Welcome Proxy––the future of digital identity.

West is pleased to announce our investment in Proxy, the provider of digital identities for the physical world. Proxy started with a simple idea that technology should empower us as we move throughout our day. This notion propelled co-founders Denis Mars and Simon Ratner to create a new paradigm that puts people in control of their own unique signal and identity.  Proxy closed on $42 million in a Series B financing bringing the total raised to over $58 million from leading investors including Scale Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue and Y Combinator.

The rapid expansion of our physical and digital worlds has created too many high friction IDs. The average person has upwards of 80 forms of ID spanning these worlds. Everything from our house and car keys to driver’s license, employee or building key card, and barcode for the gym. Each one represents a unique identifier, but these markers are siloed and we don’t own or control them ourselves. 

Proxy is addressing this issue by giving individuals a better way to manage and convey their digital identity. Today, the company is transforming workplaces and buildings by authenticating and interacting with Bluetooth-enabled devices––letting people forego their key cards for a more personal, unique solution. Proxy gives companies and organizations the ability to let their teams navigate seamlessly through the workplace with a personal, unique signal that becomes the identifier, resulting in a more reliable, more enjoyable workplace experience. With Proxy, people can interact with devices in the real world from building doors to cars to connected devices, just by being themselves. It’s why Proxy is already working with the likes of Uber, Cloudflare and Accenture to create more seamless and secure experiences for employees. 

As part of our investment criteria, West is working directly with the Proxy team on the full company brand platform, including critical employer brand artifacts and initiatives that will help empower this next phase of growth. We work with founders and founding teams at inflection points, ones that are building brands with impact, and we couldn’t be more excited about Proxy’s current and future impact on the way we interact with our space. 

"Innovation requires two things. Inventing something people love, and being able to describe it to people. The second is just as important as the first. So we’re excited to partner with West and work closely with their team to help us tell our story and to share our vision of a frictionless world.” 

- Denis Mars, Co-Founder and CEO | Proxy

A Forbes 2019 Next Billion Dollar Startup and Fast Company Most Innovative Honoree, Proxy has just touched the surface of what’s possible for their technology and the future of identity management. Learn more about Proxy here.

After coming through the worst of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, China seems to be experiencing mild success restarting its economy and is being looked to as a positive leading indicator for the rest of the world, including in the US where experts say unfortunately the worst is still 2-3 weeks away. The reality of COVID-19 on the US economy and US businesses remains serious and should not be underestimated. For companies big and small, it’s likely been an incredibly tough week, and in those circumstances, it is hard to see beyond what's just in front of you. But as well as making tough decisions, in times of crisis, leadership requires you to have optimism and hope and an ability to confidently envision what the future holds.

“Please don’t sell this crisis back to me”

Until about a year ago, I was living in China leading digital marketing for Nike’s Greater China (mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong) business. I spent a total of three years in China with my then fiance and now-husband. People often ask us what life was like living and working in a place that for a lot of people feels so foreign, and my common response is that I now feel like I have the cheat codes for the future of marketing everywhere else. As a marketer in the digital era, life in China is like drinking from a firehose - every minute of every hour of every day.

Stanford economist Paul Romer once famously stated, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” I’d held a hunch that Alibaba and Tencent are informing marketing strategy for the next decade here, but seeing new behaviors emerge during shelter-in-place, I now think the stealable tactics may extend even further. Don’t get the wrong idea and this tragic global pandemic shouldn’t turn into a marketing brief. But now more than ever before, it’s the time to LISTEN to your employees, customers, consumers and communities, LEARN from them, and RESPOND with what might end up being some of the greatest innovations of our time, think Alibaba post-SARS in 2003.  

This week and last, I did just that via check-ins or comforting messages from former colleagues and friends. These quick catch-up conversations brought me back to all the ways Internet-life in China was somewhat of a precursor to what is happening here and now. So here are my 5 learnings from China that may “stick” in a current and post-COVID United States:

1) Double-down on social listening and community engagement, and recalibrate infrastructure to be nimble to your customer’s new reality.

During a recent evening reflection, my husband and I talked about how our life during this shelter-in-place period feels familiar to our first winter in Beijing. In the fall of 2016, Beijing issued its first Red Alert––the highest pollution warning––sparking school closures, odd-even driving restrictions, and similar stay at home measures. That winter was the worst pollution season ever on record for Beijing. My colleagues and I would cringe every time we were forced to cancel an outdoor Nike Run Club or Nike Training Club event, flushing tens of thousands of marketing dollars down the drain. 

But during that time, an interesting societal behavior emerged in Beijing, which internally at Nike we lovingly called “DEAR” (Drop Everything And Run): Any time the real-time air quality index (AQI) reading would drop below 50 - a “good” AQI, akin to L.A. on an average day - people would flood the streets and parks on bikes, on foot, with kids and sports equipment in tow, no matter what time of day or day of week it was. Some innovative and empathetic startup companies even started officially allowing a “fresh air leave” benefit. 

This newfound appreciation for the outdoors may certainly be what’s in store for us this summer, but if future pandemics come as frequently as some experts predict, this ‘seize the moment’ way of life could also become our new normal. For startups and scale-up companies of today, how does your current brand platform and customer journey map or dashboard support the new reality for customers? Look for opportunities where you can inject flexibility and authenticity into the foundation of your brand so as to support our shifting sense of normal for today and tomorrow.

2) Explore ways to enable a more customer and front-line friendly service experience.

It’s pretty widely known that China’s mobile POS or proximity mobile payment penetration rate far exceeds the rest of the world, largely due to the leapfrog effect from their never having meaningfully adopted credit cards. Led by tech giants Alibaba (Alipay) and WeChat (WeChat Pay), China’s mobile payment adoption rate is conservatively estimated to exceed 35% of the population, compared to ~8% in the U.S. [Statista].

In this vein, I received an email yesterday evening from a local shop in SF where I take my dog for grooming, alerting customers that effective immediately, all locations are going cashless in an effort to protect the health and safety of their teams and communities. If that is a broad change happening in more than just Mission Bay––and I have a hunch it is––mobile payment adoption may accelerate to catch up with the amount of disruption to consumer and retailer experience this phenomenon has caused for China.

3) Every moment is a content moment. Prioritize timeliness and authenticity over production value. 

Cord-cutting may finally happen en masse, including more frugality around cable media in general, which is the dominant market trend in China.

