Investor Spotlight: Bill Schultz, Beliade Consumer Partners

In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, host Hannah Dittman sits down with Bill Schultz, Partner at Beliade Consumer Partners — a venture fund focused exclusively on founder-led consumer brands across food and beverage, personal care, beauty, and lifestyle. Bill brings a rare combination of Wall Street pattern recognition and early-stage brand investing experience to the table, having spent the first decade of his career at Goldman Sachs covering publicly traded consumer and retail companies before joining Beliade, where he's now in his seventh year backing breakout challenger brands.

Beliade invests at seed to Series A, writing first checks into companies approaching $1M in revenue and supporting them through the $1–10M growth phase. What sets them apart is a laser focus on disruptor brands in large, established categories — think Little Sesame in hummus or Coterie in diapers — and a deep conviction that the rise of the modern American family is the most powerful structural consumer shift happening right now.

Bill and Hannah dig into everything founders need to know about the fundraising process: how investors actually think about unit economics and contribution margins, why financial savviness is one of the strongest predictors of founder success, and how to come into a raise with a clear, specific ask that builds conviction fast. They also get into the mindset questions every founder should ask themselves before raising a single venture dollar — and why honest self-reflection about what kind of business you want to build matters more than most people realize.

They also walk through Beliade's full diligence process, from first conversation to term sheet, with clear, practical insight founders can use to prepare.

Listen in as they cover:

• Bill's path from Goldman Sachs covering public consumer companies to backing early-stage challenger brands at Beliade
• Beliade's investment thesis: categories, stage, check size, and what makes a disruptor brand worth backing
• The rise of the modern American family — and why it's the structural shift driving the best consumer opportunities right now
• Why founders should think less about trends and more about enduring long-term changes
• The honest question every founder should ask themselves before raising venture capital
• Why financial savviness is one of the strongest predictors of long-term founder success
• Unit economics and contribution margin — what they mean, why they matter, and what Beliade uses as a north star
• The diligence process from first conversation to funded — what happens at each step and how long it takes
• Why building investor relationships before you have a capital need is the smartest fundraising strategy
• What Beliade looks for in a founder: the ability to operate at 50,000 feet and zoom into the details
  
  

Whether you're a founder preparing to fundraise, an operator trying to understand how investors underwrite opportunities, or just someone who wants a clearer picture of how early-stage CPG capital actually works, this episode is packed with practical, hard-won insight.

Episode Links:
Beliade Consumer Partners: https://www.beliade.com
Bill Schultz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billcschultz/
Beliade on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beliade/

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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.

Bill Schultz
Successful outcome can look very different depending on the type of founder you are. What success looks like for one founder might look very different for another. Success for you might be, hey, I want to run this business for multiple generations. I want this to be steady eddy grower, to compound over time and to throw off cash, and I want to own all of it. That's a very different fundamental approach than a brand who's going to raise some venture funding with venture funding type expectations for an exit in a few years. And so I think part of it is like kind of zooming out a little bit before you raise that first venture dollar. Be honest with yourself, what you really want. Which one of those two paths do you want to go down?

00:52
Bill Schultz
And so having some honesty with yourself early on about what you want before you go about the journey, I think is a really important thing.

01:02
Hannah Dittman
Hey everybody, I'm Hannah Ditman, operations and finance host of the Startup CPG podcast. And today I'm joined by Bill Schultz from Beliade Consumer Partners. Bill is a partner at Beliade where he focuses on investing in high growth consumer brands across categories like food and bev, retail, personal care and lifestyle. Beliade Consumer Partners invests in the consumer brands redefining how modern families live, eat, play and thrive. Anchored in health, wellness and everyday well being. Bill started his career at Goldman Sachs covering large established consumer companies and now spends his time backing emerging brands on their growth journey. That combination gives him a really unique lens across the full consumer spectrum, from scaled incumbents to early breakout challengers, along with a deep industry expertise.

