Investor Spotlight: Nick Giannuzzi, Humble Growth

In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, Hannah Dittman speaks with Nick Giannuzzi, founder and managing partner of Humble Growth—an investment firm intentionally designed to shift the traditional power dynamic between founders and investors. Nick traces his career from representing Vitaminwater in its early days to building a leading CPG-focused law firm, and eventually launching a $312M growth fund backed by industry operators who understand firsthand the realities of scaling consumer brands.

Nick discusses why thoughtful, founder-aligned capital remains rare in the CPG space, and how Humble Growth approaches investing with transparency, discipline, and long-term partnership at the core. He emphasizes the importance of working backwards from an eventual exit, building operational and financial foundations early, and maintaining rigorous standards even amid the daily pressures of running a business.

With decades of experience advising and investing in brands, Nick sheds light on the common pitfalls he sees founders face, the characteristics that define resilient leadership, and the structural considerations that often determine whether a business can scale, transact, and ultimately endure.

Listen in as they discuss:

• The origins and philosophy behind Humble Growth
• Transitioning from legal counsel to growth investor
• Why building a business that can transact is essential—even if you don’t plan to sell
• Strategic considerations for growth-stage brands, from margins to channel strategy
• The role of discipline in evaluating opportunities and operators
• Founder traits that drive long-term success—and where they can become obstacles
• Balancing operational excellence with strategic foresight
• How investors and founders can work together beyond quarterly board meetings
• Best practices for preparing documentation, data, and structure ahead of fundraising
  
  

Episode Links:

Website: https://www.humblegrowth.com/
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-giannuzzi-6a550b14b/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/humblegrowth.com/ 

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Show Links:

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• Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at [e-mail]
• Episode music by Super Fantastics
  
  

Creators and Guests

Host

Hannah Dittman

Operations and Finance Correspondent at Startup CPG

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Nick Giannuzzi
I work backwards from the legal perspective and what the company has to look like. How many co packers we have, do we have redundancy? Do we have in those contracts? Do we have the ability to extend them if we want to sell it to a buyer who needs the manufacturing? But what if you sell your company to a buyer who doesn't need the manufacturing? Then you need the right to terminate those contracts and those suppliers.

00:33
Hannah Dittman
Hey everyone, I'm Hannah Dittman, operations and finance, host of the Startup CPG podcast. And today I'm joined by Nick Giannuzzi, founder and Managing partner of Humble Growth. Nick has spent his entire career at the center of the consumer space. First as one of the most sought after attorneys representing founders in transaction deals, and now as a founding partner of Humble Growth, an investment firm built to rewrite the traditional investor founder dynamic. After working with thousands of entrepreneurs, Nick saw the need for a more balanced founder first model investing. One that brings real transparency, aligned incentives and humanity. In this episode, we get into the fundamentals every founder should be thinking about long before they raise a dollar or build a business. How important it is to work backwards from a clear north star of where you want your business to eventually be.

01:18
Hannah Dittman
Studying exit case studies to understand what makes a brand truly exitable. And building the kind of operational organization and back office hygiene that sets you up for a clean, efficient, confident fundraise. Nick also shares why the people around the table on both sides often determine whether a deal thrives or falls apart. And how to make sure you're choosing the right partners. This episode is candid, passionate and grounded in decades of first hand experience across thousands of consumer transactions. If you want to build a business and a cap table that lasts, you won't want to miss this one. Enjoy. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Hannah and today I am here with Nick Gianuzzi, an investor from Humble Growth. Nick, welcome to the show.

02:05
Nick Giannuzzi
Hi Hannah, how are you?

02:07
Hannah Dittman
I'm good. Thanks so much for joining us today.

02:09
Nick Giannuzzi
I'm thrilled to be here. Appreciate you spending time with me.

02:12
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, likewise. I'd love to kick off our conversation getting a brief background of your journey through cpg, your path to humble, and your current title and focus as an investor.

02:23
Nick Giannuzzi
Okay, I'll try to not make it too long, but my background is a long background in CPG. In 1999, as a young lawyer on my own, I got a call from a guy who needed an attorney out in Queens and I met a young man at the time named Darius Bykoff who had A product called Fruit Water. And I became their lawyer. Unfortunately, Fruit Water was a terrible idea because it didn't taste good. But Darius, who was very creative and full of energy and complete inability to ever quit, decided that he was going to pivot and put vitamins in the water and call it Vitamin Water. And lo and behold, Vitamin Water and Smart Water were born. So I had the absolute pleasure of being the lawyer for the company.

