Hello folks and welcome to the second edition of Connect Ventures newsletter, The Greats, by Nicole Quinn and Mike Blank.

The Greats is a newsletter of thought pieces, portfolio company updates and interviews of the very best in their business… a journey into the minds of those at the pinnacle of their fields.

You were added to this newsletter as someone we deeply respect from our time investing at Lightspeed and CAA. If you’d like to unsubscribe, please do so below. If you know others who would like to learn about the future of Consumer, please forward it and they can subscribe here.

To learn more about our investment approach at Connect Ventures, you can read our first edition here or email us at [email protected] and [email protected].

We started The Greats with a simple question: what separates the strong from the very best?

In this Beehiiv, we’ll interview the folks at the top of their industry and these ‘greats’ all have one thing in common: they’ve found human-career fit.

At Connect Ventures, we back founders with human-career fit.

What is that? Similar to 'founder-market fit' or 'founder-product fit' in Silicon Valley, human-career fit is when we work at the rare intersection of our passion, values, and skillset. Skillset is the key.

Creative Artists Agency is a brilliant example of this. Today, we interview CAA’s CEO and Co-Chairman, Bryan Lourd, and President, Jim Burtson, two individuals with true human-career fit, to understand how CAA grew into one of entertainment's most powerful agencies. One that has moved into sports, TV, music, gaming, business development, brand marketing, and tech startups.

But first, a deep dive thought piece…

Venture Capital is governed by the power law and nowhere is this more true than in Consumer. If you get Consumer right, you get it very right.

Prior to my 10 years at Lightspeed, I spent nearly a decade in public markets. It was this time on Wall Street that engrained in me that the true way to beat the market was to be out of consensus and right. When I first started in venture capital in 2015, Consumer was very much consensus. It was 1/3 of VC dollars, as you can see below:

At the same time it was not right, shown by the number of Consumer companies becoming unicorns which was dwindling by 2015 (so it was consensus and wrong):

However, look back at that first chart and you’ll see that it is now 1/16 of VC dollars, so very much out of consensus.

Then look at the second chart and we see the tide is turning to show that more Consumer unicorns were created last year than any time in the past decade, so it’s out of consensus yet starting to be very right.

Consumer is the largest addressable market in human history, the birthplace of many of the most valuable companies ever built, and the sector most capable of delivering the power law returns that define top-quartile venture performance. Consumer adds much needed diversity to your portfolio and is priced today at a relative “bargain”. Yet many LP portfolios remain underweight Consumer relative to other areas.

It may sound like we are talking our book, but rather it is the book that follows this thesis. There is a strong why now in Consumer, due to AI, that should not be ignored. A few facts that you may not know (or have forgotten in the SaaS era)…

We would be remiss not to start with TAM. It’s huge and it’s growing.

Globally, consumer spending reached $60.0 trillion in 2023 and is forecast to reach $77.1 trillion by 2029, up 26% in just five years.

In the US, consumer spending surpassed $21.4 trillion in 2025, more than the entire GDP of every nation besides China. Household consumption represents two-thirds of US GDP.

Consumer spending anchors the economy, full stop.

Shirking Consumer served you well as an investor in the past decade. But it wasn’t always that way.

On a call with an endowment recently, the allocator kicked off the call by naming their biggest winners of all time: Airbnb and DoorDash. They are not alone.

The largest, most valuable, and most return-generating companies in venture history are overwhelmingly Consumer businesses. If you are in venture for outsized returns, Consumer delivers.

Let’s review the greatest hits…

Today, VC-backed unicorns account for over $4.4T in value, and a disproportionate share of that value resides in Consumer-facing companies from Shein ($38B revenue) to Fanatics ($8.1B revenue) to OpenAI, Discord, Whatnot, Faire, and Vinted.

History will repeat itself (or at least rhyme). Just as the internet brought us Amazon and mobile enabled Uber, AI has kicked off a Consumer golden age. We believe the best vintage years for Consumer investing are ahead, not behind.

Venture is a game of power laws.

A tiny fraction of venture-backed companies are responsible for the majority of a fund (and the asset class) returns. Looking at PitchBook data, 10% of investments are responsible for 60–80% of all returns across venture capital globally.

Consumer deals are a major driver of power law returns in venture capital.