01:48
Hannah Dittman
In this episode we get into how Bill thinks about identifying breakout consumer companies, what actually matters in diligence beyond the surface level metrics, and how founders should approach the fundraising process, including the mindset to go into it with. We also dig into perspectives on trends, how to separate signal from noise, and why strong business fundamentals matter more than ever if you're building fundraising or just trying to better understand how experienced consumer investors are underwriting opportunities today, this one is packed with practical, actionable insight. Enjoy. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Hannah and today I'm so thrilled to be here with Bill Schultz of Beliade Consumer Partners. Bill, welcome to the show.

02:34
Bill Schultz
Thanks for having me.

02:35
Hannah Dittman
We're super excited for you to be here today. I'd love to dive straight in with a brief background and your path that led you to Beliade.

02:43
Bill Schultz
So my path here was pretty unique. I spent the first decade of my career at an investment bank, mostly investment research. I covered the publicly traded consumer and retail sector. So at that time I kind of had a front row seat to kind of the direct consumer 1.0 tide that was coming in and how that was like really impacting all these like large publicly traded businesses that I covered. The businesses were also staying like private for longer. It was just really clear that all the fun stuff was happening in kind of the venture stage of the market. Not really in the kind of boring old stodgy publicly traded businesses anymore. And as part of my job there, I would do a lot of like, we're trying to bring some of these venture stage businesses into our research orbit.

03:29
Bill Schultz
So I did a lot of like private company outreach. We would do these conferences, you know, really to get our investment banking clients aware of this emerging crop of great brands that were scaling in the category. And during that tenure I had met my current partner and founding partner, Beliade. His name's Martin Dolphy. We hit it off right away and we kind of followed each other's career for a few years. He was like kind of quietly assembling this like killer portfolio of great direct consumer brands at that time, Rhone and Cotopaxi. And he was a very early investor in some of these really great brands. And when he was looking to raise a third fund and go a little bit bigger and build a team around him, I jumped at the opportunity.

04:14
Bill Schultz
So I've been at Beliade now for this is my seventh year.

04:17
Hannah Dittman
Wow. So awesome. You've really seen kind of the spectrum of the world I am sure. So that'll be a fun chat and some great context for the conversation today. Could you also give a firm overview of Beliade? I'd love to better understand your mandate differentiation and where you guys are focusing in terms of criteria stage and check size.

04:37
Bill Schultz
Definitely. So we're pretty narrowly focused. We only do brands, we don't do tech, software enablement, anything like that. We're pure brand investors. We do some retail selectively, but mostly consumable product businesses. So think food and beverage, personal care, beauty, lifestyle apparel brands, things of that nature. Generally our bread and butter is seed to Series A. We'll lead seed rounds out to Series A. We'll be a little bit more of a hybrid venture into early growth funds. Our whole focus is like founder led businesses. So really mission driven companies where there's a really clear buy in like a clear founder market fit of who's running the business. And we're seeing really clear early evidence of like a cult like following behind the brand. And generally we're starting to have conversations with companies when they're approaching maybe a million or so in revenue.

05:33
Bill Schultz
And our focus is kind of like 1 to 10 million in terms of first investment. What's maybe unique about us, like unlike a lot of venture funds who are maybe really on the frontier of like edgy categories that don't exist yet. I'm not going to name any names like bash any sectors or anything. But the way we try to focus is like looking at disruptor brands in like established categories that already exist. So we really focus exclusively on like disruptor brands in large established categories that we know well and we feel like there's white space opportunity for a disruptive brand to come in and take share.

06:10
Hannah Dittman
That makes a lot of sense. I would love to dive into kind of an example to paint a better picture of something. You mean, is there anything in your portfolio that might be a great way to illustrate some of the kind of thesis that you're thinking about?

06:22
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I'll give you maybe two examples that come to mind. So one is a brand that I love. I'm on the board of the company and I'm super passionate about it. It's a brand Little Sesame. They make hummus. They started actually as a four wall, like a fast casual restaurant concept and during COVID they pivoted to launch a food CPG product. And they're the fastest selling, fastest growing hummus brand at retail today. I would say a perfect example where you have a pretty large category at retail that already exists, which is hummus. It's a multi billion dollar category. There's two brands that make up the vast majority, more than half the market share in the category. Those brands have been on the shelf for a long time.

