When Brynn Putnam sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million at the starting of the pandemic, it appeared to the editor that she had sold the smart fitness company too soon.

Instead, the timing turned out to be good. The home fitness craze collapsed almost as suddenly as it peaked in the first yr of lockdown. Meanwhile, after a yr as CEO of Lululemon, Putnam had recent operational insights, a major victory under her belt, and a fresh concept that she became a recent company that can go public in 2025.

Venture company Lerera Hippeau has already participated in a highly competitive round for this stealth startup – the firm also led Mirror’s $3 million seed round – and on Wednesday evening in New York, I met with each Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer and Putnam to speak about what she’s constructing. We also talked about the broader rebound that is finally going down in consumer tech – led partly by the founders who led the last wave of successful consumer startups.

Below are excerpts from that chat, calmly edited for length. You can even watch the entire interview below.

Ben Lerer on issuing the first check:

When we invested (in Mirror), Brynn had a very compelling but completely crazy demo that was principally like a two-way mirror with a computer screen behind it that was intended to point out what the mirror would look like if she were in a position to raise tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars to truly produce something like this. What’s really interesting is that she designed a piece of equipment that was her own (then her own line of boutique gyms). . . and once we saw it, it was just clear that Brynn was not only a smart entrepreneur who had built a good gym brand for herself, but she was also an inventor. Brynn won us over very, in a short time and we can have looked crazy for a few years, but ultimately less so.

Brynn Putnam on selling Mirror just 4 years after its founding:

We weren’t on the market. We weren’t on the lookout for a buyer. We just took off. But we’ve been working with Lululemon for a very long time. I’ve been working with them at my gyms for about ten years and we have been spending a lot of time with them creating content and doing fun events with them, and it just felt like the right time for us to essentially participate in Bounce Fast and Confident in homes throughout the world. We really felt this was a chance we couldn’t miss.

As for whether Lerer addressed this issue, he said:

I had my opinion on this. Look, enterprise is a funny business because of the law of power and the concept that it’s best to take pictures of the moon and you’ll have a lot of losses, but your big victories will change the whole world. I consider in the law of power, but I also think that sometimes a enterprise loses sight of truly basic, good, and sound business decision-making. There are some general truths in business, resembling: sell when others are greedy and buy when others are fearful. You do not have to maintain coming back to the casino over and all over again. In this case, when Brynn got here in and said, “Hey, I got this offer, I’m really considering taking it,” I said, “Yes, it’s best to do it for yourself; it’s amazing for us. And for those who’re getting pushback from others (e.g. later stage investors on a different cost basis), I’m pleased to attempt to be helpful, but truthfully, you are way stronger and more powerful than me and you may get on with it. I feel for a yr or two afterward, Brynn probably found a few individuals who had their doubts, and now I feel persons are seeing the growth of the entire category and realizing that it was just a good move.

Putnam about working later as an executive at Lululemon, which later he threw in the towel on the Mirror: :

An investor I love. . .he then told me that I ought to be gracious and learn that throughout the life of your online business you might be selling your online business. You sell it in small pieces or in larger pieces, but you might be at all times selling your online business. And the neatest thing you may do once you have made the decision to sell is to learn as much as you may from the company you have decided to sell to and attempt to do something meaningful on this recent role. And that is exactly what I did. In the yr I used to be there, I learned an incredible amount of things and it was extremely interesting. But I feel ultimately, going from founder and CEO to actual divisional CEO is a very big change, and for some those that’s a good fit. And for me it just wasn’t like that. I actually am a builder.

Putnam talked about what prompted her to create a recent startup:

When I left Lululemon, I used to be just in a different stage of my life. I went from being pregnant to having two kids and it really took stock of what was vital to me at that time. The mirror was very much about me. It was my reflection, my performance, it was to make myself higher. In the next phase, my life focused more on family, friends, relationships, and those things that I considered vital. I actually had a hard time finding quality time for family members like I did once I was growing up – you already know, sitting at the table and eating, playing a board game, one another’s faces. For my children, who grew up glued to iPads or smartphones, the experience of hanging out was more difficult.

So I actually began considering, how can I take what I learned at Mirror and apply those lessons in the fun category? How can I take advantage of technology to construct higher relationships and social connections? And that is what I’m working on now. It’s a recent consumer hardware company, but it’s in the gaming space relatively than the fitness space, really focused on how we spend our time face-to-face, where technology is not an experience, but a real enabler of higher relationships.

When asked if her recent product is intended for youngsters (if it suits in a pocket or is worn on the face), Putnam replied:

This is for everybody. It’s a place for friends and families spending time together. This is not a company for youngsters, although we hope you’ll participate with your kids. It’s not an education company, although we hope people find it interesting, strategic and creative, but it’s really about using technology to attach people. (At this point Lerer stated that Putnam was sworn to secrecy.)

