Kirsten Green Uses Data — and Her Gut — to Make Investment Decisions

When Kirsten Green first heard about Dollar Shave Club, she wasn’t in. Green, the founder of venture capital firm Forerunner Ventures, hadn’t seen the pitch, but was told about the concept by a friend. She wasn’t, frankly, that interested. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s hard,'” Green said. “I sort of went to a place where I was like, ‘That’s a fairly low-ticket item that has a really huge, big, formidable competitor.'” Then, she met Michael Dubin, the founder of Dollar Shave Club, at a dinner. He started talking about “the guy,” and how he was changing, waking up to the ideas of health and wellness and self-care, and sneaking into his wife’s or girlfriend’s cabinet for sunscreen or moisturizer. At the same time, that guy had to go to a drugstore or mass retailer to buy any of those things, where many of the brands are passé, Green said. That’s when it clicked for Green. She was one of the company’s earliest investors, investing $1 million in the company for a $5 million valuation. Four years later, Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever for a reported $1 billion. When Forerunner invested in Dollar Shave Club in 2012, the concept of a direct-to-consumer personal-care company was relatively

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