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What is going on DTC Pod Today we are joined by Ben Matthews who is a general partner at Knight Ventures. This conversation is going to be really interesting because Knight is one of the VC funds that's kind of at the intersection of everything consumer, creator and culture. They've partnered with some of the biggest creators in the world and launched some businesses you guys may be familiar with Mr. Beast Burger and Feastable as well as they are now incubating other sort of businesses. So they really touch everything from commerce to consumer to SaaS and even things in AI. And now they're even incubating businesses. So Ben, we're going to have a lot to talk about. Why don't we start a little bit about with your background, tell us about yourself and tell us about how you got involved with Knight Ventures and what Knight Ventures is all about.

Yeah, first off, huge fan of the Pod, longtime listener, first time caller, so excited to be here and really excited to jump on today and talk to you about a lot of the brands that we built, a lot of the brands that we've invested in. Just kind of what we're seeing happening in the Market, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. So my background, I came at this from venture capital. So I was a vc. I worked at a. Well first, a long time ago I was a product manager at Google. Outside of that though, I kind of fell backwards into, into vc. I got a job at a phenomenal fund which is called Bessemer.

And I worked at Bessemer doing a lot of different types of investing, early stage software, early stage consumer, for many years and really noticed that a lot of the power of our dollar when we were investing capital was going right back to Facebook and Google. Like 50 cents of every dollar was just evaporating. And I was watching this, this kind of tier of money as it came from like rlp us to founders, founders sending it back to those platforms. So I watched the tax accumulate over year over year and just marketing and customer acquisition getting so incredibly hard for these brands, particularly direct to consumer brands. And notice that the ones that were having the most success, the portfolio founders that I worked with that seemed to be thriving were really finding hacks on acquisition. And primarily they were finding it through content. And they were either generating their own content, they were kind of like founder led CEO, content led CEOs or they just, they really understood how to navigate this new emerging world of influencer creator. I call it content.

You think about it, any, any content that's created as a, as a vehicle for US customer acquisition. So I noticed this trend and kind of dove deeper into it and realized that, you know, a lot of the world was moving towards, towards a world where if you didn't really understand how to make content, if you didn't understand how to use it, really, you weren't going to be in a position to win as a consumer brand. So I left, started a fund with these two guys who really were at the forefront of talent. They started a business called Knight and Knight Media is a talent management company. Today reps like 250 of the most popular people on the Internet. And these people are anyone like a, like a Mr. Beast. We rep a guy named Kai Sonat.