03:08
Nick Giannuzzi
From 1999 to 2007, the company went from a few hundred thousand dollars in sales in 1999 to 670 million in sales in 2007. So that was my first CPG company. And I said to myself, boy, this is so easy. I'm just going to keep on doing this. So basically, since 1999, I've only done that. I started a law firm called Gianuzzi Group, originally later to be changed to Gianuzi Lewenden for my partner, Ryan Lewenden. And happy to say that today the law firm is about 25 lawyers. We're located in the Meatpacking District in New York City. We only do cpg. We don't do anything else. If you're starting a brand, if you want to raise money, if you want to do a celebrity deal, if you need a co packing agreement, whatever it is you need to do, we do it.

03:58
Nick Giannuzzi
We then partner with those brands. We help them grow, we help them do their financing across the table from private equity, which is something we're going to talk about today. And then eventually we helped them sell. And so over the years, we've sold hundreds of companies to either strategics or other large sponsor private equity firms. Did that my entire career. The law firm is thriving today. Seven partners. They're absolutely amazing. They all started their career with me. I hired them all out of law school. And still the biggest joy of my entire career, the law firm also led me to something. We made our money and we. And we served the CPG community by serving founders at the law firm. In 2007 and 2010 and 2012, when founders wanted to start a company, there was really nobody there for them.

04:49
Nick Giannuzzi
And we built this boutique based on getting the backs, being the wingman, however you want to put it, of these founders. And it became an absolute passion for me. Most of my closest friends are the founders who I served during those years. Some of them, we had giant successes, sold for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and some of them failed. But they were all journeys and they were all battles and they were all wonderful experiences along the way. I represented My clients at least a thousand times across the table from private equity. And I watched the founder's journey and what they went through. And they went to raise money because the business needed money or because they wanted to take some money off the table. And that was the primary goal would be to raise money so the company could grow.

05:36
Nick Giannuzzi
But then they also, of course, hoped for good people as partners. And then what they really hoped for was real help, real meaningful operational help. And what I saw time after time was the chance of getting all three of those things. The money you need, the a really good charactered partner that had your back and somebody who actually could move the needle on operations. It virtually didn't exist. And so it was in the back of my head for many years. After Covid, as the firm got to a certain size and I had been running it for a long time, I finally decided that it was time to think about coming up with a solution to what I saw was a bit of a problem in private equity. And so the first person I turned to was Andrew Abraham, who is the founder of Orgain.

06:26
Nick Giannuzzi
Orgain is now over a billion in sales. Andrew built that business effectively, single handedly to where it is today. He built an amazing team. He has hundreds, maybe 300 employees. The business has now been sold substantially to Nestle. But in 2021, Andrew and I met and we talked about this vision of building a fund that was designed to improve the life and results for founders. And Andrew came up with the name of Humble, which became Humble Growth. Because what we decided was the only people we wanted around us were people who had put, you know, had put in their dues, who understood how life really works, knows that nobody deserves anything. You work hard for it and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. And you have to be truly grateful and humble for what you have.

07:14
Nick Giannuzzi
And so that was the silly idea that we had. We also had a silly idea that we could go out and raise $200 million. Andrew, effectively. Andrew was a doctor. Before he started Orgain, I was a lawyer. So a doctor and a lawyer got together and tried to build a private equity fund.

07:29
Hannah Dittman
That's a bar joke.

07:30
Nick Giannuzzi
Yeah, it's a bar joke and there's a nun and there's some other people. So we said, okay, now we need to raise money that we have a compelling idea. But who in the world is going to listen to us? It's very hard to go to institutional investors and saying, hi, we have no background, we have no history, we can't show you the deals that we invested in together, but we have this great idea. So instead what we did, which was very true to what were trying to do in the first place, is we didn't go to raise our money from institutional investors. We went and raised our money from the industry.

08:05
Nick Giannuzzi
And so through lots of phone calls and lots of meetings and spending time with lots of wonderful people, a year and a half later, we ended up raising 312 million, well over the 200 from the industry. So we have 150 LPs in our fund. The vast majority are industry people. And the nice thing about that is that the people who put the money in, for the most part, virtually all, were founders. And they had been through the wringer, they had been through the ups, they had been through the downs. We tried to take money only from people who truly were humble, you know, who knew what it was to win and to lose. And we told all of them that we're going to run the fund a little bit differently.

