This LA investment firm backed Ring before Amazon acquired it, and it just made several new hires to change early stage tech startups

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• M13, a Los Angeles-based consumer investment firm, announced two key hires Friday: Latif Peracha, former director of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and Gautham Gupta, former founder of NatureBox.
• MC Gasco-Buisson, an executive on loan from Procter & Gamble’s investing arm, also joined the firm.
• Carter and Courtney Reum started M13 in 2017 to fill a hole in early-stage venture funding they saw during their own stints as entrepreneurs. Winners need to be created in addition to being hand-selected by a firm, according to the Reum brothers.
• The team also announced Matt Hoffman joined as the Head of Talent to further expand the firm’s capabilities in helping portfolio companies recruit and retain top talent.
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Venture funding is largely based on picking the best companies, the best founders, or the best market opportunities. But twin brothers Carter and Courtney Reum thought venture investors were also uniquely positioned to create the big new business opportunities themselves.

That was in 2017, and on Friday, their early-stage venture firm M13 announced it was adding three new hires and a corporate partner as a testament to its success: Latif Peracha, former director of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and Gautham Gupta, former founder of NatureBox. MC Gasco-Buisson is also joining the firm as an executive on loan from Procter & Gamble’s investing arm, 

“To do this the way we want to do it takes time,” Courtney Reum said. “We’ve been under the radar because we are in LA, but we wanted to go get this platform going, make some money, and not just show new talent the cocktail napkin with our plan.”

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The Reum’s early-stage firm concentrates on Series A stage consumer technology companies and counts smart home gadget company Ring among its portfolio. According to Peracha, the broadness of the firm’s investment thesis is by design and was part of the sales pitch when he decided to join.

“The model is designed to impact a wide variety of companies that could be a wider variety of consumer companies, because really any company that can sell to a consumer we will look at,” Peracha said.

If Peracha is the “big visions” hire with space companies on his resume, Gasco-Buisson is the practical corporate partner to ground M13’s portfolio companies in the here and now. She has worked at consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble for 22 years, most recently leading the company’s corporate venture capital arm. She said she advises new and emerging brands on things like customer insights, branding, and marketing given her experience advising Procter & Gamble’s household cleaner, wellness, and other consumer products.

“The unique model enables the founders to have access to P&G resources, knowledge, and capabilities and we are committed as an organization to growing these companies together,” Gasco-Buisson said.

Part of Gasco-Buisson’s role will involve mentoring the larger M13 team in addition to advising startups. She said that, even though consumer investing is typically seen as fickle, consumer tastes as a whole are relatively stable and primed for M13’s model.

“Some of those things don’t change, but what does change is expectations,” Gasco-Buisson said. “We are seeing expectations shift in personalization and accessibility, in health especially, where the consumer expects high levels of customer service. The entrepreneur must be meaningfully differentiated.”

Carter and Courtney Reum also hired Matt Hoffman to lead talent acquisition for M13 and its portfolio. They’ve found over the last two years that one of the biggest struggles Series A consumer technology companies face is finding and retaining key talent, and feel that Hoffman will round out the operational functionality of the firm.

“Can we create an institutionalized approach that gets stronger the more we do it over more companies?” Carter Reum asked. “There’s just a scale between investing part of the business and our backed part of the business where other teams don’t.”

Courtney Reum added: “I have nothing against venture capital, we have been general partners and limited partners and have been customers of it. We don’t believe there’s anything broken about it, but it needs to evolve.”

SEE ALSO: A founder of Juniper Networks and a co-creator of Apple’s Mac operating system used this hand-written pitch deck to raise $200 million from SoftBank for their new data center startup

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