The reality is, as those same companies run up against a shortage of original programming, and live events and IRL meetups are simultaneously eliminated, more than ever before, we will all miss… the fear of missing out. With screen times up across the board, livestreaming brings that feeling of FOMO back to an at-home world, manufacturing digital flash mobs and injecting a false sense of scarcity to things like flash sales, driving impulse buying and online shopping as a highly social, leisure activity. Beyond livestreaming, as consumers are spending more time on screens, there is more direct load to brand sites than ever before. Refresh your owned platforms to ensure your content is up-to-date and engaging to both your customers as well as investors.

We're already seeing individuals and communities coming together through live stream and video in grassroots ways. This past Saturday, DJ D-Nice’s Instagram Live story peaked at 100k+ viewers, as he spun nine hours straight for the likes of Michelle Obama, Oprah, Diddy, Ava DuVernay, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden, who had all stopped by “Club Quarantine.”

In China’s major cities, public gatherings are heavily regulated (all the time). So online hangouts are ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Alibaba’s TMall has a livestream session, called “2nd Floor” every night that’s meant to feel like gathering your friends and going to the mall. Different brands sponsor it each night. As shelter-in-place continues, new and more sophisticated solutions -- driven by brands and platforms -- will arise that might take a page out of China’s playbook. The platforms that successfully combine the best aspects of OTT + innovative commerce (ex. iQiYi’s shoppable hit shows) or livestreaming + sophisticated e-commerce tools (ex. Alibaba’s Taobao) will surely be the winners.

4) Build a tight community by selectively working with the right influencers who can lead authentic conversations for your brand.

If you didn’t read our previous blog post about the rising cost of influencer marketing, you should. KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing - as it is known in China - has been an ever expanding bubble over the course of the last few years, and every day I worked there I kept thinking it would burst. It didn’t. The market is flooded with so many KOLs, you could easily think that brands and paying companies have all the bargaining power. However, it’s the opposite. 

As the number of KOLs increases, so does the specificity of the niches they cover, providing brands with a very detailed level of targeting (especially among micro-influencers and those with even smaller yet highly-engaged audiences). As a way to increase their enterprise marketing offerings, the major platforms (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) have formed or struck up exclusivity deals with mini conglomerates of KOLs called Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) to offer up to brands as an integrated feature of their ad targeting suite. 

Just as we are starting to see here in the US, better targeting and better tools means higher cost of acquisition. As things like the California Consumer Privacy Act come to the forefront and third party cookies become a tool of the past, it is yet to be seen whether the major platforms here will unionize and command more top-down control of the nascent U.S. version of MCNs and the landscape at-large, folding it in with their already growing power. But on the supply side, one thing we can be certain about is the appeal and flexibility of an influencer or KOL existence, and as external forces (ahem, quarantine) shine a light on the perks of a flexible at-home schedule, we may just see an influencer economy bubble that mirrors China’s.

5) Revisit your privacy policies now as guidelines and mindsets around community engagement shift dramatically and quickly.

In true West fashion, this last one is more of a provocation, but is worth taking a moment to dive into what this means for your business and your community. It’s no secret that privacy is less of a concern amongst individual consumers in China, (especially when combined with the value of convenience and entertainment above all). Contrast that mentality to here, where most would argue that GDPR/CCPA are an optimistic step in the right direction. How many people have taken action using these new tools at their disposal, and how many average citizens are even able to interpret the .csv file that they receive when they request their data from a company? 

It seems that people will always make concessions out of a need for convenience, value, and now safety, and will continue to do so even more. As you navigate your brand through these changing times, take appropriate pauses to check those policies - they are after all, part of your brand. Don't wait for your consumers to demand policies from you, be in the driver’s seat and, as best as possible, set the tone yourself. 

As travel procedures implement health screenings and workers at larger companies ask questions like, “Will all employees be tested before we are allowed back to the office?” perhaps a bit of that same laissez-faire approach to data privacy is allowed to enter our minds. We are having to reckon with issues at an individual and an organizational level that we never have before, and with every “so-and-so got tested” and celebrity who posts from their quarantine bed, I wonder if this new level of openness and authenticity might be our new normal?

More thought starters from China:

• Gaming and Esports - The number of mobile gamers in China is almost double the population of the United States. Here, numbers may spike as more “casual” gamers will spend more time exploring platforms and app stores.
• Delivery - By far the thing my husband and I miss the most about China (industry titan Meituan Dianping even has social features that allow you to see and order the same lunch as your favorite influencer) delivery is picking up in a big way across the United States. Catalyzed by COVID-19, on-demand or scheduled delivery will become even more popular and productized as brands provide more flexible options to deal with higher demand.
• Social Commerce - China’s S-commerce industry already sits at 2 Trillion CNY, and includes popular features such as team buying and commerce-enabled chat groups. Here, more people are feeling compelled to assist others and have time to spend turning hobbies into side-gigs, which will require more sophisticated social commerce tools to power.

Nostalgic for the Future, Realistic About the Present

In a moment of work from home despair earlier this week, I took to social media to listen, learn, and respond, and I was greeted by photos of friend gatherings in Shanghai and Beijing - in the outdoor shopping villages, in the parks, together at hotpot. Many of the posts featured bicycles, or fresh kicks, or sweaty, smiling faces. It was an uplifting moment for me, as I realized the new sense of appreciation we are collectively going to have for all sorts of things that just three weeks ago we all probably took for granted. I responded to a friend’s post to ask if life there was getting “back to normal,” and she responded with a mountain of insight about turning business back on. It was a good reminder - don’t just allow CNN to play all day in the background as you navigate remote work life; phone a friend or colleague in China to hear what it’s like on the ground. You might get a surprise jolt of optimism out of it.

-Stacy Tarver Patterson, Managing Director, West

It has certainly been a week unlike any other. 

Alongside our portfolio companies, founders and partners, the West team is adjusting to a new working environment, daily routine, and so much more. So as we calibrate to this new “normal”, we’ll use this space to share our thoughts, musings, and reflections on the journey. Read on for thoughts from four of our West team members.

"I have been texting, calling, and scheduling video calls with those who I care deeply for but have been too busy to catch up with. A short text message takes <10 seconds but can spread lots of positivity and deliver a smile on someone's face.

Also sharing that a former West team member, Sejal Parekh, and her partner started this grassroots effort called #helpyourhood (IG handle @helpyourhood). Our local businesses are the fabric of our daily lives and I want to call on myself and others to support our communities as best we can during this weird time."