07:03
Bill Schultz
We thought there was a lot of room in the category for somebody put out a product that's new and different, really built more from a chef's perspective, high quality ingredient profile. Except for one example is a Little Sesame hummus. Another would be coterie diapers. We were investors in the company's C. Brown a few years ago. If you don't know that's a diaper business. And that brand was really built around the idea that modern American families are really demanding a new type of baby care product. We're seeing it in like baby food products for example. We had conviction that diapering as a category was going to be sort of the next big area for that. So diapers obviously a multi billion dollar category retail and coterie was the disruptor brand in that category.

07:48
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, great examples. And I Think it makes a lot of sense. You hear a lot about aisle disruption or emerging brands kind of taking on sodgy incumbent areas that might be overlooked. I think we saw it earliest in the days of kind of like the big obvious categories, but there's so many different areas of all the different stores where consumers want a better option, a higher quality option, a more interesting option, one that resonates more strongly with them or fits their needs. So that thesis makes a ton of sense. And I agree it doesn't have to be this kind of earth shattering tech minded disruption or innovation to reach consumers. I think some of the best brands tap consumers lives in the routines they already have with just a better switch option for them.

08:37
Hannah Dittman
And consumers keep on consuming the way they maybe always have or maybe discover and learn something new. But it's not this like fundamental game changing shift.

08:47
Bill Schultz
No, we have like a fundamental view that the biggest structural tide that's happening right now, a consumer, is what we define as like the rise of the modern American family, which is shopping for products a lot differently than prior generations did. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One is generally new families now are millennial led families. Right. It's a millennial household. They are generally a little bit older than prior generations when they're starting to have kids. Their discretionary power is obviously a little bit more advanced than it was in prior generations in terms of their ability to go after purchase products that really resonate with them as consumers versus brands that just so happen to exist on the shelf.

09:27
Bill Schultz
And so that's an idea that we think transcends across health, wellness, CPG products, really any category that touches the sort of modern American family. See that with coterie diapers is like a perfect example. But everything from food, products that are being purchased to personal care, beauty, all these things are seeing a huge step function change based on a shift in the modern American family.

09:51
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, I love the way that you've summarized that and I think it makes a ton of sense. This fun thing about consumer is it's so psychology driven. Why do people make decisions? Why do they buy what they buy? How do they operate their lives? And I think some of the best investors and the best brands are really anchored on thinking through that what's going on in the consumer's life journey and mind. So that makes a ton of sense. While we're on the topic of trends and behavior, I'd love to pick your brain on some thought leadership and ask you if there's any market shifts, insights or categories that you think might be relevant for founders currently fundraising or starting a brand right now as they're kind of crafting their narrative and thinking through how to communicate what they're working on to investors.

10:38
Hannah Dittman
Are there any nuggets that you think that would be helpful for them to be thinking about in the back of their minds?

10:42
Bill Schultz
Yeah, maybe a little bit of a contrarian there. My point of view is that as a founder you should care a little bit less about trends and a little bit more about like enduring structural long term changes that are playing out. That's generally how we invest as a fund. We're not trend driven investors. If you look at our portfolio, especially as a venture investor like us, we're making investments that we are planning to hold our position in the company for upwards of a decade sometimes. Right. We really want to see a brand that's built for a long duration, not for a short term trend. So I would say we're less focused on companies who are pitching to us as like the next GLP1 augmenter or protein driven XYZ.

11:32
Bill Schultz
I would say we tend to focus on brands that don't try to incorporate trend into their pitch.

11:36
Hannah Dittman
Really helpful and I think a great perspective to highlight too because I feel like every investment firm is so different and as a brand navigating the fundraising journey, it's kind of similar to when you're building products for consumers. And there's a saying you can't be everything to everyone. I don't think you can be everything to every investor either. And some investors are super innovative seeking, some are more thinking about market tailwinds and waves and how you fit into that. And their thesis is more driven by external market factors and less so by the individual company trend. Everyone thinks so differently and their investment strategy is so different.

12:17
Hannah Dittman
So I also think learning about the investor that you're trying to meet with or just intuitively knowing how you think and you approach business and finding an investor that aligns with that can be really helpful as well.

