Consumer tech is making a comeback, and with it comes the resurgence of consumer company founders like Brynn Putnam

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.