- Jess Wen

"Something that gave me a reason to smile this week:

With everything going on and probably too much news playing in the background, I was struggling to get into a focused mind space and “get into character” for a copywriting exercise. Searching for a quick hack to channel my inner mother and knowing that the rest of my family in Detroit and New Jersey were similarly sheltering in place, I reached out to both my own mom and stepmom and asked if they would take a few minutes to jot down ~100 words about their experience of being a mother. Maybe each of them just had some extra time to think these days, or perhaps as a mother one just has this exceptional stream of consciousness constantly at the ready. (I wouldn’t know, I am so far just a dog mom of a 5 month old cockapoo puppy.) Either way, the responses I received absolutely blew me away in their loving rawness.

My takeaway? Motherhood, like love, is a verb. And now I am curious to know others’ hundred word definitions of motherhood..."

- Stacy Tarver Patterson

"I recently stumbled upon this Nat King Cole compilation album called, The Unforgettable, and I've been listening to it on repeat this week. There’s something about the romanticism of the 1950s captured in the lyrics and the lushness of the orchestral arrangements and that have been soothing during these uncertain times. Maybe it will help you too."

- Brandon Hightower

"I have a couple friends in the restaurant industry and this week it has been my personal goal to support each one of them. We had dinner from Bon Nene last night (I recommend the Maguro Bowl) and it was such a delight to see the team. Tomorrow we are planning a "date night at home” and ordering Che Fico (my best friend, Allie, works there) for dinner. It isn't much, but it feels like a small step to supporting the businesses we love.

In our work, dial-ins don't always need a purpose. A co-worker and I have had a daily 1:1 where we just check-in for 15 minutes. This gives us a cadence of communication that doesn’t feel forced, and is a substitute for our in office banter. Another colleague and I use a dial-in for work sessions. This means that our videos are on and we are sitting together for a couple of hours, but there isn’t an agenda and sometimes we aren’t speaking at all––-just sitting and working in silence “together”. Having that presence (even digitally) is comforting. This kind of collaboration models sitting in a conference room together. It makes space for creativity and brainstorming. My takeaway here is that if you have a nut to crack, treat it the same way you would treat in-person collaboration, just include a video call link. Sit together, throw ideas at the wall, and don't feel the pressure to always talk. It's okay to just sit with each other."

- Delfina Sitar

Late last week the rates for many social media influencers doubled overnight. Here’s what we think this means and what you should do about it. 

At West, we’ve spent the past two weeks building out a collaborator strategy for a stealth portfolio company that is gearing up to launch. Then, at 5am the morning we were due to speak with the founder and his team, an email hit our inboxes. It was a little unsettling.

The note came from a former West team member, now social media consultant, who we were partnering with to build out the program. The subject was simply, “Coronavirus + Collaborators” and it had been sent after a long night fielding frantic calls from clients and agencies wondering why their contracts with key influencers were being held, canceled, or aggressively renegotiated. 

With retail numbers sliding, and experiential and event sponsorship canceled or indefinitely postponed, brands are scrambling to find ways to keep their user base engaged and revenues buoyed. As recent projections validate, advertising dollars are being shifted aggressively from traditional large scale media channels toward social media influencers and tactical, digital social programming.

In this situation, the market demand creates a Black Friday-like vortex, with influencers rates doubling (or more) and exclusivity requests from big-spending brands effectively locking out key influencers within their vertical for six months or more. Their livelihood, steady income, and the brands that provide it are all in jeopardy. 

A network of nervous, independent contractors compounded with new traffic patterns across social media platforms yields uncertainty and as social always does, a totally different ecosystem. With so many people now working from home, and a global hammer of universally used hashtags, sites are now experiencing frequent and more uniform visits during the day, rather than just during traditional, peak hours. Plus, the world now has a singular focus–COVID-19. So what happens if, as an influencer, you post on a non-COVID related topic? Your engagement rate drops. And when the engagement rates drop so does the rate an influencer can demand. So those with high engagement rates in the crisis allowed their stock to rise. Desperate and/or opportunistic influencers even began leveraging the COVID-19 hashtag to gain impressions and increase levels of engagement. Times of uncertainty incite wild fluctuations in price and volatility––and with it winners and losers. 

The digital media market has been bullish for a long time, offering mainly direct-to-consumer businesses a repeatable way to grow with a mostly predictable CAC (customer acquisition cost). However, this is only one channel for growth and brand building and it is hard to sustain cost-effectively over time. As investors, we are not the only ones who have become deeply cynical when we see growth derived from digital-only means. Our point of view on collaborators or influencers is this: some are valuable, others are not, some are dangerous to a partner, others are vital. Panic separates those segments. It’s why you should collaborate only with those who provide the same strategic value exchange you expect from long term partnerships. It is not transactional, it is relationship-based. 

Amidst the volatility, here’s what we suggest. 

If you are early in the journey or about to launch 

This is a time to reevaluate your mix and how you’re building your brand for the long term. Study your end-to-end customer journey and dissect the multitude of ways consumers will come into contact with your new brand. Incorporate moments of delight that will foster long term brand love from the very beginning. Influencers are a tempting and immediate source of awareness and engagement, but by no means the only one. Consider channels that will build your brand in an emotional and meaningful (dare we say human) way. 

Grassroots field marketing and community management (2.0). Now more than ever it is crucial to build trusted connections with your consumers because a strong brand is one of the most powerful tools to hedge against difficult business conditions (more on that here). We’re seeing small community-led initiatives pop up on numerous platforms from Zoom dinner parties to virtual trivia nights. Don’t discount these as one-offs, see these as a new way to build and sustain community. We undoubtedly are at the start of a period of change about how we think about and value connection and community. Referral and micro-influencers are about to mean entirely new things. 

If you are scale-up

This is where this potentially starts to hurt. We know a key part of the D2C playbook relies on acquisition and influencer marketing to facilitate and pump growth around a well defined CAC. Now, that CAC is in flux and that will significantly impact your growth story. And that’s a problem. Following a range of recent case studies (the Casper IPO bringing that playbook squarely into the light) investors are increasingly wary of growth-by-acquisition stories. They are short term props masquerading as strong brand and product stories. 

While challenging, now might be the time to question your mix and start to think about how small actions now can help you find a leadership position once we are in a post COVID world. (We deliberately didn’t say return to “normal”.) However, at this stage of life, you already have loyal consumers. Your business will no doubt endure structural changes and pivots––our new normal will be fundamentally different than today––so bring your consumers along for the ride with you by building a brand that is flexible and responsive to their sentiment. 

If you are an established brand

You are likely already implementing a range of cash conserving measures across the business. You also hopefully have a larger war chest. But those with the larger war chests are exactly what’s driving the pricing spikes in this market.

While this is probably a good strategy to stay ahead of the competition in the short term, be cognizant that you may be artificially inflating the market (against yourself) in the long run. Are you engaging with influencers who represent your brand in an authentic way or are you land grabbing what is currently available? Continue to make brand decisions that would stand any test in good times. 