12:29
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I think so. I think of it as like within the world of CPG investors, there's funds like us who are specialist brand investors, but we don't have necessarily specific industry that we focus on. We can look at a food and beverage brand one day we could look at a personal care brand the next we could look at a direct consumer lifestyle brand the following day. So for us it's less about sort of spotting kind of short term trends. When we're investing in a company, our expectation as sort of a venture investor in A business is that we are playing for significant outcomes. That's what we're looking for. And it's generally hard to execute on delivering that type of huge outcome if you're purely focused on kind of near term trends. If you're trying to chase that next like what's hot right now.

13:16
Bill Schultz
And that's how we think about things. We're looking for enduring long term consumer businesses.

13:21
Hannah Dittman
Great point. Thinking through, obviously you've had a lot of pattern recognition, you've seen a lot of different companies, you spent a lot of time in this space. Is there something that you wish more founders or operators knew or understood as you spend time with them that you think you can shed some perspective on to proactively help them maybe avoid some pain points or obstacles?

13:41
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I would say a couple things I'll point to. I have a perspective that the vast majority of CPG brands should be run as family run, founder run small businesses. And I think a lot of times there's an expectation, hey, I'm starting a brand, I must raise a significant amount of venture capital to have a successful outcome. Successful outcome can look very different depending on the type of founder you are. What success looks like for one founder might look very different for another. For example, success for you might be, hey, I want to run this business for multiple generations. I want this to be steady eddy grower, to compound over time and to throw off cash and I want to own all of it.

14:29
Bill Schultz
That's a very different fundamental approach than a brand who's going to raise some venture funding with venture funding type expectations for an exit in a few years. And so I think part of it is like kind of zooming out a little bit before you raise that first venture dollar. Be honest with yourself what you really want. Which one of those two paths do you want to go down? Both those paths are very different strategic decisions. And going down the path of venture capital and bringing in a lot of venture money obviously brings in expectations about the type of outcome you're going to be striving towards. And so I guess having some honesty with yourself early on about what you want before you go about the journey I think is a really important thing.

15:13
Hannah Dittman
Really sage advice and great points. Oftentimes also I feel like a little bit of a chicken and egg situation for founders at the beginning because to start up you need money and so you're thinking I've gotta find money. And then to get money you also need to prove out performance. So I think it's kind of thinking through the long term vision of a business as well, and not just the current problem that you're tackling in the today. Obviously there's so many ways to skin a cat and the most obvious answer is to go get money from someone. But I think to your point, you're kind of signing yourself up for a very specific journey and a very long one if you're able to achieve a fundraiser.

15:55
Hannah Dittman
And that's something that I think every founder should be hyper aware of what that actually entails and what you're really looking at and the sacrifices you have to make both within your life and maybe potentially even within your business to be able to pursue something like that. I love the words of wisdom and I think it's also a testament to investors that are empathetic of the founder experience from their side and saying like, hey, we don't want to just like make money off of you. This has to be good for your life too. So I think that sheds a lot of light on how you're approaching things. I would love to kind of think through some pattern recognition. Obviously you've seen a lot of companies, you probably have quite a large portfolio post the fundraising process.

16:36
Hannah Dittman
When you're in post investment operations, do you feel like there's any kind of common pitfalls or areas that brands frequently run into problems on that others can be thinking about ahead of time?

16:49
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I'll start maybe some pitfalls. One of the things we see a lot I would say like, and I'll maybe bring us back to like a conversation were having before about like kind of skill sets for founders. But we have found through pattern recognition that our sort of like most successful founders in our portfolio have been founders who are like really on top of their financials. Like their financial acumen is like, is 10 out of 10. And it's pretty intuitive, I guess, as to why that would be the case. But generally we find that founders who have a really good handle on their financials, their unit economics, even things like basics like what's their cash conversion cycle look like?

17:27
Bill Schultz
And it takes a certain type of like, I guess a financial acumen to really understand, like, okay, if I push harder on my manufacturer here, every dollar of savings I'm getting on the margin is going to compound over time. I would say the most financially savvy founders in our portfolio are generally the ones who are now running those nine figure type businesses. And that's something that we can kind of feel out early on through our diligence process. We always ask questions like walk me through your unit economics and what does your margin profile look like and what do you need from a capital perspective to get from 2 to 5 to 10 to $25 million in top line and why? And we find an overlap between our kind of most successful founders and who are the sharpest in terms of their financial capabilities.