08:47
Nick Giannuzzi
Our goal is not going to be to maximize every single deal with every single founder. What we're going to do, which we think will be more valuable to our LPs in the long run, is we're actually going to honor the handshake. We are going to put the founder first. We're not going to look for fancy structures. We're not going to look for situations where maybe we could win and maybe the founder doesn't win quite as much. What we would do is we would tip the cap to the founder. All those years I did those private equity deals for the law firm, every private equity fund would send me an eight or a ten page term sheet. Humble uses a two page term sheet. And I've done more private equity deals as a lawyer than probably anybody in CPG in the world.

09:30
Nick Giannuzzi
And what I realized in that time is you don't need that many rights. What you need is a founder who will listen to you and consider your thoughts and will do their best to process what you're proposing. You do not need massive blocking rights. You do not need all these restrictions. I'm more of a carrot person than a stick person because I've always been on the founder side. And what's so wonderful is all of our LPs see it the same way because they made their money by being founders. And so we tipped this approach into the market. We built an amazing team. We hired a bunch of really amazing investors from lots of really good funds that we do admire because there are lots of good funds out there and we Started doing deals and we're about to be 10 deals into our fund.

10:15
Nick Giannuzzi
We've deployed about two thirds of our fund over the last two and a half years, and we have doubled down on relationships and honoring the needs and desires of the founders. And so far, so good.

10:28
Hannah Dittman
What a beautiful story, full of passion and a really interesting path to get into investing. You know, I think the poll that you have is a very authentic and honorable mission versus I was just looking to make a lot of money. And I think that's such a testament and a real strength as an investor and a differentiator. I'd love to dive into a little bit more of an overview of your fund itself. Criteria mandate, average check sizes, stage focus, and how you're approaching kind of the nuts and bolts of the investments that you're making.

11:02
Nick Giannuzzi
Yeah, no great questions. Probably should have gotten there by myself, but thanks for that.

11:06
Hannah Dittman
No, not at all.

11:07
Nick Giannuzzi
You.

11:07
Hannah Dittman
You had a lot you had to cover, and that was a big question.

11:11
Nick Giannuzzi
I have a lot of passion in doing this. And your comment about making money. Everybody wants to make money. We're all pursuing commercial business affairs. That's what we do. But this for me and certainly for Andrew, who's been incredibly successful with orgain, money has always been a secondary thing for us. We felt we could build a better mousetrap, and maybe that was a little bit egotistical, but we wanted to prove that. And I think in fund one for Humble, I think we have proven that. So first of all, we're not venture, we're growth capital. We're generally writing checks between 20 and maybe $40 million. The brands that we invest in usually are doing 20, 30, 40 million at the time. They've achieved product market fit. They don't necessarily have to be profitable, but they're certainly en route to that.

11:59
Nick Giannuzzi
Our objective is we see a brand, maybe they're in a certain amount of retail, maybe they're primarily Amazon and online. And we say, are there seven to 10 things that we can do for them that will really move the meter? Like, is there really a way for us to make a difference? And I'll give you an example. Let's say the brand's not in Costco. Andrew's business sells over 500 or gain sells over $500 million a year in Costco. Andrew knows a thing or two about Costco. In our LP base, we have brands that are selling 3 or 400 million a year in Target or Walmart or not quite that much, but are sort of the masters of a category.

12:44
Nick Giannuzzi
And Whole Foods or have built a hundred million, multi hundred million dollar business on Amazon and all of these LPs, when we are looking at a brand and when we're partnering with the brand, they all step up to help the brand. They'll come in and they'll spend time with them. Why? Why do the founders who, why do our LPs do that? Well, first of all, they're investors in the fund, and second of all, they're founders and founders take care of founders. And certainly the founders that we chose to be partners with are the types of people who want to help the next person up. And so that's really how we kind of look at it, is what size are the margins close to where they need to be. We look forward and say, what would an acquirer need to see?