Furthermore, on the influencer side, the stakes are now raised. With so much money sloshing around, expect social media to get a whole lot more salesy. And in our experience, this is not a good thing, much less when influencers try to balance the fine line of reporting on COVID-19.

The whole reason we love social media is that it isn’t advertising or reporting, it’s more human, and for the most part, meaningful. That may be about to change.

-Matt Hirst, Managing Partner

The health and safety of our team, our clients, and community is our biggest priority and West has been closely monitoring guidelines from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, CDC, and other government and health officials over the past weeks. Following the city’s most recent ordinance, the West team will be fully remote for the foreseeable future. While it’s certainly a shift from our daily in-office vibe, the team is ready to focus on the work ahead: helping our CEOs, founders and founding teams define and defend their market opportunity with brands people love, brands with impact.

At West, we’re lucky to have the opportunity to invest in and work directly with companies at various inflection points and across a range of industries. Given this vantage point, our team will be digging in as much as possible to share useful insights with our community as we all navigate through the coming days and months. We’ll be updating our blog with notes, learnings and musings as we traverse this journey together. Sending our best for good health and a quick economic recovery to all.

As a founder or CEO, you’re certainly getting inundated with advice, articles, and “how-to” tips for preparing for an economic downturn. You will be asked or required to re-evaluate your business and generate updated financial models and forecasts, to pull back on any future-looking operations and to immediately cut or flatten spending, especially anything deemed “discretionary”. During a recession or economic slowdown––and I have experienced a few––companies turn inward, decrease operational costs, and often start by sending marketing and sales resources out the door.

However, a looming recession is also a non-obvious, massive opportunity to re-evaluate your customer value proposition, customer journey, and brand relevance. Having a resonant and top-of-mind brand is one of the most powerful tools to hedge against difficult business conditions.  Research shows that when a brand is a powerful “short cut” to a consumer’s attention and share of mind, it is easier for those companies to gain market share in a softening market––even more so than in a strong market. When the downward spiral begins, the brand you’ve built––before the market softened––is the most important customer asset. Make sure it counts for something. 

The customer is always right 

The advantages of customer loyalty are also more pronounced in a downturn. Loyal customers cost less to serve. They typically concentrate their spending with companies they trust and their referrals to friends can lay the foundation for growth when the economy rebounds. Human nature tells us that when people are anxious or fearful, they seek safety and value trust. Having a highly trusted brand provides a safe haven and gives customers confidence in times of overwhelming uncertainty.

When companies turn inward and compress spending, they risk severing ties with their most loyal customers and turning off the very channels that spur the product innovation connected with customer needs. During booming times companies can focus on and are rewarded for product innovation and risk. When a recession kicks in, we must shift our orientation towards the customer and how we can best serve them, and product innovation takes a temporary back seat to customer relationships. 

During good times, even the most successful businesses pivot––some multiple times. When the economy shifts, your business should be even more prepared to adapt to structural and customer-driven changes. If you’ve studied a customer lifetime value analysis, you know that your most profitable customers are also the most expensive to replace. Rather than risk losing them, offer more value, continue to spark their loyalty, and make them part of the conversation. Focus on building a brand that is flexible and responsive to the customer’s sentiment, and needs, informed by the nature of the market in real time.

In a recent report by Deloitte that looks at data from the two most recent recessions––periods when the classic cost-reduction playbook was hailed as the gold standard, the firm cites the number 1 action consumer companies should take when faced with a looming recession is to “determine why you matter”. I’d add that this work isn’t only for consumer companies. It’s for every type of company. This is the core work we do with our portfolio companies and in our brand studio at West. Having a clear understanding of your purpose and defining what your company offers your customers is foundational to delivering trusted value.

We should also acknowledge that you should always have a downturn scenario plan and if you can get ahead of it, try to deepen your cash reserves.  When the market has a downturn, if you’ve built a strong balance sheet, you’ll be able to make more intelligent decisions while keeping your team and sanity intact. This is a best practice of the smartest companies in every market segment. 

Invest in smart growth

Driving your brand to “top of mind” should not be conflated with an increase in growth marketing spend or engaging a large scale (i.e. costly) advertising campaign that plasters your brand across the NYC Subway with minimal traceable ROI. This is about doing the foundational work to create a defensible and unique brand and customer value proposition. This work involves understanding the end-to-end customer journey from awareness all the way through to customer advocacy. It is also about understanding and placing a high ROI on your performance marketing spend.

Ultimately, when things get tough, having "vendors" is very different from having "partners." If you are a “partner” to your customers, you demonstrate that you have a shared commitment to their future and well being. Surround yourself with extraordinary people who truly share your vision for the future. If we’re all in a foxhole, I want to be in there with people I trust.

Invest in your customers. Build trusted relationships. Invest in your brand.

- Joanna Rees, Managing Partner at West

As West heads out for the holiday season––wrapping up projects and laying the groundwork for new ones––we’re also pausing to reflect on the last year. This has been one of our most impactful years to date, and while we’ve been heads down in production mode, we’re taking the end of the year to share a few special moments and turbocharge for the one ahead.

On West

West moved! We kicked 2019 off at 50 Pacific and it really feels like home. In addition to a new home, we added five new full-time team members: Stacy Tarver Patterson (Managing Director), Felicia Reyes (Creative Director), Eva Pullano (Communications Director), Brandon Hightower (Strategist), and Andie Hamm (Strategist).

A seasoned marketer, Stacy brings over a decade of experience to West and was most recently a Senior Marketing Director at Nike Inc leading teams across the U.S. and internationally. While at Nike, Stacy covered a myriad of diverse roles in brand strategy, planning, and digital marketing; including stints leading the marketing teams in Beijing and Shanghai, two of Nike's fastest growing markets. Stacy holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Management and Organizational Behavior from NYU Stern along with an MBA from Columbia Business School. She is currently pursuing her MS in Data Science from University of California, Berkeley. 