18:16
Bill Schultz
It's a Venn diagram with overlapping circles.

18:18
Hannah Dittman
Great point. And I think in today's modern age it's a lot easier to learn things. There's obviously fractional support, has been a big movement post Covid, but also AI learning. I feel like you can brush up on concepts and things that were once much harder to understand or would take quite a long time to wrap your head around or you'd be deep in Google. You can kind of quickly get up to speed on things or even get some AI help to help bolster your own skill set. So yeah, I think all things that founders should be kind of digging into and trying to round out themselves with, whether it's within their team or within themselves or both. Obviously when a brand goes to fundraising, there's kind of always risks in any business.

18:59
Hannah Dittman
And obviously as investors you're thinking about which can and cannot be mitigated. Maybe a brand, everything looks great, but their margin isn't exactly as high as you would like it to be. Or maybe they haven't reached profitability yet, maybe they haven't built out the team fully. Or there's always different things going on in a business that might be not a perfect mark on the scorecard. What types of risks are you comfortable as an investor wrapping your head around? And how should founders be approaching trying to think that through as they go through a fundraise process?

19:34
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I would say a couple things. One is like kind of non starter things for us would be like unit economics and gross margins and contribution margins are one of those things it's sort of hard to optimize for down the road if you're starting from a weak position. A lot of times those things show that you don't really have maybe a lot of pricing power, for example. I think you want to shore up those foundations early on in a business. When we're diligencing a company, I would say one of the first things we tend to look at is like what do the contribution margins of this business look like? What are the unit economics? How do we understand the gross margin profile? And those are kind of, I would say, areas that are, we won't really overlook. Those are foundational things for us.

20:18
Bill Schultz
Things that are like we can overlook would be if you're raising an early stage, like maybe it's your first institutional capital raise, probably don't have all the team around you that you want, and there's probably huge gaps in your resume and your experience that subsequent hires are going to help unlock for you. And I think it's a matter of as a founder having like intellectual honesty about what those gaps are. Are you somebody who's like creatively minded, you have such strong founder market fit, you understand the product and the category really well, but maybe there are certain areas like branding and growth marketing and things like that are areas that you're less savvy on. That's okay as long as you know that and there's a path with growth in the company to bring to bolster the team with those types of skill sets.

21:05
Bill Schultz
So I would say like team gaps areas that we can feel confident in, like not necessarily overlooking, but understanding as a potential point of risk that we have to then figure out a way to solve for.

21:18
Hannah Dittman
Great points and really helpful the way that you laid that out so clearly with examples. We've mentioned unit economics quite a few times in this conversation. Could we double click on what you mean by unit economics and kind of what's the North Star guiding light that founders should be aiming towards when we're talking about these things?

21:37
Bill Schultz
Yeah, I would say there's not really like a one size fits all across all the categories that we invest in because a great gross margin for a food CPG brand is going to be like a pretty bad gross margin for a beauty brand, for example. So I would say it's kind of category dependent. We have sort of benchmarks for all of those categories. But the things we tend to most focus on, I would say like at a high level contribution margin is kind of for us, like the end all be all. And we define that as effectively how much is it costing you to get that product from sale to a customer?

22:11
Bill Schultz
And we pay a lot of attention to that because a great contribution margin, a higher than average contribution margin allows you to take liberties in other parts of your P and L that you otherwise might not have been able to do. For example, if you have a really good contribution margin in your business, you're able to fund marketing that maybe some competitors wouldn't have been able to do without a huge amount of capital being raised. So I think the contribution margin for us is generally like kind of a North Star KPI for unit economics that we look for, I would say for a brand that's got more than one product and selling it to multiple forms of retail. Really understanding like your gross margin profile through by retailer and by product. And this kind of goes back to like financial savviness.