13:28
Nick Giannuzzi
So let's say the business is doing 30 or 40 million dollars. Part of our work is to look forward three or four or five years and say, are there buyers for a brand like this? What would the brand have to look like for a buyer to want to buy it in four or five years? And then we work backwards and we say, can we get there? Do we have to launch, you know, new innovation to get there? Do we need to be at different channels to get there? Are the margins going to be sufficient to get there? And if we can extrapolate forward to get to a theoretical exit, that's a business because of the seven or ten things that either we can do or they can do perhaps a little bit better with us, that is a fit for us.

14:13
Hannah Dittman
Beautifully said and I think sheds a lot of color on how you would approach a diligence process and what you're thinking through and what business fundamentals you really need to anchor in to be able to understand at that stage of a business where you need to go. I think that was a great summary. I'd love to dive back into that in a little bit. But before pivot and to some lessons learned. And you know, now that you've been doing this for a while and you've seen quite a bit throughout your career, what is something you wish you knew at the beginning of your investing career that you know now there's so many.

14:46
Nick Giannuzzi
Things I knew so little and I'm still learning so much every day.

14:51
Hannah Dittman
That's a great trait.

14:53
Nick Giannuzzi
Yeah, I mean, I have so many holes in my game and that's why we do this. We do this regardless of what we're doing in life to get better. And we lean on our strengths where we can, but we have to be aware that there's sometimes things that we're still learning and still missing. The problem with me is I'm so passionate about it. I want to invest in every single founder because I see the plight and I built my own business. Law firm's different than a private equity fund, but there was hundreds of sleepless nights, times when I didn't know how to pay the bills and I didn't know how to get out of a hole and I didn't know what to do next. And so I have great empathy for the fate of a founder.

15:29
Nick Giannuzzi
And so one of the things that I learned through hiring an amazing investment team is discipline and the discipline of not kind of falling in love even with the brand. We all have brands that we love, but some of those brands are designed in a way that they can never make money or they can never grow outside of natural, for instance, or they can't get to a large enough group of customers in order to have a significance so that there be a strategic that would want to buy them. And so the thing that I've learned most of all over the last few years is the discipline of making sure that every box is checked.

16:05
Nick Giannuzzi
And I think that's also a shout out, I think, to founders when founders start a business and I have literally represented, I don't want to overstate it, but at least 3,000 founders in my life, I don't know exactly the number, but something above that I believe founders think of a business and they dig in and they focus on the five SKUs or whatever they're doing. And it's so hard to make that work that they never come up to 20,000ft above and look down. And sometimes I have conversations with founders even now, and I say, well, what is a business? What should your business look like in five years? What is an acquirer going to want your business to look like in five years?

16:50
Nick Giannuzzi
And they're working 80 hours a week just trying to keep the lights on and may get the product out the door and not go bankrupt. They don't necessarily have the time or ability to pull back and say, oh, because most of the time when I say that, believe it or not, people have no answer then because effectively they're just, they're in the mines. You know, they're getting up at seven in the morning and they're going into the mine and they're coming out at midnight and they're going to sleep and getting up again. And so one of the things I would shout out to every single Founder is build a business that can transact.

17:24
Nick Giannuzzi
Even if you tell yourself, I'm going to build the business and own it forever, which is very rare because most founders are building something to sell, make sure you build a business that owns ultimately can transact whatever that means. Like, if you're building a business that can only get to 25 million, which is an amazing accomplishment, but in some sectors of our CPG industry, a 25 million business probably can't ever exit and certainly can't exit well. So whatever it is that you think you are doing, make sure you're building a business that ultimately can transact. If you don't ever want to sell it, God bless you. Don't sell your business. I think that's amazing. I love that. But don't set out to build something that can't be sold.

18:03
Hannah Dittman
I think that's great advice. And it kind of goes back to a point you made earlier when you were talking about how your fund is approaching finding the right company fits for you all. And you're talking about working from the end goal backwards and trying to understand how with the roadmap of does this business have the right pillars in place to eventually get there? You know, if I'm a founder listening to this and I'm thinking, okay, yeah, I definitely want to exit my business, but I have no idea what that would mean. Where's a good starting point for me to start wrapping my head around? Okay, I get that I need to work from the end goal backwards. And okay, I get that I have this big dream and this big goal to eventually sell this business.

18:43
Hannah Dittman
What else do I need to know and what else do I need to be thinking about?