Felicia is a Creative Director with a passion for design and creating visual stories that bring brands to life. Prior to West, Felicia was Associate Creative Director at John McNeil Studio in Berkeley. At JMS she led a team of designers, photographers, programmers, UX designers, animators, writers and makers to build brands and help tell their stories. A creative leader in developing global branding systems, digital experiences and advertising campaigns, Felicia has led campaigns from concept to execution for technology companies such as Cisco, Google Pixel, and Nest. She is a designer at heart with a strong knowledge of how design meets product, marketing and company strategy. Felicia's endless curiosity of the ever evolving business landscape plus her love for strategy and design thinking led her to pursue an MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Prior to West, Eva managed communications for the investment platform, CircleUp, and served as a resource to portfolio companies on their PR efforts. Eva previously led PR initiatives for early-stage startups at LaunchSquad across industries including fintech, blockchain, adtech and cybersecurity. Eva originally hails from New York and holds dual-degrees in International Studies and French Language & Literature from the University of Michigan. She is captivated by the evolution of story and the dynamic nature of the communications industry. She was drawn to West by the opportunity to support our portfolio companies and shape how our story is told in the wild.

Brandon has a passion for understanding people, analyzing systems, and creating beautiful experiences in order to spot trends and shift culture. Born and raised in Orlando, Florida, Brandon came to California to study at Stanford University, graduating with a B.S. in Product Design. He’s since worked as a UX Designer and Design Researcher for SAP Silicon Valley, and consulted for a number of young companies in user research, product definition, and design strategy, within varied industries from streetwear to consumer electronics. Brandon is excited to join West and expand on his penchant for understanding people and refining products to tell stories that resonate.

A former West intern, Andie has since graduated from the University of Southern California with degrees in Architectural Studies and Communication Design. Andie is interested in all things at the intersection of business and design, strategy and creativity.

...and in case you missed it, West Partner Matt Hirst gave a heartfelt talk on aging at the most recent TEDxBroadway in New York. You can catch Matt’s talk as well as a Q&A on the origins of this passion project here.

On our partners

Our portfolio and studio clients brought their bold ideas to life with companies that will have a lasting impact on their respective industries. We work with founders and founding teams at inflection points. Those who need to define or discover their markets, and those who are ready to lead and own new ones. 

Some of those moments include Inc. Magazine naming Impossible Foods 'Company of the Year' and Prelude Fertility becoming the largest provider of comprehensive fertility services in the U.S. After graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 cohort, Haiku launched its public beta and was recognized on Product Hunt as Product of the Day. With $8.2 million in seed funding, Veronica Lee and Remrise are tackling the $30 billion sleep-health industry. Torch's Cameron Yarbrough and Keegan Walden are paving the way for upskilling leadership across corporate teams at scale, while full-body electrical muscle stimulation workout, Katalyst, is gearing up to make every workout not only extremely efficient but highly effective. Additionally, Jacky Cohen, VP of People and Culture at Topia, was spotted sharing best practices for approaching Diversity & Inclusion during the holiday season with Forbes. 

Our venture fund selectively invests in a few of our studio partners. It was an active year with 10 new seed to series B investments in companies including Newfront Insurance, Sweeten, Circles, Remrise, and Proxy. 

We consider it a great privilege when we get to apply our unique set of skills and experiences to companies committed to inventing a better, kinder, fairer future. We are honored to have worked with some of the best founders around. 

Onward

This Monday at our last weekly team meeting of 2019, we took a moment to reflect on 2019 and visualize the future. In true West form, we created a proverb, with each Westie contributing one word to the narrative. What transpired was quirky and amusing, energizing yet serious. It was a true reflection of the values we’ve crafted for our team and the companies we partner with. We are Truth Tellers, Uncommon, Relentless, Brave, Optimists [T.U.R.B.O. ;)]. 

We’re committed to partnering with exceptional founders to maximize their opportunity. We build for impact and in 2020 we look forward to doing just that.

“Imagine a world where age didn’t matter. Where we didn’t judge you for being old and you didn’t spend your entire life trying to stay young.” – Matt Hirst

Matt Hirst, a partner here at West, is working to reframe our perspective on aging with AGEIST, a media platform he co-founded to reinvent how life after 50 is lived, experienced and understood.

His recent TEDxBroadway talk builds on this mission, diving into why we’ve pigeon-holed our elders and how we––as marketers, creatives, and innovators––accidentally stopped engaging with the one consumer who might actually have it all. Matt‘s perspective is compelling on why we need to not only broaden our horizons on aging, but also include this valuable group in our customer outreach.

Tell us about the origins of AGEIST? 

AGEIST started as a conversation between my neighbor in LA, (the photographer) David Harry Stewart. I was 36 and he was 56. He had just come off a photoshoot for an AT&T campaign on behalf of Vice in which he had been asked shoot young (~20-year-old) hip, urban AT&T users in the street in NY. After talking to every one of them he found out that none actually paid their phone bills - their parents did. We looked at stats and realized that the 50+ group was the largest, richest generation in history and it was essentially being ignored. This was an opportunity that set us on our course. We couldn’t figure out whether the best business model was a research and insights business or a media business - so we built both.  

What are the biggest insights you took away from your AGEIST research?

Firstly, it is that basic language has become tainted with ageism, meaning that it is very hard to describe an “old” or “older” person without it invoking a sense of pity. That’s a problem and a very hard gravity to escape. 

The second is that age-activism or age-specific brands or services are often part of the problem. While they have the same mission as AGEIST, they can accidentally isolate older people, which actually just re-inforces the problem. The insight is that people are much better segmented if you leave age out of the primary classification. A cool, worldly person has similar values, interests, and habits whether they are 35 or 65. This insight is reinforced when you look at AGEIST’s audience data - we have as many readers and fans under the age of 50 as we do above 50. We just choose to be very deliberate about our focus on people who have truly lived.

Why are marketers getting it so wrong?

Where do you start? Part of the issue is that this generation doesn’t have a strong cultural identity, so the one that we hand them is of a medicalized, slightly helpless individual who is winding down their life - even when stats show that a 50-year-old today may only be halfway done. And if these are the dominant images in society, then people just tend to follow suit. Our job is to essentially create a new visual and verbal identity for this cohort; one that focuses on their ability, skills, their life-learnings, their agency and ambitions for the future. How old they are shouldn’t be a topic.

How do you translate this mission to your work at West? 

Part of our role at West is to ensure that the great ideas and businesses are able to make the leap out of Silicon Valley to a broader population. Age, gender, and ethnic diversity is a key part of this and we are constantly looking at how to build and position brands to take advantage of the largest possible customer base. With our access to the database of AGEIST’s insight and data, we feel like we have a pretty powerful advantage in helping our portfolio companies develop products and speak to a neglected but hugely powerful group in a new way. 

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Matt is a strategist, researcher, creative thinker, and venture investor who has more than 15 years experience at the intersection of technology, culture and media. Matt joined West after serving as the Global Head of Brand Experience at Google where he worked across a range of core Google product teams to develop strategic initiatives to drive growth, engagement and consumer love. Prior to Google, Matt spent nearly a decade at Red Bull in the London and Los Angeles working alongside athletes and cultural innovators to conceive, roll out and then scale, audacious, disruptive and experiential content platforms. 