Putnam on the confluence of artificial intelligence and hardware and software that suddenly seems very vital to founders and investors:

I feel we’ll soon enter the golden age of hardware. All the VCs here will likely be very excited to speculate in hardware founders soon, hopefully (because a) a few things are happening. The iPhone got here out 17 years ago, and we’ve not really had a consumer hardware success story since Oculus. I feel there is a chance on the marketplace for something recent. Many of the core components of these technologies have gotten more mature and subsequently reasonably priced, so in our case it is possible to create display technologies in a way that it was not 10 years ago. And then, of course, AI opens the door to interacting with our devices. Naturally, recent devices will appear on the market. We’re banking on the idea of ​​not only one other PC, but relatively a recent, shared device in the home, which is what we did with Mirror and what we’re doing again here. We consider the future will suggest that there will likely be technology available to assist connect home and family.

Without focusing an excessive amount of on the technical specifications of the hardware, but more on the overall experience being created, Putnam said:

I recently learned about Nintendo’s design philosophy. They have this idea that they use “withered” technology with lateral considering. So the idea is to make use of mature, reasonably priced and more accessible technologies, but at the same time create really interesting experiences around them, and that is what we did with Mirror. It was more of a commodity equipment. It wasn’t pioneering technology. And (that) we’re doing again now.

About bringing family and friends together as an investing topic (here the editor mentioned the recent startup of Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn, Cakewhich focuses on connecting people offline), Lerer said:

I’m an investor (in Pie)! Look, I actually have young children and I actually have the same challenges as all my friends and everyone else: we’re all hopelessly hooked on these devices and at a high level we’re excited about alternatives to this addiction and recent formats of entertainment or opportunities to get people away from their screens or out into the world. We recently entered into a (related) deal, yet to be announced, with an application layer AI company in the travel space, which I’m really enthusiastic about. And we just announced the deal last week at one other application layer company in the automotive aftermarket, which is actually the largest hobby area in the U.S. by spending. In the consumer space, it is at all times price on the lookout for ways to tap into people’s passions.

On the feeling that “consumer” as a category is going backwards – also due to the recent $500 million fund announced last week by renowned consumer-focused company Forerunner Ventures, Lerer said:

As a fund, we’re the first founders, but we’re also the first in New York and (with) the first generations (founders) of New York in the early 2010s, there have been a lot of consumers, a lot of media, a lot of direct-to-consumer products. And there have been a few trends that were really driving it. You had the rise of the iPhone and the App Store. You had the explosion of social media and an arbitrage promoting ecosystem that would acquire customers faster than ever. Perhaps the rise of Shopify has also created a great time to construct consumer businesses with wide-open imaginations.

There hasn’t been much in the last 4, five, six years in terms of big technological changes which have inspired people to do anything that does not seem incremental. And I actually think AI is that catalyst right away. We see a very high-quality group of founders saying, “It’s time to get back in the pool.” There are things which can be possible today that weren’t possible six months or a yr ago, and the tilt is steep nowadays when it comes to using your imagination. So I’ve been more enthusiastic about consumer issues for a very long time, which is really exciting for me because it’s my passion. I built a consumer business. I really like investing in consumer founders and, truthfully, things have been pretty bad the previous couple of years.

Viewers were talking in regards to the Friday night boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul – but probably not for the explanations Netflix hoped for.

Yes, 27-year-old Paul (YouTuber turned skilled boxer) defeated 58-year-old Tyson (a former heavyweight champion who got here out of retirement for this match) in eight rounds, but the true headline was a difficulty with viewers watching live on Netflix, with freezing and buffering a seemingly common occurrence.

As Downdetector found, the hashtag #NetflixCrash was trending on the X platform received over 1 million reports Netflix problems in 50 countries, including 530,000 reports within the United States, with peak problems around 11 p.m. EST.

“This is the biggest event,” Paul announced after the match. “Over 120 million people on Netflix. Site crashed.”

Netflix has stumbled upon live shows before, with the fourth season of Love is Blind reuniting airing last yr. delayed by over an hour. Since then, the streamer has expanded its live offering to incorporate exhibitions golf AND tennis matches, live talk showAND award ceremonies, with none major problems.

While the streamer only releases selective data on its viewership, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the fight peaked at 65 million concurrent viewers (in comparison with 1.8 million concurrent live streams for Tom Brady), so it’s probably protected to say that the Tyson-Paul match was the largest test of Netflix’s live infrastructure to this point.

The streamer now has just over a month to make improvements before broadcast two NFL games on Christmas Dayand then WWE Raw in January.

Over the past 4 years, the U.S. government has made great progress in the ongoing fight against the “ransomware scourge,” as President Joe Biden has described it.

