consumer
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The Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Wants - and a Football Club Everybody Watches
Clearlake turned a distressed-debt strategy into a $90 billion machine by fixing unglamorous companies - then bought a Premier League club to prove the point.
The Quiet Compounders of Park Avenue
For 40-plus years, Harvest Partners has bought unglamorous middle-market companies and held them long enough to matter. Here is how a relationship-first shop on Park Avenue turned patience into a $20-billion franchise.
CreativeMode
CreativeMode is a no-code, AI-powered platform that lets Minecraft players build their own mods by describing what they want in plain English. It generates ready-to-play mobs, items, blocks, weapons and structures for both Java and Bedrock editions, then lets creators publish, share and compete with them. Founded in 2024 by three ex-Crusoe engineers and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, CreativeMode says players have made more than 450,000 mods on the platform.
Andrea Johnston
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Louisa Schneider
Louisa Serene Schneider is the founder and CEO of Rowan, the ear-piercing company that hires registered nurses to do the piercing and runs its own medical advisory board. She started it from her attic in 2017 after a career in M&A and retail trading at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and built it into a chain doing roughly $70-100 million a year with dozens of studios and hundreds of employees, more than half of them nurses.
Mike Polner
Mike Polner is VP of Product Marketing and GM of Next Gen Creators at Adobe, where he leads the Firefly generative AI business and oversees creative tools including Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere. With over 20 years in marketing and product leadership, he has a track record of scaling consumer businesses - growing Uber Eats from $100M to $50B+ GMV and helping Cameo reach a $1B valuation. A former VP of Marketing at Discord and product marketing leader at Cameo and Uber Eats, Polner is at the center of Adobe's push to make AI-powered creativity accessible to the next generation of creators.
Alex Bergonia
Alex Bergonia is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Babylist, the leading baby registry and family commerce platform headquartered in Emeryville, California. With a background bridging impact investing and high-growth consumer tech, she has spent her career at the intersection of strategy, operations, and mission-driven work. Before joining Babylist, she held progressive strategy and operations leadership roles at Farmer's Business Network (FBN Financial), and earlier built expertise in impact investing through fellowships and roles at Komaza, The Nature Conservancy, DBL Partners, and RSF Social Finance. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BA in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College.
Garrett Smallwood
Garrett Smallwood is the CEO and Board Chair of Wag! Group Co., the publicly traded pet-care marketplace best known for on-demand dog walking. A three-time founder whose previous startups were acquired by The Home Depot, Expedia, and Wag! itself, he took over Wag in November 2019 and rebuilt it from a single-service walking app into a multi-product pet-care platform spanning walks, sitting, boarding, training, wellness and insurance. He also serves on the board of the San Francisco SPCA and is an Entrepreneur in Residence at seed-stage venture firm NFX.
Faiz Ahmad
Faiz Ahmad is the Chief Executive Officer of Paula's Choice Skincare, the Unilever-owned, Seattle-based science-driven beauty brand. He spent two decades building direct-to-consumer machines at Apple, Delta Air Lines, Optum and YETI before stepping in to steer Paula's Choice through a sports-meets-skincare era anchored by the FIFA World Cup 2026 sponsorship.
Tarang Amin
Tarang Amin is the Chairman and CEO of e.l.f. Beauty, the affordable cosmetics company he took public in 2016 and grew from a $135 million equity story into a multi-brand portfolio anchored by e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Naturium, Well People, Keys Soulcare, and - as of May 2025 - Hailey Bieber's rhode in a $1 billion deal.
Babylist
Babylist is the operating system for new parenthood — a universal baby registry that grew into an ecommerce destination, a content engine, a healthcare brand, and now a chain of experiential showrooms. Founded in 2011 by ex-Amazon engineer Natalie Gordon, the company hit $750M in 2025 revenue while staying founder-led, profitable, and unapologetically focused on the parent.
Joy
Joy is an all-in-one wedding planning platform that helps couples build custom wedding websites, manage registries with zero fees, coordinate guests, and stream virtual events. Founded in 2016 by three former Microsoft and Adobe engineers, Joy has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of couples worldwide with a free-to-use model, 600+ website templates, and a universal registry that pulls from any online retailer. Backed by General Catalyst and Sound Ventures, Joy has raised over $108M and is expanding beyond weddings into all major life milestones.