Sapphire Partners has terrific analysis on how Consumer amplifies the power law. Looking at data from 1995-2022, they found that Enterprise companies accounted for more exits but at lower valuations. Consumer accounted for the blockbuster exits but it produces more failures in the pursuit of those mega successes. This is why we strongly believe in investing post product-market fit with managers who have human-career fit.

The power law especially applies to Consumer where we have the advantage of network effects, low marginal costs, winner-take-most dynamics and nearly 5 billion addressable consumers.

Fast forward to 2026, and AI has created a step change in valuations with the coming IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Today, we are just beginning to see the full value of Consumer AI. Consumer remains the category with the best path to mass adoption, product velocity, and capital efficiency. Identifying the next wave of record-breaking Consumer AI companies is the task at hand.

Consumer embodies the game of venture. We believe you need exposure to capture the true upside.

“We have 0% exposure to consumer and it is a constant discussion at our offsites that we need to change this” is what we hear from LPs who are trying to diversify their portfolios.

I’ve written about this on X, SaaS TAM is shrinking while Consumer TAM grows. When SaaS valuations compress, Consumer's defensibility shines and global audiences and incumbents can't replicate internally. Those incumbents then buy the consumer innovation that they can't build in-house.

Then we are asking ourselves, what is defensible? It’s Distribution, Brand, Data network effects, Community, IP, Regulatory capture and Ecosystem control. These are the elements of strong consumer businesses.

Venture itself is a secular innovation asset, not primarily rate-sensitive. While public markets whipsaw, Consumer AI is on a path up and to the right. Consumer healthcare like telehealth (24.68% CAGR 2025-2030) and wearables (17.1% CAGR 2024-2029) are on the rise globally. We believe Consumer demand is persistent; what changes is perception and the key players.

Consumer was consensus in 2015 (1/3 of VC dollars). It dropped to 1/16th.

Things rotate in and out of favor all the time. Energy funds dominated the 2000s until shale crushed them. Big buyout shops thought they had impenetrable 20-year strategies in one sub-sector. Then markets shifted.

When a sector falls out of favor, capital supply/demand flips in the buyer's favor. Less capital chasing Consumer means better entry prices for us and better terms too. You want to be on the buyer side of that equation.

The power law doesn't care about consensus. It rewards those who show up when others walk away. The risk of being underweight Consumer is not simply missing returns. It is missing the very outliers that make venture worth the bet.

Consumer doesn’t die. It reboots with new technology and then you have a 7–10 year window to invest to capture 90% of that value. That window is now.

Bryan Lourd: What makes CAA so special is that it is a bunch of entrepreneurs who are committed to working together to do what's best for a client and our company.

So it is completely expected and normal for a 26-year-old to have an idea for someone in a whole different division and put that idea forward and motor it.

Jim Burtson: People that thrive here are entrepreneurs and the culture encourages that. But it is all about “we” as opposed to “I.” And those two things usually do not meld together in a powerful way. I think that’s a big part of what makes CAA who we are.

Bryan Lourd: What we committed to was building a company and a culture that can hold your interest the rest of your life. The idea was that renaissance people weren’t going to stay the same their whole career. They were going to evolve and find new interests.

And I'm staring at an example of it in Mike Blank right here. Where he started here and where he is now, calling in from the TMRW Sports Board Meeting. I think he found what he wanted to be. And I hope he’s not done.

Bryan Lourd: Our job is to be out in the field. There was a really memorable meeting where it was clear that Disney through ESPN was spending half their day on television and film and then a whole other part of their day on sports. We needed to be in every category that was part of the zeitgeist.

It became clear that we had to find a way into sports. That was a huge challenge to say we're not going to be just a talent agency. We're going to be a company that has multiple divisions in television, film, music, sports, banking, philanthropic work, politics, and more.

Jim Burtson: You have to be innovative every day and evolve with what your clients' needs are. No client is doing just one thing. Technology enables us to provide opportunity in a broad set.

Bryan Lourd: I was at the Natural History Museum where Jon Favreau, one of the great artists of our time, was presenting Prehistoric Planet. Everything in it is created. It’s not real.

His ability to imagine the Ice Age and manipulate technology to advance storytelling is super exciting. That’s what innovation looks like: technology enabling imagination.

