound system equipment. Grove was required to think carefully about everything including best practices, ratio of highest paid employees to lowest, and company equity. $9.18K . You may opt-out by, 7 Unicorns, A $2.6 Billion Acquisition And 1 FBI Raid: This Year In Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups, These Forbes 30 Under 30 Founders Are Now Running The Next Billion-Dollar Startups, Why Only Two Companies Founded By Women Made The Cut, Cryptocurrency Crimefighter Chainalysis Becomes First Blockchain Company To Make The Cut, The Next Billion-Dollar Startups: Where Are They Now? Stock Ideas All-In-One Screener S&P 500 Map S&P 500 Bubble S&P 500 Aggregate Buffett-Munger Screener Industry Overview Undervalued Predictable Benjamin Graham Net-Net 52-week/3Y/5Y Lows 52-week/3Y/5Y Highs Magic Formula(Greenblatt) Dividend Stocks Peter Lynch Screen S&P500 Grid Predictable Companies Spin Off List : The second piece is that it wasnt the money in the Series A that led to the business transformation. The information on this site, and in its related newsletters, is not intended to be, nor does it constitute investment advice or recommendations. If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. Looking at the numbers for December, I was like, Oh my gosh, we are going to go out of business.. Whats on shelf at most grocery stores and retail stores is driven by big brands that have extraordinary marketing budgets and hundreds of billions of dollars of trade stand. : The first four years, candidly, were kind of a scary experience. But Im aligned with your point. December is a seasonally bad month for us, but it was a particularly bad season of December that year. I definitely feel that. , a net Mar 6, 2020 Stuart Landesberg. 13. : I sure was. We never gave up on listening to the consumer, make a little more progress, listen to the consumer, continue to evolve the experience. I think my own style as an executive, as a startup founder is definitely influenced by the folks who I most looked up to as a young professional at TPG. So I knew Jordan just a little bit in high school, and then he moved out to San Francisco, and we reconnected when he got out here. Landesberg believes that Grove makes it possible for people to avoid single use consumption in their homes. I'm Ken Martin. I dont see it as either I work for the board or the board works for me. Every day became closer and closer to the ultimate reality. Founders (and high school buddies) Alex Bean and Blake Murray, both 35, have won over more than 3,000 corporate customers so far, including WordPress, Evernote and Qualtrics. For the people that are listening, what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi? (Individuals are still free.) Stuart Landesberg currently owns a total of 1 How did the idea of Grove come together? Thanks, so much for having me. We got into this really positive cycle where all the sudden for the first time we had true subject matter experts in marketing, in product development, in a lot of areas, and that helped us scale more quickly than we ever had been able to in the past. WebStuart Landesberg is Pres/CEO/Co-Founder at Grove Collaborative Holdings. Sure, thats a trying thing emotionally. Over the past 18 months, WebStuart Landesberg General Information. I think I really understood that the most from watching the leaders with whom I most identified at TPG. Alejandro: I dont believe everything I read. Stuart Landesberg is the director & 10 percent owner & President & CEO of Grove Collaborative Holdings Inc. It was scary. Running in an undercapitalized startup where you only sort of have product/market fit, in my experience, was extraordinarily stressful. Alejandro: Just so that our listeners understand, it is basically a subscription-type of experience. We might have had an adult beverage or two throughout the game. Its crazy to think that, in retrospect, I spent four years on this without seeing it breakout. But Bullpens mantra is to do unusual deals, and they did this one. Dude, theres got to be a price. Pauls a really great guy. : Got it. The business is forming well. During the past 18 months, 0 shares of Virgin Group Acquisition Corp II (VGII.U) were sold and 0 shares were bought by its insiders, resulting in a net Over time, we evolved it to a point where we said, Okay. I think that is one of the jobs the board plays, and it is extremely important. You think of them as a big machine and greater than any one person. Okay, and I think we're ready to go. I think that the leaders at Grove who are most successful and the leaders in our context are not just the senior people at the company, but they range from we had an associate at one of our fulfillment centers. But doing a pivot is also quite scary. Alejandro: Obviously, when youre looking on the investment side, and you take a look at companies that make sense versus companies that dont make sense, what were some of those patterns that you were able to recognize? So when the tragic bankruptcy happened, it was incredible to watch the gears really grind to a halt as people stopped being able to do their jobs, and seeing the extent to which even giant companies like Lehman are really just the combination of collaborative efforts of a lot of great people. And it wasnt like there was a breakout moment. Mr. Cervantes joined Grove in 2022 as its Chief Financial Officer. Stuart Landesberg is We actually changed the name to Grove at that time, and the changes that we made based on the insights of those first four years have been the things that fueled the growth of the company so rapidly over the last two-and-a-half years or so. And that counts, especially for many of the folks on our board. : I dont believe everything I read. So in 2013, she launched the San Francisco-based startup to help companies become more productive with a shared email inbox that incorporates Facebook, Twitter and SMS, and encourages team collaboration. We got that round done, and then it took us 19 months and a bunch of bridge rounds between there and the time when we had when I had twice as much money on my personal credit card as we had in the company bank account before we raised our Series A. We offer a really curated selection of 1,000 SKUs, some of which are from national brands like Seventh Generation, Mrs. Meyers Method, some of which are from brands that we owned and developed in-house. I think this goes back to one of the early things I learned from computers is that if the truth exists, its always better to name it even if its not right. This is a BETA experience. Today, professionals pay $12 per editor per month and businesses $45 per editor month to use Figma. Alejandro: Right, and then after this, you did a little bit of a stint at Vincraft Group, and then after that, you went into TPG Growth, which Im sure taught you a lot about the way that you see and work with companies, more on the investment side. That research caught problems at San Francisco-based Cleo, a parenting app with a troubled workplace and a CEO who lied about her age and background. Mr. Landesberg earned a B.A. 8. How did the idea of Grove come together? purchase I consider many of the people brought on board as friends, mentors, I learn a lot from them, and I super-enjoy working with them. They get it delivered, and they pay a subscription fee for that. Ms. Perry received a M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business and a B.A. Most use the free version of its gamified courses. On the other hand, we also wouldnt be as successful if our board members werent happy to hop on the phone at a moments notice about any issue. Get the full list, Morningstar Institutional Equity Research. Leaping Bunny certified manufacturers make certain that products are 100% cruelty free. See Stuart Landesberg's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. Its awesome to know that I have that partnership. Your email address will not be published. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. Today, it offers 5,000 brands to 35,000 stores. But youve really been on the tough side of the equation, and now, obviously, its a different story, but Im sure that youve learned a lot. The first one, MHS, and Nestle in particular, those two firms really stepped up and supported the company then as well. Ive experienced investors who have a little bit of an entitlement, and they think the company does the work, and the investor sees some of the returns. But really, none of us had really built and scaled a consumer e-commerce business. sale I guess leadership is defined differently for everyone in every context, and I dont think theres one definition of a leader. You mentioned earlier that it took you four years or so to do your Series A, so would it be possible for you to walk us through the fundraising journey? To view Stuart Landesbergs complete investments history, request access, To view Stuart Landesbergs complete exits history, request access, To view Stuart Landesbergs complete team members history, request access, Youre viewing 5 of 29 co-investors. Its easy to understand why.