18:47
Nick Giannuzzi
Yeah, well, before we got on air together, we talked about how amazing this industry is. And the thing that sometimes doesn't get utilized enough is all of the wonderful resources that we have. People, people are generous with their time. My experience is, unless you're a direct competitor, any other founder is going to speak with you. The investment bankers in the space will speak with you, advisors, my law firm, whoever. Like, we are there to speak with you and to share. Like I always tell my clients at the law firm, if you're my client, we have probably another thousand active clients at the at G Newsy, Lewend. And if you want to talk to any of our other clients, like, no matter what you do or what you're going to do next month, we have 10 or 20 clients that are already doing it.

19:31
Nick Giannuzzi
So here's the list of the people I'll Connect you with them, talk to them, ask, learn. Like, one thing I think they should do is they should look at data, right? So they're looking at data to see how their brand's doing. Okay, look at the brands that are bigger than you. See the ones that have transacted. Find out the people who did the transaction, what did they look like? If you want to be a bar and you want to sell as a bar, look what Rxbar was doing when they sold. Look at, look at what Perfect Bar was doing when they sold. Look at what the parameters were, how many SKUs, what was the store count, what was the velocities, what were the margins, what were the revenues, what was the ebitda.

20:07
Nick Giannuzzi
All that stuff is available somewhere because there's people who did those things. And again, this is the problem is it takes time and it takes awareness. And that's why the trade shows are so great. Expo west and the other good trade shows, because it brings people together. But, but I think it's really important that a founder find time, which can be brutal and can be impossible, but try to find time to pull back and to ask those questions so they actually have a plan on how to get somewhere instead of just continuing to grind, which by the way is very the most. 99% of it is just grinding and growing. But it'd be nice while you're doing that to have a little something in the back of your mind to know where you should be getting.

20:46
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, the North Star guiding you is so important because it is true. You will be grinding many hats, many problems, many highs, many lows without that constant beat of the drum of this is the metric I really need to get to or this is the dynamic I really need to get to. It's so easy to get reactive or lost in the sauce of everything that's going on. I mean, you almost have to have a little ADHD to be able to do the job, but too much of it and you can get pulled away from your goal real quick.

21:20
Nick Giannuzzi
It's always fun talking about the characteristics that you want most and hate the most in founders. So the thing that you really want in a founder is somebody who is adamant and sure of themselves and willing to run through walls and completely committed to the brand and what they see as the vision of the brand. The thing you hate most about founders are all four of those same characteristics as. And so you need that really strong willed person because let's face it, there's never been a brand. I don't think that's gone in a straight line. And it's never just been easy. And so what happens for the people who don't have that level of conviction? They quit. And only the founders that have the ultimate level of conviction actually stay at it is just too hard of a road. It's too hard.

22:11
Nick Giannuzzi
When I meet a brand and they're doing 20, $30 million and maybe Humble's not going to invest, I always tell them that what they did is like, it's not a miracle. But the fact you get a brand of 20 to 30 million dollars. Don't take a no from me to suggest that you are not valuable or you haven't accomplished something amazing because you have. It's so hard to get there. So, yeah, like I want founders that are tough as nails. Hopefully they've been. I like people who been bounced around. You don't need to. Failures are fine. I prefer somebody who's failed. I failed a lot before I had some level of success. And also being vulnerable, you know, like letting people know who you are and what you've been through, that's a good thing.

22:53
Nick Giannuzzi
I think getting to know a founder and their character and the fact that maybe they've taken some shots and they've had some battle scars along the way, it's okay. We all have.

23:02
Hannah Dittman
Yeah. Cpg, I mean, it's such a human. Investing is a very human centric business. But CPG is as well. You know, you're understanding the psychology of your customer base. You know, you're selling things to people. This isn't like robot software that some other software is going to use to integrate. It's a very personal business and changes quite a lot. So I think understanding the person that you're in business with on both sides of the table, the founder and the investor, is just such a critical component to feeling good about your job and where your business is going.

23:33
Nick Giannuzzi
You know, when founders are interviewing the different funds and the businesses that are doing the best get the most term sheets and have the most interest in potential investment. I really recommend to every founder to really do the due diligence on the fund. Don't call the founders who the fund introduces you to and say, please call these founders. I invest in them. Call all their other founders that they invested in because the list they give you is going to be the ones where you they actually had a good result and a good relationship. You need to talk to everybody. And one of the great things about being in my position as a lawyer all these years is I got to see all of them. And I got to see who were the good actors and who were the bad actors.