Jim Burtson: If you look at the history of the sports and entertainment world, advancements in technology have always ultimately improved the businesses that really drive culture.

AI is creating both dislocation and confusion, but it also creates the opportunity for a lot more money to flow through the system. Our job is to understand it, stay ahead of it.

Connect is one of the best examples of that. It is us acting as principal, it is providing investment opportunities for our clients, and it is creating new consumer propositions.

Bryan Lourd: Barbie’s Margot Robbie understood what the film should be and sought out Greta Gerwig.

Mattel had the vision to allow them to do it. They had the foresight and the guts to see that the consumer would actually recognize that this was two women's idea about what Barbie is. Barbie stands for something different.

It became the most successful movie in Warner Brothers history and drove product in a way that breathes life into that brand for decades to come.

Bryan Lourd: The point is not just identifying talent, but putting the right infrastructure around that talent.

Charlotte Tilbury, a working makeup artist, knew the product piece. But she didn’t know the 24/7 business piece. She sought out a partner who could build the business alongside her. That partner, Demetra Pinsent, is as much the star of the company as Charlotte Tilbury is.

Jim Burtson: Mike McCarley came in and pitched TMRW Sports and the TGL as this vision. This idea that was very much a “field of dreams,” an “if you build it, they will come” kind of story. We saw that we could help him build that vision with our infrastructure. And we did help.

Bryan Lourd: Our advantage is exposure. We have so much exposure to so many smart people’s ideas. We see the future because we’re watching creation at its inception point.

Jim Burtson: We look for curiosity, capability, and drive coupled with judgment. When you see that combination, you want to lean into it. And know when to get out of the way and let them be who they should be.

TMRW Sports: The NFL has officially partnered with TMRW Sports to launch a professional flag football league for women and men. The launch is expected to align with the run-up to the 2028 LA Olympics, where flag football will be an Olympic sport for the first time, maximizing visibility and momentum.

Flag football is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world, with approximately 20 million players worldwide. Approximately 4.1 million youth play flag football in the U.S. alone – a more than 50% increase since 2020. Investors in the league include NFL legends and active players, including: Peyton Manning, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Larry Fitzgerald, Tom Brady, and Eli Manning, as well as women's sports champions Billie Jean King, Ilana Kloss, Alex Morgan and Serena Williams.

TMRW Sports' first successful venture, TGL, a primetime team golf league in partnership with the PGA, just wrapped its second season. Mike was recently in Palm Beach for the TGL Championship and a TMRW Sports board meeting. In the finals, Los Angeles Golf Club went on a 9-0 run over five holes to defeat Tiger Woods' Jupiter Links Golf Club and claimed their first SoFi Cup.

The LPGA and TMRW Sports also recently announced the formation of WTGL, a new team golf league featuring the world’s best women golfers. World No. 1 Jeeno Thitikul, English star Charley Hull, three-time Olympic medalist Lydia Ko, Canada’s winningest golfer Brooke Henderson and seven-time U.S. Solheim Cup team member Lexi Thompson are the first athletes to sign on to compete in the inaugural season at the SoFi Center in Florida later this year.

Moises (Music AI): Grammy-nominated Charlie Puth has joined Moises as Chief Music Officer to help guide Moises’ creative and productive direction. Puth is a long-time user and supporter of Moises, adding, “Every musician I know is using Moises, and I’ve been using it in my own creative process for years.” Designed for musicians, by musicians, Moises helps over 70 million artists globally isolate vocals and instruments, identify chords and structure, and explore new arrangements. The AI-enabled platform makes professional-level music workflows accessible to artists at every level, supporting the creative process from learning and rehearsal to experimentation and production.

Moises also published a recent study with Water & Music surveying 1,500 professional musicians. Their research found that 78% of professional musicians report using AI for music-related work in the past 12 months, with 40% saying AI helped them learn more songs, 33% used AI for experimentation with new genres, and 30% used AI to improve production quality.

“The narrative around AI in music often focuses on what it might replace,” said Geraldo Ramos, CEO of Moises. “What this data shows is something different: musicians are using AI to go further with their ideas, practice more effectively, and explore sounds they might not have reached otherwise.”

Until next time on The Greats,

Nicole, Mike, and the Connect Ventures team