Kindred
Kindred is a members-only home-swapping network that turns primary residences into a credit-based travel platform. Founded in 2021 by Opendoor alums Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina, the San Francisco company has grown to nearly 300,000 members across 150+ cities and raised $125M in combined Series B/C in February 2026 to scale a 'third way' alternative to hotels and short-term rentals.
Albert Wang
Albert Wang is the co-founder and CEO of PatPat, a direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand he built from a mobile app in 2014 into a global platform serving 21 million customers across 140 countries. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer and former Oracle founding member, Wang spotted the gap in affordable, stylish kids' clothing when he and his co-founder Ken Gao both became fathers the same year. PatPat has raised over $465 million in funding, including a $160 million Series D2 from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021, and has pioneered innovations like Go-Glow light-up apparel technology.
Melissa Kim
Melissa Kim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minted, the San Francisco-based design marketplace that connects consumers with independent artists for premium stationery, art, and home decor. Hired in 2007 as Director of Finance and Strategy straight out of Stanford Business School, she was later named co-founder by Mariam Naficy in recognition of her foundational role in building the company. Under her leadership as CEO, Minted surpassed $300 million in revenue in 2026, with double-digit year-over-year growth, a wholesale business that grew 31% in 2025, and profitability that doubled - all fueled by a sharp premium-market focus and an owned-channel marketing strategy built on the virality of physical design.
Stress-Free Auto Care
Stress-Free Auto Care is a tech-enabled chain of automotive repair shops modernizing a $200B+ legacy industry. Founded in 2016 and based in Mountain View, California, it operates 30+ ASE-certified shops across California and Texas, pairing proprietary software with neighborhood mechanics to offer transparent pricing, digital vehicle inspections, text updates, and live video feeds of repair bays.
Weee!
Weee! is North America's largest online ethnic grocer, delivering Asian and Hispanic groceries direct to homes across the United States. Founded in 2015 by Larry Liu as a WeChat group-buying experiment, it has grown into a vertically integrated platform with a $4.1B valuation and more than $1B in annualized revenue.
Sid Gupta
Sid Gupta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Quince, a San Francisco-based manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) brand that sells luxury-quality cashmere, silk, and home goods at a fraction of traditional retail prices. Founded in 2018 alongside his wife Zunu Mittal and CTO Sourabh Mahajan, Quince reached a $10.1 billion valuation in March 2026 after raising a $500M Series E led by Iconiq Capital. Before Quince, Gupta built Lolli & Pops, a specialty candy retail chain, from 11 struggling locations to nearly 100 stores across 28 states. A University of Chicago economics graduate and Stanford MBA, he has spent his career dissecting pricing inefficiencies in consumer retail - and building businesses to exploit them.
Yinon Weiss
Yinon Weiss is a serial entrepreneur, decorated military veteran, and the Founder and CEO of Stress-Free Auto Care - a tech-enabled auto repair chain with 30+ locations across California and Texas. Before Stress-Free, he co-founded RallyPoint (the 'LinkedIn for the military') and CarDash (a transparent auto repair marketplace that went through Y Combinator S17 and was acquired). A UC Berkeley bioengineering grad with a Harvard MBA, Weiss served 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Platoon Commander and Army Special Forces officer, earning the Bronze Star before transitioning to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Antonio Key
Antonio Key is Co-Founder and General Partner of Sunset Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Los Angeles and San Francisco that has backed more than 70 early-stage companies, including Ready Player Me, Yuga Labs, Wonder Dynamics, BlocPower, and Flow Carbon. Before Sunset, he was Director of Investments at Samsung Next and an M&A banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who worked on roughly $26B in deals. He's a Kauffman Fellow (Class 28), Wharton MBA, and Stanford grad.
Arielle Zuckerberg
Arielle 'AZ' Zuckerberg is a General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, a San Francisco seed firm that backs the 'magically weird' - founders pursuing unconventional ideas at the earliest stages. A former product manager turned investor with stops at Wildfire Interactive, Google, Humin, Kleiner Perkins, and Coatue, she pairs a product-first lens with a hands-on, founder-friend approach. In March 2025 the firm announced a $181.8M fund (the number nods to chai - 18, life).
