KiwiCo empowers kids to explore, create and learn with hands-on kits. Mirvie provides a personalized window into pregnancy for early detection and intervention. Grove is committed to a plastic-free future with its line of eco-friendly beauty, home and lifestyle products. Hear from these 3 exceptional entrepreneurs about their mission to create a better world for our generation and the next ones, building movements and communities, and the milestones in getting to escape velocity.
Kamini Ramani:
Welcome, everyone. I’m Kamini Ramani, CMO of Mayfield, and I’m thrilled to chat with three amazing entrepreneurs who are taking care of the next generation by making our world safer and healthier for families and kids. To start at the very beginning of life, we have Maneesh Jain, a serial entrepreneur of many breakout healthcare companies, including as founding CEO of Cirina, which was acquired by GRAIL, which is now part of Illumina. Maneesh leads Mirvie, which is redefining pregnancy health with an early detection RNA test. Welcome, Maneesh.
Maneesh Jain:
Thanks, Kamini. Pleasure to be here.
Kamini Ramani:
Next, we have Sandra Oh Lin, an engineer and the former head of eBay’s fashion business, who leads KiwiCo, which has delivered over 25 million creativity kits to everyone starting from newborns to the kids at heart. Welcome, Sandra.
Sandra Oh Lin:
Thank you, Kamini. It’s great to be here.
Kamini Ramani:
And finally, we have Stu Landesberg, a former TPG private equity executive turned founder of Grove Collaborative, a digital-first eco-friendly CPG brand and marketplace. Welcome, Stu.
Stu Landesberg:
Glad to be here.
Kamini Ramani:
So to start with, can each of you take us back to your founding moment, which propelled you to start your company? We’ll start with Sandra, whose company KiwiCo is about a decade old, followed by Stu, and then finally with Maneesh. Sandra.
Sandra Oh Lin:
Absolutely. So KiwiCo was born partially out of personal need. My two youngest children were getting to that age where I wanted them to get hands-on. I thought it was a great outlet for them to exercise their creativity, see themselves as makers and creators. And so, I started to pull these projects together. And as an engineer by training and as kind of a maker and creator growing up, this was something that was really important to me so that hopefully they would see themselves as producers and not just as passive consumers. And as I started to pull these together, lo and behold, I was not the only busy well-intentioned parent that wanted these types of enriching activities for their kids. And so that’s how KiwiCo was born. And we still continue to pursue that vision and mission, not just for my kids now, but for millions of kids around the world.
Kamini Ramani:
Thank you. Stu.
Stu Landesberg:
So love that story. Grove was also born from a personal passion for the category. Grove seeks to redefine the home and personal care categories – hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent, paper towels, shampoo – categories that have for a long time been a harmful force in human and environmental health in many ways. The founding moment for Grove really came after a lifetime of being focused on sustainability. In my prior life I came head-on with the reality that although the majority of consumers prefer conscientious products, in broad distribution in most retail outlets, the vast majority of shelf space and the vast majority of purchase still goes to conventional brands. And so I started Grove really to change the category and change the products that people are buying to ones that we can all feel really good about in terms of the impact that the products have not only on us as people, but also on the planet around us.
Kamini Ramani:
Sounds great. Maneesh.
Maneesh Jain:
Thanks. That’s much needed for sure. Our story goes to the beginning of life. And so, the problem we’re trying to address is really the unexpected complications that develop in pregnancy. I think the statistics here are just staggering. One in five women experiences complications like a preterm birth or preeclampsia, gestational diabetes in the course of pregnancy. And it’s about five times the rate of cancer incidents.
So for my co-founder Steve Quake and I, it was not just a statistic. It was also personal. We experienced unexpected complications through our own journeys to becoming parents, respectively. And our founding moment came really in the summer of 2018. So Steve had spent about 10 years at Stanford with an international collaboration using RNA technology to predict complications like preterm birth months in advance. And I had just come off developing the first early detection test for cancer at Cirina and GRAIL. And so we knew this was possible and we really felt compelled by having a potential solution to address this big need, which can help families right at the beginning.