Early in his term, Biden and his administration quickly declared ransomware a national security threat, unlocking recent powers for the military and intelligence agencies. Since then, the United States has successfully disrupted and recovered ransomware infrastructure multi-million ransom paymentsand directed charges and sanctions at some of the most notorious ransomware operators.

Despite government enforcement efforts, the number of cyberattacks targeting U.S. organizations continues to rise, and 2024 shall be one other record 12 months for ransomware. This means that when President-elect Donald Trump returns to office in January, he, too, will inherit a serious ransomware problem.

Although it’s difficult to predict what the next 4 years of cybersecurity policy may appear like, the entire industry is preparing for change.

“It’s hard to say what will happen with policy and regulation in the future because there are so many layers and players involved in the changes,” Marcin Kleczyński, CEO of anti-malware giant Malwarebytes, told TechCrunch. “But I know that cyberattacks will not stop, regardless of who is in office,” Kleczyński said, citing ransomware as the most important problem.

First mixed semester

From a cybersecurity perspective, Trump’s first term as president was a mixed bag. One of Trump’s first (albeit delayed) executive orders after taking office in 2017 required federal agencies to instantly assess cybersecurity threats. Then in 2018, the Trump administration unveiled the U.S. government’s first national cybersecurity strategy in greater than a decade, which led to a more aggressive attribution and shaming policy and a leisure of rules allowing intelligence agencies to “hack” adversaries with offensive cyberattacks.

At the end of 2018, Congress passed the law founding CISAa brand new federal cybersecurity agency tasked with protecting America’s critical infrastructure. The Trump administration tapped Chris Krebs as the agency’s first director, and the then-president fired Krebs two years later in a tweet for saying that the 2020 election – which Trump lost – was “the most secure in American history,” contradicting Trump’s false claims. that the election was “rigged”.

Although cybersecurity hasn’t featured much in Trump’s messages since then, the Republican National Committee, which endorsed Trump for office, said in the 2024 election cycle that the incoming Republican administration will “raise security standards for our critical systems and networks.”

Expect a flood of deregulation

Trump’s push to chop federal budgets as part of a promise to cut back government spending has raised concerns that agencies could have fewer resources available for cybersecurity, potentially making federal networks more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

This is occurring at a time when American networks are already under attack from hostile countries. Federal agencies are warning this 12 months “a broad and merciless threat” by China-backed hackers, most recently raising alarm over the successful infiltration of multiple US telecommunications providers to access real-time call and text message records.

Project 2025, an in depth plan written by the influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, which is claimed to serve “wish list” of proposals to be taken up during Trump’s second term, he also wants the president to push for laws that might eliminate the entire Department of Homeland Security and move CISA under the Department of Transportation.

Lisa Sotto, a partner at U.S. law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, told TechCrunch that deregulation shall be an overarching theme of the Trump administration.

“This could impact CISA’s role in shaping critical infrastructure cybersecurity regulations, potentially leading to an emphasis on self-regulation,” Sotto said.

Referring to recent guidelines proposed by CISA in March which might require critical infrastructure firms to reveal breaches inside three days starting next 12 months, Sotto said these so-called CIRCIA rules “could also be significantly amended to reduce cyber incident reporting requirements and related obligations.”

This could mean fewer required data breach notifications for ransomware incidents and ultimately less visibility into ransom payments, something security researchers have long cited as an issue.

Allan Liska, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, told TechCrunch in October that much of the exertions the United States has done over the past 4 years, including forming a world coalition of governments committed to not pay the hacker’s ransom, you might turn into an early victim of sweeping government deregulation.

“The Global Ransomware Task Force established by President Biden has accelerated many law enforcement efforts by enabling information sharing,” Liska said. “There is a good chance this will go away, or at least the United States will no longer be a part of it,” he said, also warning of the risk of a rise in ransomware attacks with less intelligence sharing.

Are you tempted to do more disruption?

By reducing the regulatory focus, Trump’s second term could pick up where it left off with offensive cyberattacks and take a more aggressive approach to addressing ransomware.

Casey Ellis, founder of the crowdsourcing security platform Bugcrowd, says he expects offensive cyber capabilities to grow in the U.S., including an increased use of hacking attacks.

“Trump has a history of supporting initiatives aimed at deterring enemies of U.S. sovereign security,” Ellis told TechCrunch.

“I expect this will include the use of offensive cyber capabilities as well as an increase in hack-back activities that we have seen in the partnership between the FBI and the Department of Justice over the last several years,” Ellis said, referring to the government’s efforts in recent times years to counteract botnets, DDoS landing pages and malware. “The type of ransomware, first access broker, cybercrime infrastructure, and quasi-governmental operations previously focused on by the U.S. government will continue to be in the spotlight.”