Matt is an accomplished researcher and writer and his work has been presented at numerous conferences and featured in a range of publications including the Financial Times and The Economist. Matt holds a Bsc in Psychology from Coventry University, an MA in Transnational Media and Global Communications from Goldsmiths University.

Have you ever wondered how two products can seem so similar, yet one becomes a household name and the other fades to the background? Have you ever found yourself urging a friend to try a product, service or experience because you can’t stop thinking about it?

This is the power of customer-centered design.

Consider Apple, Google and Airbnb. These companies offer vastly different services, but they share a common practice. They place their customers at the center of the product experience, and they use an understanding of customer wants and needs to build beloved brands.

Chances are you first heard about them from a friend or family member who raved about an amazing trip they booked on Airbnb, the ease of “googling” something on an uncluttered site, or how the expert at the Apple Genius Bar not only saved their cracked phone but also taught them hacks for saving storage space.

There’s an endless list of competitors out there who offer similar services. So what is it about these companies who ultimately win your mindshare and the biggest share of the market?

• They’re the ones who put their customer at the center of every single decision.
• They do what is right for the customer first, and let the business model flow from there.
• They understand that no amount of marketing spend can make up for a bad customer experience.
• And they are relentless in making sure their customers know they care.

In return, they win loyalty, brand love and an army of user-promoters more powerful than the most targeted marketing campaigns.

Customer Needs in the Hands of the Decision-Makers

Mapping customer experience and designing for customers is not a new idea. What’s new is that some of the most innovative and forward-thinking companies are elevating the role of customer experience to the C-suite, positioning it alongside CEOs and CMOs with exposure to and engagement with the Board of Directors. The instantiation of this commitment is in the investment in a Chief Experience Officer.

When Magnus Olsson co-founded Careem, a ride-hailing app that serves customers across the Middle East, North Africa, India and Pakistan, he knew that in order to straddle multiple geographies and cultures,  he needed to elevate customer needs to a higher level with more influence and oversight. So he hired a VP of Customer Experience and a VP of Captain Experience, two roles intended to own every step in the customer journey. But even at the VP level, it soon became apparent that this pair of executives did not have enough organizational power and influence to make the impact that was required.

He realized that the potential to build and protect brand value was contingent on recovering loyalty for those clients and drivers who had a negative first experience with Careem. He believed if he could regain their trust, he could convert them to loyal customers and partners. And while call center and customer experience employees could provide fast responses and troubleshooting on the fly, the same problems surfaced again and again.

So Olsson took on the role himself. As Chief Experience Officer, he sits at the executive table and drives decision-making cross-functionally, alongside his team. He brings the customer lens to every strategic and budget decision the company makes. He is the voice and conscience of the target customer. He’s constantly pushing to keep the bar for service high, and ensures that customers remain at the center of company strategy.

For startups, this concept often gets overlooked or pushed aside. There's budget to consider, and culture fit, and a lingering concern over too many leaders at one table. It can feel like it's "too early" or the company is "too small" to worry about this yet. Those are valid concerns, but it is becoming apparent that these considerations are trivial compared to the potentially transformative effect of this role across the entire company.

But there’s also an upside. Reaching customers means gaining loyalty, a metric with direct business impacts, according to Casper’s Chief Experience Officer, Eleanor Morgan. Casper has always prioritized creating a leading customer experience. “Our goal is to create delightful experiences that invite customers to be part of our community and engage more in sleep,” says Morgan.

Casper is on a mission to elevate the science of sleep while inspiring joy and the magic of bedtime. As they expand across new channels, including more than twenty owned retail stores and new retail partners, it's more important than ever to present a cohesive experience. “We approach all channels as if they were one store, eliminating boundaries—because the reality is they are one brand experience to the customer," she says.

In her role, Eleanor is responsible for the design and development of the Casper customer experience across channels—from digital to retail to in-home touchpoints. She leads digital product, UX strategy and design teams to create experiences that make bedtime cool again.

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It is a compelling argument that in the world in which we now live, a Customer Experience Officer is not a nice to have, it’s an imperative. Good intentions without a clear and empowered organizational owner have a way of slipping through the cracks, especially in the pace and complexity of a startup environment. And your customer's wants and needs should never slip through the cracks. No customer we know, including every one of us personally, wants to feel like an afterthought, especially when it comes to the companies whose exceptional customer experiences inspire our loyalty.

A Chief Executive Officer who understands and cares deeply about customer experience may inject this principle into the DNA of their company, but they’re obligated to a host of other priorities. To translate this intention to results, companies should position an additional CEO, this one a Customer Experience Officer, alongside the normal lineup of C-Suite executives. This new kind of CEO should be granted the same level of responsibility, power, cross-functional access and authority.

Putting resources and intention behind this position is akin to giving every single one of your customers and their needs, wants and pain points, a seat at the decision-makers’ table.

The Business Case for Listening

At West, we work alongside teams with a specific focus on mapping their customer journeys. These journey maps provide the company with a decision dashboard that impacts how to hire, where to spend and how to market a product or service. This process is critical for any company, whether they’re selling directly to individuals or to businesses. We understand that people drive every purchase decision, so people should be central to the way every company operates.

When Topia’s team came to us they were still MoveGuides, a technology solution that helped HR departments manage the logistics of moving talent around the world. So we started by mapping the customer journey on both sides of the marketplace.

By taking this human approach, we realized something that MoveGuides hadn’t accounted for. The “talent” so integral to their business are actual people with fears, goals and desires. And work relocation surfaced many of these emotions. So we evaluated the needs of HR professionals, the ones most connected to the talent themselves. And we learned that the relocation game is won and lost on how quickly the individual feels settled in their new home.

So Topia was born. Where MoveGuides focused on paperwork and logistics, Topia eliminates every pain point of the move—from immigration forms to payroll—and focuses on turning workforce mobility from a headache to an advantage. The Topia brand now serves 50 percent of a global company’s workforce and has made two strategic acquisitions to better serve talent and the HR teams who support them.

Impossible Foods Founder Pat Brown wanted to ensure a magical first impression for his brand-new, plant-based burger. Rather than reaching for what seemed like the logical move to reach the largest market (brightly-lit grocery store shelves in the vegan section), we considered the customer’s very first interaction with a meat-free burger, and we focused on making that moment delightful. So we looked at those already offering special customer experiences around food: high-end chefs. And the Impossible Burger was born.