24:17
Nick Giannuzzi
Who were the private equity funds that really stood by their clients and really made a difference. And notwithstanding my commentary, there really are some that are great, but they're few and far between. And so the founders need to do the due diligence on the character. The other thing is, don't be fooled. Just because you meet the principles of a fund in the meetings, when they're talking about investing, you don't be fooled that you're actually going to spend time with those principles for the next five years. Make sure that whoever does invest in you, the people you're meeting in the room, are going to be your people. I know for Andrew and I, we're on calls pretty much every single day with every single one of our portfolio companies. We don't set meetings, we text, we call. We're constantly with each other.

25:04
Nick Giannuzzi
Andrew and I don't disappear. We show up for the whole relationship.

25:08
Hannah Dittman
That'S so important and kind of dovetails into a question that I wanted to ask you. When have you seen a founder handle something that really went wrong? And what did you like about how they handled it? Or maybe if you handled it together, what was that dynamic like? I think it's easy when people are winning and it's going all rosy and it was an amazing investment and that's all going up into the rest. Right. But founders of all stages of businesses are struggling every day. And I think they often hear tenacity, resilience, overcoming obstacles. It's something that they're being evaluated on. So what does a best in class founder look like in times that are tough?

25:45
Nick Giannuzzi
A best in class founder, when things go wrong, and things always go wrong, almost every year for every brand, something really material goes wrong. There's a product gets manufactured, it's not quite as good as the product you want to make, which will make the user experience a little less good. So you can just let it sell through and the brand will probably be fine, or you can pull it back, take the hit. Because your brand and the integrity of your product is absolutely the most important thing. And I think that things like that, where people, you know, we always talk about the sandbox, and you learned everything you needed to know on the sandbox. There's always a right and there's always a wrong. What we do, though, in life is we decide to say, well, right and wrong. But what about the money part?

26:35
Nick Giannuzzi
If we do it the right way, we won't make as much money. That's not. It's never the right answer. So integrity is integrity. And I think that if you make a product and it's not quite as good and you think it's going to ruin the user experience, and then you take. You take the hit. And I think that's the type of thing that I like in a founder. Somebody who is willing to sort of go out in the storm even though they could stay closed in where it's safe because it's the right thing to do. I think that's the type of people that you want to be around.

27:03
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, I agreed. And I think you live and you die by your customers. And there's a lot to be said about the 8020 and being overly perfectionistic and being somewhat grounded in reality. I think it is a founder's tightrope that they're always walking. Almost every founder I've met is just so obsessed with. I mean, their whole representation of what they're doing is a representation of themselves in a lot of ways. And they're so obsessed with getting it right and making it perfect. Every founder I know agonizes over every little detail of the packaging that this I want to make better. That wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be. And it definitely is a hard balance.

27:38
Hannah Dittman
But I do agree, knowing when it's going to have an impact that doesn't sit right with you in your gut is an important moment to make the right call and prioritize the right things in business, even if it comes with a lot of headaches and setbacks.

27:51
Nick Giannuzzi
And Humble can't say that we're a founder first and not stand by that type of decision. So we sell a year later, or we do a couple million dollars less in revenue, or we're a little bit less profitable. But the founder did what they felt was integral to the brand and to themselves, and they're going to sleep at night. And so a good partner in any industry, in any business, a good partner understands that and rides the waves. You have to be a partner in the good times and the bad times.

28:21
Hannah Dittman
So true. So well said. I'd love to ask you one more question before we dive into a little bit of a case study question. Can you explain a little bit more of what the day to day of the relationship between an investor and a founder is like? You know, we're definitely talking about that. You need to have a good understanding of the humanity of one another. You need to be on the same page with some of these like, mission and big picture values. But how do you Guys actually work together. And what's the dynamic?

28:47
Nick Giannuzzi
Like every private equity fund wants quarterly board meetings. I guess you have to have quarterly board meetings. But I honestly think if a founder spending quarterly board meetings to teach their investors about their business, something's gone horribly wrong. I care about all the moments between the quarterly board meetings. I think like I said, literally with every brand we're involved with, we're on helping them with multiple things every single day. We're helping them work on product development, we're helping them work on a rebrand, we're helping them hire. We have a full time employee at Humble whose job is to do nothing but help place new personnel and companies that we invest in. And so we're helping them hire, we're troubleshooting.

