Consumer Founders: Building the Impossible
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Consumer Founders: Building the Impossible<br>From Irresistible to Unstoppable. Why I keep backing them ⚡<br>Jean de La Rochebrochard<br>May 26, 2026
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For years, consumer has probably been one of the most misunderstood, underrated categories in venture capital. Too emotional for some. Too trend-driven for others. Too risky. Too crowded. Too visible.<br>And yet, consumer creates a very particular kind of fascination.<br>Consumer is brutal
There is almost a love-hate relationship with the category, because some of the most beautiful companies can seem to collapse almost as fast as they became phenomenal in the first place. In consumer, the fall can be as visible as the rise.<br>Entire cemeteries are filled with products that once looked unstoppable. Companies that raised huge rounds, generated enormous hype, dominated conversations for a few years, and then slowly disappeared.<br>But despite all of that, I still believe consumer remains one of the most exciting categories in the world.<br>And when I say consumer, I do not only mean social consumer. I mean consumer as a whole: software, hardware, wearables, skincare, beverages, wellness, food, fashion — anything that needs to earn a place in people’s daily lives.<br>Because when consumer companies work, they do not simply create revenue. They create rituals, identity, and culture. They become part of people’s daily lives. And when you realize how few products actually manage to earn that place, it becomes far less surprising that consumer is such a difficult category.<br>People only have room for a very limited number of consumer products in their lives. One phone. A few messaging apps. A handful of skincare products. Maybe one wearable. A few brands they truly love in each category.<br>In many ways, it’s like the home screen of your iPhone. Space is limited. Attention is limited. Winning one of those slots, and especially by kicking out another product, is incredibly hard.<br>That is what makes consumer both terrifying and magical.<br>My own fascination with consumer goes back much further than venture capital itself. Long before becoming an investor, I remember obsessively backing Kickstarter projects simply because I loved seeing builders create things. It almost did not matter what category they were in. I was fascinated by people trying to invent new products, new rituals, new objects, new behaviors.<br>But the real turning point for me probably came in 2013 with Zenly. At the time, the company was still called AlertUs.<br>Watching Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo build what would eventually become Zenly was one of the most exciting experiences of my investing life. The pivots. The obsession with product quality. The intensity. The endless iterations. Then the successive rounds. Benchmark coming in. The connection with the Snapchat ecosystem. And eventually watching a product evolve from a simple idea into an actual cultural phenomenon.<br>That feeling is incredibly rare.<br>You suddenly realize you are no longer simply looking at a startup. You are watching behavior change happen in real time.<br>Later came BeReal, a deal we led at seed stage.<br>Even if the company did not ultimately become the $10 billion outcome some people imagined at one point, watching an app surpass 25 million daily active users, particularly with such strong US adoption, was still extraordinary. Once again, there was this fascinating sensation of seeing a product shape culture almost overnight.
But creating the moment is only the first battle.
A lot of consumer products can create a moment. The real challenge is turning a phenomenon into a behavior, and eventually into a tool people keep using every single day. That is probably one of the hardest transitions in consumer. Growth and virality alone are never enough.<br>Initially, Instagram was not really social media in the modern sense. It was fundamentally a photo tool. A beautifully designed, frictionless way to take, edit, and share photos from your phone.<br>Snapchat started as a messaging tool. Fast, lightweight, ephemeral communication between friends.<br>And Bump is fascinating precisely because it goes back to something extremely fundamental: location. Not location as a gimmick or a secondary feature, but location as a core behavioral utility. Knowing where your friends are. Understanding who is around. Reducing the friction of meeting people in real life. In a world where smartphones connected us digitally but often disconnected us from physical presence, Bump is rebuilding a reality graph.<br>And once that utility exists, the product can evolve into something much larger than the original use case itself.<br>But the real test of whether any of it actually works is retention. Because in consumer, retention is where the truth eventually shows up.<br>Most retention curves in social look the same: a sharp initial spike, followed by a brutal collapse, then a slow and painful decline over time. Even products...