Welcome to a weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough.

You all know Dan Frommer, veteran tech journalist. We're going to do a W.W.C. preview here today, but before that, and

actually for most of the episode, Dan has his own excellent newsletter called The New Consumer. Sign up for it in the

show notes. Link to the free and paid editions there. Because this is the beat that Dan covers so well.

Before we get into the W.W.C. discussion and the Apple stuff,

we have a lengthy discussion of the whole consumer unicorn startup space that I don't think we cover enough on this show.

Please enjoy this conversation with the great Dan Frommer. Like consumer startups are sort of outside the remit of tech meme you know because it's

sort of like Gabe is always like well if it's not tech we're not going to cover it and a lot of the

direct-to-consumer stuff is it's not tech it's just consumer products but in the

interests of covering the startup scene and all of its guises.

You've been writing a lot about some of these consumer unicorns as they were.

So let's start by talking about that. Harry's just got bought by, what is it, Edgewell personal care for 1.3 billion dollars.

You noted that for the whole slate of big consumer unicorns there

haven't been a lot of these big purchases so far like it's been three years

since Dollar Shave Club got taken out. Why do you think that is?

It's interesting because they're not really, most of them are not tech companies

but they use technology in a way that most legacy consumer startups or just brands in general did not.

In kind of all facets of their business in marketing, in research, in development of products, in distribution

and how they run their warehouses in how they order their

packaging there's a lot of technology that goes into it and I think I wonder if

that's what has and especially the marketing component because they rely so heavily on, especially at the beginning, like on Facebook and Instagram ads, I wonder if that's what has gotten the technology VCs so into it because that's what you know one of the kind of big

questions is should these companies be valued as technology companies or as like you know diaper companies or

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