29:32
Nick Giannuzzi
With me, with my background having sold hundreds of brands in the CPG space, I help these companies get ready to sell a year or two before we are even thinking about selling. Because having a good exit is not something that just suddenly happens. You have to, it's just like that five year plan when you work backwards. I work backwards from the legal perspective and what the company has to look like. How many co packers we have, do we have redundancy? Do we have in those contracts? Do we have the ability to extend them if we want to sell it to a buyer who needs the manufacturing? But what if you sell your company to a buyer who doesn't need the manufacturing? Then you need the right to terminate those contracts and those suppliers.

30:11
Nick Giannuzzi
And so all of these things get worked out way before you even hire a banker to start to sell. And so it's constant every day. We have pretty much weekly calls with every single brand. But I would say that's like the least of it. It's really. And it's so personalized because every company is going through a different moment. And we might when we first invest, the first six months might be predominantly about hiring. I know that for instance, when we hire all of the C level people, my partner Andrew, who has obviously built, he's a bit of a unicorn of a billion dollar business in cpg. He interviews every single person for the brand. It's just what he does because he's good at it and he wants to make sure we make the right hires. So the interaction is pretty much constant.

30:59
Nick Giannuzzi
It's loose, it's light, it's. Text me, hey Nick, I got a question. Call me right back. And it's, I don't know, it's like a real partnership. It's like we think about how would you want to have a partner act towards you and that's what we try to deliver. And maybe we fall a little bit short here and there, but our goal is to never fall short.

31:18
Hannah Dittman
That's like really helpful with tangible examples that I think really paint the picture of what that dynamic is. It's like the unofficial co founder advisor in the seat with you. And I think that's a really helpful and as you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, relieving I think to a lot of founders who do are really looking for the guidance and help when you get to a certain scale, especially where the business has fundamentally changed from where you've started it and it's nice to get some additional mind power in at that point for sure.

31:47
Nick Giannuzzi
By the way, that's the other trait we want to be with founders that actually want to listen doesn't mean they have to do what we say. I don't want a founder to do everything I say. I'm not always right, I'm wrong a lot of the time, but I want them to really listen. You have to have good listeners and a founder can be stubborn and obstinate and hard nosed and everything, but they also have to listen and they have to appraise the information they get. Because I was telling the story about Spindrift, Bill Krilman, who's an amazing founder, I think Spindrift, when it started it was in a glass bottle, it wasn't shelf stable and I think it was like 90 calories.

32:20
Nick Giannuzzi
And then you look at Spindrift today and that is just a tribute to the quality of the founder and someone who maybe listened to people, maybe listen to the customer, maybe listen to the market. But you pivot and you modify and you get better and you get stronger and over time you prevail.

32:36
Hannah Dittman
It's such an evolving business to learn and grow and refine. And I agree. It's important, I think, to be adaptable, flexible, keeping your North Star where it needs to be, but knowing that your path might change a little bit to get to the same place. Very important. As you know, startup CPG has the largest slack community in the industry with now over 30,000 members. I'd love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founders that might have a similar question. Today's question was what do I need to have ready to start fundraising?

33:10
Nick Giannuzzi
Okay, great question. It depends on whether you're fundraising with the venture type environment where you're trying to raise a million 2 million, $3 million. It's very different when you want to raise money and growth capital raise. But what I would say is this, regardless of where you are, what you need to do is you need to keep very clean sort of records. Make sure your documents are very organized so that a investor can gain access to a data room with ease. A lot of times people start talking to investors and they're completely unprepared just from an organizational perspective they which is like intentionally shooting yourself in the foot. Take a couple weeks ahead of time if you want, reach out to me, I'll send you a due diligence list so you can take that list.

33:57
Nick Giannuzzi
It's the list that a big law firm would give you if they were doing due diligence on your brand. Take that and use it as a table of contents to build out a data room. Make sure all of your financials are in a way that are designed in a way that they can just be sent, they can be provided to people. If when it comes to trademark protection for your brand, just so incredibly important. When it comes to your labels and your testing of your product, have all of that organized in a place where people can see it. If you're using a co packer make sure you have the information on the co packer so that to demonstrate that you're actually working with co packers that will be acceptable and not a create risk for the investor.

