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What's up, dtc Pod. Today we're joined by Ryan springer, who is the founding partner of Midnight Venture Partners, as well as a co founder of High Desert cactus Vodka. So Ryan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the background, about yourself and some of the projects that you're involved in.

Yeah, van. I usually start my personal background with a bunch of nepotism jokes. My dad started I'll save you those this time. My dad started a retail consulting firm that mainly did strategy in the 90s. Before that he was in marketing at gatorade and and what he did was essentially build retail strategy trade marketing, data analytics, and later on actual retail execution for a lot of the most successful wellness brands or natural brand. He worked with hansen's, Monster, amy's, Kitchen Emergency, and a bunch of newer ones that have done really well. I always say that to say I worked for him my whole career. I kind of grew up in the industry.

One of my favorite stories about my bona fides of going up the industry. I remember when my dad walked in Dallas, he was like, this is the first commercially viable gluten freed bread. Neither one of us knew what that was. It was like 2004 or whatever. And I remember my dad, we tried it and my dad's like, man, I don't know what gluten is, but it's fucking delicious because this is terrible. I didn't like natural foods. I liked the industry, but I didn't get it until much later in my life but ended up working for him out of college. The the nepotism part came more in the fact that he was putting me in these positions where I was learning so much and essentially be kind of an outsourced national sales manager where I would run West, Central and East salespeople, learning retail strategy, flying out and selling to Walmart and Whole Foods.

So my personal background expertise was all on the retail strategy and natural better for you CPG side of things. And that sort of led me to where I am now in terms of my my vodka partner came to me to become his kind of 50 50 partner in the vodka because of that background, which is what a mistake he made because I had nothing to do with alcohol. Alcohol is a different animal. I've learned that the hard way. And then it definitely led me to Midnight, where we're kind of a very valueadd BC, where we take kind of best in class retail, direct to consumer and operations general partners that I had met along the way, along with my two co founders, chris Adam and Alex Lady. And so yeah, it all kind of stems from that kind of how I grew up.

No, absolutely. And one thing I'd love to get into on the vc side of things is how your background, like, operating and having that exposure to the space really set you up for success in the, in the venture capital side of things. Right. So why don't you talk to us a little bit about how those two went hand in hand?

Yeah, there's a lot of ways. Number one, I didn't understand this early on. The part I understood early was why can't more of these ultravalue add people be the ones writing the check? And there are absolutely funds in CPG that are very value add, but there aren't a lot. There's a lot that aren't. And I would kind of get annoyed when I would go into board meetings as like an outsource BP of sales or national sales manager. And we'd have this guy who was very smart, very kind, but came from a commercial real estate and didn't know anything about CPG. He was giving a bunch of advice and ended up being terrible, kind of pressuring the company to do things, just as one example. And so I realized there just wasn't enough functional capital at the seed stage in CPG.