23:00
Bill Schultz
As a founder, you should really be on top of like, okay, how do my margins look? My gross margins look based on the retail accounts I'm selling through, based on the product in my portfolio. And those things matter. If you've got like a hero product that does really well, and then you've got other products over here with a really weak margin profile, there's obviously like growth considerations you need to have.

23:22
Hannah Dittman
That makes a ton of sense. And just to kind of make it super clear, when we're saying unit economic, can we define that term as well? Obviously there's kind of like this umbrella concept that a lot of things fall into the thought structure of what unit economics, what's the so what of it? But would love to kind of just double click on what exactly that means. And if I'm a founder who has never spent any time on the finance side of the world, what do I need to know and why does this matter so much for me?

23:54
Bill Schultz
So I think about it from the perspective of like, unit economics are foundational part of your business ultimately at a unit level, at a widget level of whatever you're selling, how much are you able to sell that product for and what are all the costs associated with making that product? It's a bill of materials effectively. And without really good unit economics, meaning the margin that you're making on that product, that's a foundational part of your business, everything kind of falls apart if that's not optimized.

24:22
Hannah Dittman
And that makes a lot of sense why you guys all focus on that. Because I think there can be a lot of other factors going on in a business. And color, especially if you have quite a lot of different SKUs and things going on, it's easy to kind of get lost in the sauce as investors. At the end of the day, you're looking for is this a viable financial asset for me to invest in. And kind of the first place you're going to look is the basic part of that business. So makes a ton of sense why you guys are focusing on that and why that's so important for founders to get right as they're thinking through setting their MSRP's, landing their costs.

25:00
Hannah Dittman
And that's actually the building block of the entire business model and financial model of what the business is trying to pursue. You know, when you think about like a prestige product that has a lot of wiggle room for marketing because you probably have to market it a little bit more to convince customers to buy more expensive item versus a mass oriented or mass price skew. You want to make sure that your cogs are covered and that you're not just like undercutting all the competition and making a lot of sales because you are. But then you aren't really able to kind of return a profit and get to scale or be able to market yourself or do any of the other things that you need to do to run the business.

25:37
Hannah Dittman
So makes a ton of sense and I think important for founders to kind of be thinking through that lens as they think through the beginning stages of setting up a business versus the afterthought of already have something going and then need to clean it up. To your point, it's a little harder to change. Are there any other kind of key pillars in diligence that you're really anchoring on in that process? Obviously we're kind of talking about like the big risks that would need to get mitigated or the kind of no touch deal breaker zones. But what kind of other things are you hoping to see in a diligence process that make you really excited or gain conviction in a brand?

26:14
Bill Schultz
I would say like really clear understanding of why they need to raise the capital and how much they need to raise and exactly why. So I guess like sort of foresight is a good way to sort of describe that. Like why is a founder raising around what is that new capital going to unlock and why is that, hey, we're raising 2 million of new capital to get to 10 million of revenue. Here's what that's going to unlock for us. We are doing that to get into 3,000 more points of distribution. And this is a really clear understanding of what capital dollars unlocks I think is just really important for us to understand. As part of our diligence process we obviously build our own underwriting models for any company that we're going to invest in.

26:59
Bill Schultz
We obviously look at founders financial model and look at our financial model and we think about okay, what are the drivers that matter here? Where are the differences in opinion? We always stress test financial models through diligence and I think like why that's important is we really want to understand that a founder has a strong sense of like really what they're doing financially at the end of the day. So coming to us with a really clear ask of what they need I would say is like a big part of our kind of diligence process. Getting on the same page with them in terms of these are the milestones that can be achieved with this capital raise. So I would say that's kind of a pretty key part of our process is maybe that's not really definitionally diligence.

27:40
Bill Schultz
It's more just sort of like founder alignment. But to us that's kind of goes hand in hand. Some of the other items we pay a lot of attention to is like kind of capital history. What's the origin story of the business? Does the founder own the vast majority of the company? What does the cap table look like? Are there a ton of like convertible securities that exist out there that we don't know about and we have to learn about them? And obviously that significantly changes what our fully diluted ownership could look like in a business and the round dynamics and things like that. So capital history and origin of the company is important. And a lot of that too is also in like kind of the legal documentation that we would be looking at through diligence.