Kamini Ramani:
You know, all really important stuff. Thank you. Thank you for your vision and your dedication. And we are proud to be partners with you on this journey. Maneesh, the life-saving stuff you’ve built has got to be just so needed in the world and so easy to deliver, but it’s incredibly hard to get it to market. Why? And what are you doing about making it easier?
Maneesh Jain:
Yeah, great questions. I think, particularly as we look at women’s health and pregnancy health, we know that it really hasn’t had a lot of innovation for decades. And I think there are a few reasons. One is that historically it’s been an area that’s underinvested, and certainly, Mayfield and other firms are helping to change that. So we definitely appreciate that. The second piece is that technology was really not available to tackle the complexity of biology for some of these conditions. And that’s changing as well with our RNA technology. And finally, frankly, a lot of the talent has chased cancer diagnostics and cancer therapeutics.
And so it’s time to move some of that to women’s health, and we are hoping to make that difference as well at Mirvie. I think finally, I’ll just add that I think aside from those more systemic factors, just the process to get these products to market, to get innovation to market, is rate limited by clinical trials. And as we all know, it can take very long. It can be very expensive. And that really is a barrier sometimes to innovation getting to market, particularly in this age of the pandemic where that has been exacerbated. So one of the areas that we really had to innovate around was to do more Direct-to-Patient trials. So we could really accelerate that path to market, and we are being fairly successful there. So potentially, that’s a new paradigm to accelerate innovation to market.
Kamini Ramani:
Thank you, Maneesh. And I’m glad to see that you’ve been able to thrive even during the pandemic in terms of achieving your goals. And I know that interestingly enough the pandemic, Sandra, has been a force that’s actually lifted your business in the era of Zoom school and kids like Stu’s daughter interrupting his Zoom calls routinely and parents being more involved in their kids’ lives. How have the needs of modern families changed, and how has that actually accelerated KiwiCo’s adoption?
Sandra Oh Lin:
Yes, we’ve all been there, Stu. So I can definitely empathize with those moments. Yeah. I mean, I would point to a couple of things that we’ve seen in terms of the dynamic shifting and families really evolving. So one is for sure I think parents have become much closer to their children and not just in terms of perhaps being physically stuck with one another at some point at the beginning of the pandemic, but really beyond that. So if you think about having a real front-row seat into your child’s education, that is something that definitely happened across the US and around the world. And so you see the combination of virtual schooling or schooling from home, learning from home, as well as schooling in school. Those two are coming together, and there’s a real partnership between those activities. So the learning that’s happening at home, as well as the learning that’s happening at school.
And I think that what we’re seeing is, as kids head back to in-person school, we are continuing to see that partnership remain relatively strong as parents lean into their kids’ educations. The other thing that I would point to is I think generationally, you end up reflecting and saying, “Are we teeing up this world in a way that’s better for the next generation?” And I think given where we are right now and in the situations that we’re in, I think parents are really asking themselves this question. Is the world better for this next generation, with the divisions that we see, with a raging pandemic, with climate change, et cetera? And so, what we are trying to do as parents then is think of ways in which we can actually equip our kids to become those creative problem solvers. To become those active citizens, to become those people, hopefully in the future, who can envision this better world and actually make that happen. So that’s another thing that we’re seeing these days too.
Kamini Ramani:
That’s amazing. And you know what? You don’t need to talk to Stu about climate change. He lives it. I’m so sorry about Hurricane Ida and the Tahoe wildfires. It’s a scary place to be in the world. And so, Stu, what I wanted to ask you was, you’re upending an industry in CPG, which has classically been known as a bad player when it comes to plastics and other things. So how are they reacting to this climate change acceleration and environmental disaster zone that we’re going into?