Arthur Kaneko
Arthur Kaneko is Co-Founder and General Partner of Coreline Ventures, a boutique early-stage firm investing across the US, Japan and other key markets. He spent a decade running RealScout, a real estate technology company, after starting his career as an investor at DCM Ventures and a product manager at Togetherville. Coreline's pitch is restraint: a small number of high-conviction bets and a decade-plus commitment to each founder.
Ashish Aggarwal
Ashish Aggarwal is a General Partner at Chamaeleon, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm. He invests in seed and Series A consumer, vertical SaaS, AI, and crypto startups, drawing on 18+ years as an operator, two-time founder, and investor. A Kauffman Fellow (Class 24), he previously led investments at Grishin Robotics in companies like Ziva Dynamics (acquired by Unity), Taskade, ClubFeast, and Spin (acquired by Ford). Before VC, he ran M&A and corporate strategy at Opera Software, marketing analytics at Dell, and built ad infrastructure at Yahoo!.
Brendan Rogers
Brendan Rogers is the co-founder and general partner of 2am VC, an India-only early-stage venture fund betting on the country's Gen Z founders. Before turning investor, he co-founded Wag!, the on-demand dog-walking app that listed on NASDAQ after raising over $360M, and a social discovery service later acquired by IAC. From bases in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Los Angeles, he is one of the most visible American VCs operating inside India today.
Brian Cho
Brian Cho is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Patron, a San Francisco seed-stage venture firm investing at the intersection of games, consumer software, and emerging technology. A former founding member of Andreessen Horowitz's investment team and the long-time head of corporate development, ventures, and M&A at Riot Games, Cho launched Patron in 2021 with Jason Yeh and closed a $100M Fund II in September 2024.
Carl Fritjofsson
Carl Fritjofsson is a General Partner at Creandum based in San Francisco, where he focuses on AI infrastructure, vertical AI, and consumer bets. A Swede who co-founded the rewards startup Wrapp and the bootstrapped ad network AdProfit before turning investor, he built Creandum's Silicon Valley office and has backed companies including Cornershop (sold to Uber for $3.5B), Pipe, GoPuff, Cast AI, Planhat, SafetyWing, and H Company.
ChenLi Wang
ChenLi Wang is a General Partner at WndrCo, the Redwood City venture firm that builds and backs early-stage technology companies. He was Dropbox's second business hire and built its growth, monetization, analytics and international teams before later running the core Dropbox app. At WndrCo he led investments in CompanyCam, Exa, Material Security, Meter, Socket, Defakto and Webflow, and has served operationally as Chief Product Officer at Aura and Pango.
Winnie
Winnie is a San Francisco-based childcare marketplace that connects millions of parents with licensed daycare centers, preschools, and early education providers across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall - two former Google and Postmates engineers who were also parents - Winnie has grown from a local San Francisco app into a national platform covering 200,000+ licensed providers in over 7,000 cities. The platform combines comprehensive data (tuition costs, licensing status, inspection reports, availability) with community reviews and a SaaS layer for providers called Winnie Pro. Ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list and #1 in Consumer Services, Winnie sits at the intersection of a 500-billion-dollar childcare crisis and a generation of parents who expect the same search experience for daycares that they get for restaurants.
Jin Ho Hur
Jin Ho Hur is a Co-Founder and General Partner at HRZ Han River Partners, a Menlo Park-based early-stage venture capital firm that bridges Silicon Valley and Korea's tech ecosystem. A PhD in Computer Science from KAIST and a serial entrepreneur who built and led internet companies in Korea from the mid-1990s, Hur helped shape the country's early internet economy and served as Chairperson of the Korea Internet Association. He later transitioned into institutional investing via Translink Investment before co-founding Han River Partners, which in October 2024 launched a $100 million fund focused on AI and consumer sectors within the 'Korea Graph.' He also writes the popular Substack newsletter 'Two Cents,' covering global tech and startup trends for over 9,000 subscribers.