34:42
Nick Giannuzzi
So regardless of the level at which you're raising, you're doing your first, you're doing your safe round or your convertible note raising a small amount, you're doing your seed round, you're doing your A, you're doing your B. Just be super buttoned up. A lot of times it doesn't come easy to people, especially to founders who are gunslinging and or working those 80 hour weeks down in the coal mine like I was talking about. But make sure that you're really buttoned up every way you can. It demonstrates so much to an investor when there's organization there and it doesn't take a week or two weeks for you to get back to them. When they ask for this information it can just simply be provided.

35:18
Hannah Dittman
That's such great advice and I think it makes a ton of sense and is often overlooked. I think sometimes founders just don't know what to expect out of a diligence process. Maybe they don't realize that all what diligence might entail. They think it's a lot more relationship building which it is. In addition to this advice, being aware of what that process is actually going to entail. Therefore, you can come prepared and ready to present yourself in the way that you think is representative of how you operate in your business to your best ability is so important. And the same way that you come prepared to have a co packer conversation or a negotiation with your supplier or anything else. I think just understanding what those people are going to be looking for is so important.

35:57
Hannah Dittman
Nick, this has been such an amazing chat for founders that want to get in touch with you. Where can they find you or what is the best way for them to get in contact. And for any operators listening in that might be interested in transitioning into investing or working directly with you all at some point, what advice would you have for them?

36:16
Nick Giannuzzi
Well, first of all, in terms of getting in contact with me, my email is [e-mail] that's obviously for Humble Growth and then for my law FIRM It's NickLaw US. I'm happy to people reach out to me. I always answer. If people have questions, I always answer. And if anybody really needs me, I always make time. And then the second question was for.

36:40
Hannah Dittman
Anyone looking to transition into investing like you have, what advice would you have for them or where can they think about getting started?

36:46
Nick Giannuzzi
Maybe it's a hard industry to get into. I'm realizing that now more I, I count my lucky stars that I was able to get here. Sometimes better lucky than good. But for the people coming out of school there's a track, right? You go and you spend, try to get some two years in an investment bank and then you start looking for investment type jobs and that seems to be the clearest path. But of course if you're not 18 years old or 20 years old and you're listening to this and you're in another industry, I guess the other way is that people value people who are very experienced with brands and who have built brands and have worked within the brand world. And there are investment private equity related jobs that really value the operations people.

37:28
Nick Giannuzzi
So if you're an operator and you can add real value, a lot of the private equity investors bring those people in too. We get a lot of that from our LPs because we have such a big group of LPs who have built companies but other brands focus more on having partners within private equity fund.

37:44
Hannah Dittman
Great advice and thank you so much Nick for your time today. You're a man of the people with many words of wisdom. This has been such awesome mentorship and everyone's going to really appreciate listening to all the sage advice that you've shared and your approach and mentality on investing and on the space. I think it's unique and makes your firm stand out and it's definitely refreshing to hear from the founder side for sure. Sure.

38:06
Nick Giannuzzi
Hannah, thank you. That's very nice of you to say. I appreciate it. I've been doing this over 30 years now and I can tell you my about 30 years. And I can tell you that like in my own development, things have shifted over the years and I see things pretty clearly now. I think there's a right way to support founders and protect them. And I think you can do everything. I think you can be a private equity investor that is responsible to your LPs and yet also be responsible to the people you invest in every way. And that's what we aim to prove.

38:40
Hannah Dittman
Well, awesome. Well, thanks again for your time and I hope everyone enjoyed the episode.

38:44
Nick Giannuzzi
Thanks everybody for listening.

38:47
Hannah Dittman
Thanks so much for tuning in everyone. If you like this episode, show us some love with a five star review at ratethispodcast.com startupcpg I'm Hannah Dittman, podcast host and correspondent here at Startup cpg. I hope you'll join me again as we dig into more juicy topics like ops, finance and all the real talk founders actually need. Come say hi on LinkedIn or ping me on Slack. I'm always eager to hear your questions or brainstorm future episode ideas. If you're a potential sponsor and want to get in on the fun and appear on the podcast, shoot us an [e-mail] and last but not least, if you haven't already, don't miss out on our free Slack community. For emerging brands and CPG lovers alike, join [e-mail] we'd love to have you. See you next time.