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Sometimes we stand in as that Customer Experience Officer, bringing the voice of the customer to key decisions and reframing problems with customer experience solutions. But we believe that hiring for this role is essential.

We can’t all build the next Apple (though we’ll work our hardest to help you get there). But we can employ the same principles as these visionary founders by diving into the customer experience and weighing every decision against what we see and hear.

We just have to give the customer a seat at the table.

Joanna Rees is Managing Partner at West. She spends her days working with founders and their teams to define and expand markets based on the needs, wants and desires of actual people. Get in touch at joanna@west.ventures

One of my favorite things about founders is that they are practically required to blithely ignore statistics: barely 80% of startups make it to a Series B. They must convince investors, recruit and galvanize a team and charge towards launch, all while acting as if the “startup death curve” does not exist, or at least does not apply to them.

At West we help alter these statistics by unlocking the market side of product-market fit.

In the early stages, the search for product-market fit is high pressure and precarious. It’s done in the context of investor scrutiny, fluctuating team motivation and a burn rate. Under pressure, many entrepreneurs instinctually double down on engineering and push like crazy on product.

And that instinct makes sense. Product is the part of the equation they can influence directly—it’s under their roof. A more ambiguous and ambitious endeavor is to lean towards and listen to market.

The shift from product to market is a shift from a supply-orientation to a demand-orientation and from profit to value. This requires a massive shift in perspective for many of the startups we encounter. How do you instigate that?

When working with a new portfolio company, we begin by gathering the leadership team to answer a set of simple questions:

• WHAT does your business do?
• WHO does your business service?
• WHY do you exist?

These questions, which begin to constitute a communication platform, are deceptively simple for several reasons.

• First, every member of a team usually answers them differently, uncovering a lack of fundamental alignment. This result is practically universal.
• Secondly, the answers we get are often conflated with one another. When asked WHY they exist, they answer with WHAT their product does (a value proposition); when asked WHAT their product does, they explain what it does for them and their investors (a profit proposition).

So shifting focus to market is a hairy process but extremely rewarding once we untangle things.

After years of practice, we’ve developed a couple of tricks for bringing teams through the process. We usually spend a few dedicated days collaborating with a team to reach a platform that feels right, which includes some homework from the team and relentless preparation on the part of the West team.

So when the Endeavor Investor Network presented us with the opportunity to run this exercise with more than 35 entrepreneurs representing 15 countries across EMEA, all in the same room, in under 90 minutes, we approached it as an experiment.

Here are some of the things we learned:

• Start with what you’re not. When tackling open-ended questions, sometimes it’s easier to define what you are based on what you’re not. Referencing a range of startups at various stages and across industries helped participants circle closer to their true north.
• Differentiated & Specific. Startups can easily turn into echo chambers.
  Doing this exercise internally might yield a platform that feels right, but it’s hard to know whether it’s truly unique until it’s shared externally, either through conversations and prototypes (cheaper) or via launch in-market (expensive). Having a range of companies in the room and sharing ideas with the larger group forced entrepreneurs to consider their uniqueness. If a ride-sharing company from North Africa has the same value proposition as a weather-tracking platform from Dubai, the value proposition is probably too general.
• Healthy Competition. This work requires a major shift in perspective. And it represents a real challenge for deeply product-oriented companies. But working in mixed teams allowed the entrepreneurs to challenge each other on whether they were truly adopting a demand-orientation.

Regarding competition, the context of the workshop within the day’s agenda is important. Directly after the Endeavor workshop, the entrepreneurs had a full day of investor speed dating with West and 25 other investors in the Endeavor Investor Network. It begged the question, does all this market-orientation work matter to investors?

The answer should not surprise you, but it bares explaining.

• WHAT:  The clearer a value proposition is to investors, the clearer it will be for the market. But content matters. This is not an exercise in wordsmithing or crafting an elevator pitch. This is about clear and undeniable delivery of value to buyers.
• WHO: Potential investors like a big TAM. Investors and board members need confidence that you can capture more than that first ring of likely fans or early adopters.
• WHY: A purpose demonstrates to investors that a venture can be bigger than a single product at a single moment in time. Good investors invest in people; they care about founders’ motives.

In addition to relevance to investors, a communication platform is a keystone for employees to make decisions against and rally around. And it’s developed with market in mind. So it’s in service of capital, team and market—the most critical factors in reaching the escape velocity required to beat the odds.

A bulletproof communication platform requires testing, iteration and socialization, plus creativity. It doesn't happen in 90 minutes. But with a solid draft in their back pockets, we think founders have the footing to be “responsibly ignorant” of the death curve as they charge ahead.

Allison Light is Strategy Director at West. Get in touch at al@west.ventures 

Make promises you can keep, collaborate to tackle big problems and remember that taste is king. As we face a future of growing populations, shrinking farmland and suffering oceans, it’s time to consider one big question: What will we eat in 2025? Or 2050?

According to these food innovators, we’ll eat some combination of lab-grown and farm-grown food, more vegetables than meat, and a whole lot of crickets. And dairy isn’t going away, it’s just changing.

Drawing on wisdom from their roles as CEOs, researchers and former-scientists, our six panelists discussed and debated what it takes to change global food systems and why lab-engineered, plant-based foods aren’t just for vegans.

The panelists

Dr. Smita Shankar, Director of Research, Strain & Fermentation Development, Impossible Foods
Mike Selden, Co-founder & CEO, Finless Foods
Megan Miller, Co-founder & CEO, Bitty Foods
Ryan Pandya, Co-founder & CEO, Perfect Day
Alec Lee, Co-founder & CEO, Endless West
Josh Tetrick, Co-founder & CEO, JUST

Over 7.6 billion people live on earth today. The global population is projected to reach 8.6 billion people by 2030 and 9.8 billion by 2050. And over 10 percent of people in the world suffer from chronic undernourishment, according to the United Nations.

Meanwhile mass extinctions, warming oceans and extreme weather events place increased urgency on those trying to help.

So how does an entrepreneur decide where to start?

• The Impossible Foods team wanted to use their technology—a formula for creating plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy—to tackle environmental challenges. Armed with an understanding of the devastating impact of cattle on climate change, and the iconic nature of the hamburger, they set out to serve burger eaters. “It had to be the burger,” said Dr. Smita Shankar, Impossible’s Director of Research, Strain and Fermentation Development. Replacing one beef burger with an Impossible Burger saves the equivalent of 75 square feet of land, one half tub of bathwater and 18 miles of car emissions.