28:20
Bill Schultz
And again, kind of like just really stress testing the financial model is a big part of what we do. A couple other things I'll add. One is on like kind of founder and like really founder references are a pretty big part of investing ultimately. Like the earlier you invest, the more you're making a bet on a founder versus a product or a company. And so for us, because we invest early, a lot of what we do is understand a founder. Like how much grit and determination does this founder have? You almost couldn't pick a harder category to operate a business in.

28:49
Hannah Dittman
So true.

28:50
Bill Schultz
It's so difficult to run a CPG business. And do you have the grit and determination to do that over the course of, I don't know, the next 10 years, maybe more. And it takes a certain type of personality to kind of cope with that. I would say along those lines too. Like we're generally trying to make sure that a founder has, you know that saying, like get you a guy that could do both or whatever, find yourself someone that could do both.

29:14
Bill Schultz
It's like kind of that when we're looking at founders, like when we're evaluating founders, we want somebody who can really get into the nitty gritty and understand like we've talked about before, the unit economics, understand the financial model, understand like what the key levers are to pull in a business all the nitty gritty, but then also zoom out, take a 50,000 foot view and understand strategically why are they doing this? Why is there an opportunity? Why right now? What does the market look like around you? Who are you competing against in this category and what is it going to take to unseat those incumbents? And I think generally we have found it's like the right type of founder who can do both of those things.

29:50
Bill Schultz
They can kind of like operate at that 50,000 foot strategic view, but then also kind of zoom into the business and be detail oriented. Not everyone has both, but generally it's like one of the things that we look for.

30:01
Hannah Dittman
So well said and a great level of detail and articulation that I think paints a really clear picture not only of what you're looking for, but why it matters and why it's so important. When you think about the viable health of a business and the fact that you're going to need a business not only to be great today, but in order to invest to be like super duper extra great in the future years down the road. And that takes a lot of talent and hard work to get there. Bill, I have so many more of my own questions. I'd love to jump into a case study Slack question though. First, as you know, startup CPG has the largest slack community in the industry with now over 35,000 members.

30:39
Hannah Dittman
I'd love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founders out there that might have a similar question. Today's question is how long does fundraising last and what are each of the steps in the process of it?

30:52
Bill Schultz
Okay, short answer is unfortunately fundraising lasts forever. You will never not fundraise. Like joking aside, I think the way I think founders should approach fundraising is don't just engage funds when you're raising capital. It's like the worst way to do it I find because even the introductory conversation starts seeming like a little bit transactional. Here's what we need, here's why we need it now. And we're trying to bring in capital in the next six weeks or something. Founders that we've had conversations with for like months and months, sometimes years at a time. Like I'll just give name some examples like Coterie Diapers is like evidence of that. Poncho Outdoors is an Austin, Texas based outdoor lifestyle brand. We knew Clay for a few years before we invested in his seed round years ago. Rhone Cotopaxi.

31:40
Bill Schultz
A lot of these opportunities were, you know, relationships that we had developed for a while before there was a capital need. I think it's like an important thing. I just think it's like the most organic way have conversations. All VCs are going to Be out there wanting to learn more about your business, whether you're raising around or not. And if you're not raising around, it allows you to have that kind of warm introductory conversation that gets a VC familiar with what you're building. They're going to keep tracking you're going to be on their radar. When it comes time to raise, you can open that conversation back up in a much more organic way.

32:13
Bill Schultz
So to the question of like, how long does fundraising take, I would say like, you should honestly constantly be thinking about to the extent you are going down this path of like wanting to raise venture money and then growth equity money and then private equity money. Maybe one day I would think about it like, hey, I want to build relationships with the people who are capital allocators in that space. When it comes time to pulling the trigger of raising that capital, having those built in relationships, those sort of warm relationships will do wonders for you. In terms of the actual fundraising process, I would say we can go from conversation about there's a capital need to funding six weeks.

32:52
Hannah Dittman
That's super helpful perspective and advice. And I think that's kind of anything in business too. It's like relationships lubricate so much of what you're trying to do, whether it's with your co man, your team, hiring your network, whatever it may be. And I think the fundraising process can feel very like job interviewee, like for a lot of people without kind of having a little bit of that layer of rapport. So shout out startup CPG events, come to some of ours. We have investors that you can meet there. But yeah, I totally agree. And as far as the six week process, what would the steps be within that six weeks?