Stu Landesberg:
It’s really interesting. I feel like we…many of us grew up in a time where the brewing environmental crises were optional to pay attention to, right. It feels only like in the last few years that it has become so in our faces that climate change is going to change all of our lives. And I think when we look out at our industry, consumer products have been a huge contributor to many of the environmental crises that exist today. To take probably the single largest issue there just as an example. We, as a society, create one trillion pounds of plastic, with a T, every year, one trillion pounds, of which almost half is single used plastic packaging that’s used for less than six months. And the industry that contributes sort of in the biggest weight of that, I bet you can guess, is the consumer products industry.
So this is an industry that absolutely needs to change. But it’s also an industry that’s invested, truly, hundreds of billions of dollars in building brands and physical infrastructure around legacy products that have negative footprints. I mean, if you imagine, for example, your laundry room as a kid. Think of what color the laundry bottle is there. It’s the same color you imagine in the laundry aisle, right. That is an iconic piece of plastic that generates billions of dollars of free cash flow every year and has billions of dollars of infrastructure behind it.
The challenge for these companies, and I think one of the reasons that our industry is so slow to act, is the entrenched sort of infrastructure dollars are so material that it requires a company like Grove who has no attachment to the legacy system to come in and say, “We’re going to create an entirely different supply chain. We’re going to use plant-based ingredients. We’re going to use infinitely recyclable packaging and try to move entirely away from plastic.” And we can do that because we don’t have the attachment to the sort of legacy base of embedded assets. And I think when you look out at the industry as a whole, you see this incredible contradiction where people genuinely, I think, recognize the crises to which their industries have contributed and genuinely want to create change.
I think Sandra said it well about leaving the world better for our children. People who work in the industry aren’t evil. We all get it. But I think it’s really hard for large organizations to move at the speed that the problems require. And so that, I think, is the opportunity for Grove and where we try to be able to differentiate is really by moving more quickly and more aggressively on urgent problems that defy the existing paradigm.
Kamini Ramani:
Hey, we’re at TechCrunch Disrupt. It’s all about disrupting, right. So all for that. Now it’s great to have a vision. You’re amazing entrepreneurs. Zeitgeist is lifting your businesses, but you need money. And the three of you have followed very different strategies. It’s almost like the Goldilocks story where Sandra only has raised 10 million in the lifetime of KiwiCo. Stu, you raised upwards of 450 million, and Maneesh has raised 30 million so far for Mirvie, but he’s obviously a very experienced fundraiser from his prior companies. How did you get investors to believe in the promise of your company? And how did you build a zone of trust with them? I would say, at this point, any one of you who wants to jump in to answer can. There’s no particular order. But maybe we start with Maneesh.
Maneesh Jain:
Sure. I think just to build on what Sandra and Stu said, the time for disruption is right. And I think one thing the pandemic has done is it has given us all time to really think through that and not just go on with life as it is. So I think it really comes down first and foremost to a shared vision in terms of attracting the right investors. And I think the phrase, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” is definitely front and center. If you want to make life better for the next generation, it’s not going to happen in one year, right. We need to think a little bit longer term. And if it’s a worthy goal, it’s going to take time. So I think alignment around that is a pretty fundamental thing that is important at the beginning.
For us, the other thing was coming from the cancer world, which is, there’s lots of capital and lots of companies. Coming to women’s health and pregnancy health, it’s really been underinvested. So part of the journey is really explaining to investors that underinvested historically also means that there’s a very large untapped opportunity here. So in our case, there’s about 50 billion spent every year for unexpected complications in the medical system, and that could be reduced drastically.
So I think just making that connection between historically underinvested equals high untapped potential is a connection we try to make. I think the last thing I’ll add is just in terms of keeping up with the trust because I think that trust is pretty important between investors and entrepreneurs. It’s really, do what you say, right. We all have big visions and things we want to accomplish. But what is the first, second, third step? And it’s really delivering on those smaller goals along the way, I think, that just helps foster trust and attracts more investors. We’re excited for what’s ahead.