• Bitty Foods Co-founder and CEO Megan Miller wanted to prove that there are viable natural alternatives to lab-produced protein products. Inspired by the potential of underutilized proteins that already existed on our planet, she and her team developed a cricket flour rich in protein, healthy fats and micronutrients which also happens to be gluten-free.
• Mike Selden watched bluefin tuna fall on and off the threatened species list and wanted to make an impact on the popular seafood before it disappeared from the oceans entirely. More people are eating fish than ever before, and a combination of overfishing, pollution and climate change makes it impossible for our oceans to keep up. Meanwhile, attempts to farm fish are expensive, inefficient and often inhumane. So Selden founded Finless Foods to explore a new way of “growing” fish using stem cells from actual bluefin tuna.
• Ryan Pandya saw an opportunity to use technology to make animal products more accessible to people around the world. He chose dairy for its high-protein potential and global popularity. Then he and his team at Perfect Day took a proven technique: fermentation, and used yeast and sugar to create animal-free dairy products that taste like the real thing.
• While there are environmental advantages to their methods (e.g. less water, less land, CO2 reduction etc.), Alec Lee and his team at Endless West never set out to "save the world with alcohol.” Rather they saw an opportunity to create a more accessible, high-end product, first in wine and now whiskey. Their lab-crafted Glyph whiskey uses “note-by-note production” which doesn’t require barrelling or aging to produce a drink that highlights the endless possibilities of science.
• And JUST’s Josh Tetrick started with the goal of building a food system that makes it easy for people to eat well in a sustainable and affordable way. But when he and his team examined the current landscape, they saw a whole lot of chicken eggs. Last year alone, we consumed 1.1 trillion chicken eggs, a scale linked to a production process ripe with environmental concerns like water contamination and climate-change inducing emissions, not to mention animal welfare. So they set out to explore the possibilities of protein-rich plants that could be used to replace egg in products like mayonnaise and cookie dough. Now their team of scientists and chefs has discovered how to get the ancient mung bean to scramble and taste like an egg, the first step to fulfill that goal.

Whether selling to supermarkets or perfecting the formula in the lab, our panelists shared wisdom and learnings from their place at the helm.

Don’t disrupt, improve

Free from the bureaucracy of big government and slow-moving corporations, entrepreneurs have an opportunity to change the status quo. But too often new solutions seem to preclude the survival of existing systems. Will the rise of lab-grown food replace farm-to-table? And should it?

Tetrick doesn’t think so. “It’s not an either-or. It’s going to take all of these different solutions,” he said.

“Instead of becoming a disruptor, you can work with people and make things better,” Selden added, a problem all too real in his pursuit to grow bluefin tuna in labs, a product which could threaten the aquaculture industry, but doesn’t need to. He values the wisdom from aquaculturists and works alongside those with decades of experience as he perfects his process.

And Pandya views his new process for making milk as an opportunity to plug into existing systems, like the resource-intensive cheese production process.

“If you’re going to try to change the way the world is thinking about how dairy is made, you don’t want to go to the dairy industry writ large and say ‘change everything, destroy all your factories,’ you need to make it compatible with what’s already out there,” he said.

Pay attention to your supply chain, and seek creative solutions

Lab-grown foods open endless possibilities, and removing the limitation of animal farming can feel like a silver bullet for feeding the masses. While plant-based proteins leave a lighter footprint on the planet, they still require time and space to grow. And even plants have their limits. To meet the demands of a growing population, food providers must examine every single ingredient that makes up a product, its potential, and its limitations.

Impossible Foods views this challenge as an opportunity. Instead of letting plant growth limit their production, they’re considering ways to replicate qualities found in nature, in the lab.

“Everything else other than the protein we produce needs to be sourced, so we’re always thinking about supply chain and ensuring that as we scale the supply chain does too. Once we know what functionalities we are looking for, we can create that ourselves. We have this big toolbox and we know what we’re trying to achieve, so it’s just a matter of making it happen,” Shankar said.

Miller’s crickets solve this problem in their ability to grow from egg to adult in just six weeks, a sustainable superpower and one reason that the UN predicts edible insects may hold the key to stabilizing the global food supply. If insects become part of the mainstream diet, we will reduce greenhouse gases by 18 percent and lower average food costs globally by a third, according to a recent report.

Education can shift misconceptions, but taste reigns supreme

Education plays a major part in every company’s marketing strategy, but the “better for the world” argument will only inspire the select few. Consumers are unlikely to change lifelong food habits unless faced with catastrophe, or offered something cheaper, tastier and healthier. So don’t judge consumers for their choices, understand your market and provide appealing alternatives that better fit their lives.

Bitty Foods’ Miller knows all too well the battle of overcoming skepticism. She’s trying to convince insect-fearing US consumers to eat crickets. She usually starts by explaining the protein density of the crunchy insects, then she hands over something to taste.

“We give them chocolate chip cookies or banana bread, something they would eat all the time. And say, by the way, this is absolutely full of crickets,” she said. “Nothing else is such a differentiator as making the tastiest product.”

An understanding of the power of taste was what drove Impossible Foods to launch with chefs, rather than in vegan sections of grocery stores. By putting their product in the hands of those who turn food into culinary art forms, they guaranteed that every consumer had a delicious first encounter with the plant-based burger. Over 4,000 restaurants now serve Impossible Burgers, including nationwide presence in the fast-food chain, White Castle.

G.M.O. stands for genetically modified organism, not toxic conspiracy

The modification process is just that, a process that can be used for positive impact. While consumers have been conditioned to seek out “natural” food, replicating nature in a lab doesn’t need to bring up images of bionic corn or space food.

If done responsibly, engineered food may have the power harness natural processes at scale, creating opportunities to feed growing populations with less impact on the planet. Still, two thirds of consumers remain skeptical, as evidenced by July’s New York Times article, Are G.M.O. Foods Safe?

Prove your impact with action, not words

Don’t promise to change the world. Prove the potential of your product, get customers excited to go out and buy it, then build toward impact from there, Lee said. In his pivot from wine to whiskey, he’s seeing the power of serving up whiskey cocktails with a story.

Tetrick evaluates every opportunity through one filter: Does this keep us working toward our goal? If not, they pass and wait for something better-aligned.

At the end of the day, you’re making food

When feeding people, consider the culture around cooking and meal-sharing, the implications of healthy diets, and the factors that drive new habits. Build for a market of eaters who vote with their wallets and judge with their taste buds. If you get this right, you’ll open up larger opportunities for impact and you’ll truly drive change.

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About West

West works alongside companies to define and grow new markets in pursuit of category leadership. We work with companies who want to be the future of food, fertility, work, and more. Because we believe that if you can define and grow the category, you can shape the world.