33:29
Bill Schultz
Let's just say we don't have a relationship already. Say you're just going to reach out to me cold via my email or something and we're going to have a conversation. Say the first introductory conversation we have is like conversational. We don't go into it like, hey, you're going to pitch me like we're in some startup competition or something. We view it as like, we want to have a conversation with you to understand who you are, understand the origin story, why you started this, what you're aiming to achieve and why. Like, you know, give us the why about it. And we want that to be a two way conversation. So we're going to be like asking questions along the way. It's not going to be like, hey, you're going to pitch me for 30 minutes and I'll get back to you in a week.

34:08
Bill Schultz
So we want to have an introductory two way conversation. Generally the process from there is like if we're interested and we want to learn more, we'll generally follow up within like that next two days or so, within the next day or two with hey, here's like some things that we want to like look at really quickly for maybe like some introductory diligence. Send us a deck, maybe like kind of a high level financial model, kind of a summary of your team. This could all even be in an email too. We want to review a few things and then we're going to start talking about the opportunity more as a team.

34:40
Bill Schultz
From there we generally start piecing together information in kind of like a one pager that the three partners here at Beliade, we all kind of talk about all opportunities that we're looking at. We have multiple touch points a week. We don't just have one weekly investment committee meeting. And so we kind of put together like a one pager on the opportunity. And if it's like two or three of us are like okay, there's something here, we want to learn more and we want to dig in more, then it kind of becomes like the diligence process. So really understanding. Like usually there's a virtual data room that's set up. That's the first thing we're going to ask. Like hey, we'd love to see your virtual data room. Please open it up to us, send us a link.

35:16
Bill Schultz
And in there we want to see basics like your financial model, a cap table and things forward looking financial model to understand how you're thinking about the business. You know, kind of the basic like legal documentation formation docs and things like that about your company. We generally try to not go down the path of diligencing and wasting your time until we kind of collectively as a partnership have a buy in about what you're doing, what you're building.

35:42
Hannah Dittman
Really helpful. And you guys must be working pretty hard to be getting through data rooms that quickly within a few week window.

35:48
Bill Schultz
It's a lot of work.

35:48
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, not lost on me. I imagine that as much as you don't want to waste the founder's time, like that's a lot of work for a firm to get through diligence. That's a lot of manpower, that's a lot of analysis that needs to be done. And it's not like investment firms can just boil the ocean and look through every company under the sun. You know, they have to take it seriously and willing to invest the time and resources and energy into doing something like that as well. Bill, this has been such a great conversation. You're a wealth of knowledge.

36:17
Hannah Dittman
I think you have such a great lens on what you're looking for and a big passion for the CPG consumer space, which is always so nice for founders that might want to continue the conversation, have additional questions or want to get in touch with you. Where can they find you or what's the best way for them to get in contact? And second part of my question, do you have any advice or opportunities with your team for those looking to join investing in general?

36:40
Bill Schultz
Yeah. So on your first question, feel free to email me. I'm billelyod.com Would love to learn more about your company and I'm always open to new introductions. So please reach out if you're raising or if you're not raising and you just want to say hi. Please reach out on your second question around our investment team or potentially joining Beliade. I would say like we're currently raising our fifth fund. The goal with our fifth fund is to add to our investment team probably later this year. So stay tuned on that. Nothing open right now, but that will hopefully change soon.

37:10
Hannah Dittman
Awesome. Well, best of luck on fund five. What an exciting milestone that will be for you all. Huge congrats and no easy feat. Obviously, like you guys are and founders can see investors have to do it in some capacity too. So you will be fundraising forever. But thank you so much again for your time today. So lovely chatting with you. Well friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. And if you love this podcast, you'll love our Slack community even more. Here at Startup cpg, we're a community of brands and experts and you should join.

37:48
Hannah Dittman
Sign up @startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community of over 35,000 All Star CPG members, hear about amazing events near you and all our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I'll catch you on the next episode and I'll see you on the Slack.