Kamini Ramani:
Thank you, Maneesh. Sandra and then Stu, quickly on journey to investors and continuing to stay in the zone of trust. And then leave me a minute for my lightning round.
Sandra Oh Lin:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree with a lot that Maneesh actually said. And I think that foundation of trust is absolutely imperative. If I think about our investors and our board members, I think it’s a matter of, as he mentioned, kind of alignment or around ambition and vision. But it’s also gaining their trust upfront around decision-making and doing what’s right for all stakeholders. And so, in my opinion, I think that means being very upfront, being very forthcoming with opportunities, as well as with challenges so that they believe that you’re going to be very considerate in terms of your decision-making and your planning. And they trust you to do your job basically is what it comes down to. And we’ve been really in a very fortunate position where we’ve been profitable and cash flow positive now for over five years and running. And so, it definitely has been a marathon and not a sprint. So, absolutely agree with that sentiment.
Kamini Ramani:
Stu.
Stu Landesberg:
Yeah, I would just… I mean, the thing I would add is I think financing is, you often, or at least I often see the headlines and it all feels inevitable. We’ve had a number of financings, as you mentioned. Our series A took us four years to raise, and I pitched 175 investors, 100% of whom said no. And eventually, I was able to get somebody to scrap and claw a little bit in. And 175 no’s and half a yes, still is a successful financing. And so, ultimately, I think of fundraising a little bit as, it’s a necessary thing to get the resources to go create the vision. And also something that’s just a process just like anything else in the business and just like any other sort of business process and partnership to about preparation, perseverance and ultimately the people on the other side, right. Are you bringing in someone who’s going to be a productive force for the company over the long term, because it’s certainly been my experience that we are better because I have great investors as partners.
Kamini Ramani:
Absolutely. And thank you for sharing that vulnerability. It wasn’t easy in the early days. And I think the entrepreneurs in this audience need to hear that because we at Mayfield say we partner with founders from inception to iconic, and Stu, you’re definitely getting to iconic status, whether you like it or not, but the inception stage was tough. So we have two minutes to go, lightning round. It’s the year 2030. You’re still leading your companies. In a word or a phrase, how would you measure your impact? Sandra.
Sandra Oh Lin:
Generation of innovators and change-makers.
Maneesh Jain:
If I had to pick a phrase, I’d say pregnancy health uncomplicated.
Stu Landesberg:
No plastic.
Kamini Ramani:
Love it. And since we have a little bit of time, if any of you want to share taking care of the next generation, what’s one cool thing that your kids are doing during the pandemic? Anybody.
Stu Landesberg:
Well, my kids like to join my Zoom calls, as you already sort of shared with the audience. Princess fairy Francis Margaret Landesberg appreciates the shout-out. No, but I think, at least for me, I think my children have taken a materially bigger interest in all of the things around the house because we’re around somewhere often… so much more often. And so, I think that it’s amazing to have them be a more active participant in all of the elements of life, including my Zoom calls.
Kamini Ramani:
And Sandra’s kids are doing KiwiCo kits. We know that.
Sandra Oh Lin:
They’re doing KiwiCo kits. I mean, they did… It was fun. They put together Zoom kind of recipe trading and cooking with their friends and that type of thing. I mean, one thing that I would say was really great about that time, and this is kind of seeing the silver lining in it is that I felt like I was able to see them in a different light. I got to see them with different angles that I wouldn’t necessarily have had visibility into. And I think they saw the same for me as not only a mom but as an entrepreneur and as a leader because they would pop in like Stu during Zoom calls and that type of thing. And I think that was something that was actually quite special that they were able to see me as a multidimensional person. And I am able to see them as multidimensional people too.
Kamini Ramani:
That’s great. Maneesh, Anything to add?
Maneesh Jain:
Well, I’ll just say, closer connection to teenagers is a good thing, maybe too close from their perspective.
Kamini Ramani:
Thank you. Thank you so much. Taking care of the next generation, and we are honored to have you here. And hopefully, our audience has enjoyed this chat. So onward and upward.
