Seeking a new era online

The rise of non-venture scale (but delightful) consumer internet businesses

Some of the best consumer investors in the world say the era of free distribution ended in 2015, after which we entered the era of paid distribution. Since then, only two consumer companies in the western internet landscape have reached venture scale: Tiktok and Shein. It's no coincidence that both of them came from China and grew almost entirely through paid distribution. If you were an entrepreneur between 2015-2022 and you aspired to build a venture scale consumer business, you’d need at least a billion bucks to start, and maybe a few billion more in case someone with deep pockets comes along to copy you.

But hold on a sec, the market crashed last year, and money is expensive again. What’s next?