Inside Lunch Partners, a venture capital fund run by marketers

Several years ago, marketing leaders Nick Tran and Ross Martin had a conversation about starting a new venture capital fund. “We jokingly said at one point, ‘How amazing would it be if we were all able to have lunch together once a year, discuss all these opportunities, and then walk out of this lunch with this plan to invest in a few of these startups?’” Tran recalled. That venture, Lunch Partners, became a reality in 2018. Today, it’s thriving as a different kind of VC fund—one mostly led by marketing experts, rather than finance wizards, who provide money to start-ups along with priceless advice drawn from experience leading some of America’s best-known brands. Martin, now president of the ad agency Known, co-founded Lunch Partners with Kern Schireson, the agency’s CEO and chairman. They are among a group of 18 limited partners that includes Tran, chief marketing officer at luxury goods marketplace Farfetch and former global head of marketing at TikTok. The limited partners, who refer to themselves as the Lunch Table, also include McDonald’s Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Tariq Hassan and Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein, in addition to executives who have held marketing roles at companies such as Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo and Live Nation. (See the full list at bottom.) Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Lunch Partners currently holds investments in 15 companies, including olive oil brand Brightland, hair care company Jupiter and wine brand Nomadica. The firm invests in early stage businesses, usually seed rounds, and does not invest in companies that pose conflicts for its limited partners, according to a Lunch Partners representative. The partners had been investing in other businesses on their own before Lunch Partners was founded, Martin said. “We realized that if we combined our expertise, and our experience with early-stage businesses, and joined forces … we could replicate an Avengers model here, where we play to all of our strengths and neutralize our weaknesses as investors, and then work together to support founders and CEOs,” he said. Six years in, it seems like a success. The value of the Lunch Partners portfolio has tripled since 2018, a spokesperson said, though the group declined to share exact figures. What’s more, all 15 portfolio companies made it through the pandemic and are currently growing; and one portfolio company, aviation and air travel company Surf Air, made an initial public offering in 2023. One major distinction between Lunch Partners and more traditional venture funds is that marketers are operators first, and investors second, Jupiter CEO Robbie Salter said. Generally speaking, if you go to a more traditional fund, he said, “you’ll find that those individuals have more of a track record of investing in those businesses versus operating those businesses.” Lunch Partners was the first fund to invest in Jupiter, he said. “We have the extremely good fortune of being backed by people who actually have been operators as well,” Salter said. Lunch Partners made a pre-launch investment in Salter’s company Jupiter, which rolled out in 2020. While Salter declined to disclose the size of the investment, he noted that Jupiter has since raised more funding from other firms. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here “It would be a tremendous value add for a VC fund or any other type of fund to have somebody on their team who fundamentally understands how marketing works,” Salter continued. The Lunch Partners limited partners have not only introduced Salter to great brand partnership opportunities, he said, but also provided packaging design expertise, distribution advice and more. Jupiter’s annual revenue has at least doubled each year since its 2020 launch, Salter said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jupiter (@hellojupiter) It’s a win-win—Lunch Partners leaders are also learning from the start-ups. “Even though I’ve been at large corporations, I actually find a lot of meaningful insights, innovations [and] scrappiness from some of the start-ups that we’ve been working with that allows me to think differently in my role,” Tran said. Contrary to the popular belief that someone needs a hard finance background to succeed in VC, this type of investing is “all about creativity,” said Lisa Licht, a Lunch Partners limited partner who was a marketer at Live Nation and is now an executive coach and a marketing advisor for Build-A-Bear Workshop. “There’s no business today where you can rest on ‘this what I did 15 years ago,’” she said. The cherry on top Brightland Founder and CEO Aishwarya Iyer said that when she started discussing the possibility of Lunch Partners investing in Brightland in 2019 with Martin, she immediately loved the idea of having operators as part of a fund. Brightland, she said, has been very lucky to have great investors overall (the company has taken investments from other funds, too). “I’m very grateful for that,” she said, “but I think there’s an extra cherry on top when you have investors who have run businesses, who have been a part of companies, who know what it’s like to go through the ups and downs and haven’t only been on the investing side.” Iyer said she was “blown away” by the major corporations and decades of marketing experience the Lunch Partners limited partners bring to the table, describing their backgrounds as “very rare” for investors. “Most of the time, it’s somebody who worked in PE, or venture or at a hedge fund or in banking, who just sort of continues on in their investment journey, and they’re assessing if a company is viable or not,” she said. Of course, those people can provide value to a company in other ways, but “it’s a very different experience to have folks who have really walked the walk,” she said. Beyond the monetary investment that Lunch Partners has put into Brightland, the partners have helped Iyer solve problems such as figuring out how to implement a bonus plan for her team, navigating compensation and hiring plans for other executives at her company, and thinking about celebrity partnerships in different ways. Iyer did not disclose the size of Lunch Partners’ investment in Brightland, but since the investment Brightland has grown into an eight-figure business, Iyer said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by B R I G H T L A N D (@wearebrightland) Nomadica specializes in wines made from sustainably farmed ingredients. Kristin Olszewski, its founder and CEO, said she wishes more traditional venture firms had marketers on board making decisions. “Let’s call a spade a spade—marketing is more important than it’s ever been,” Olszewski said. But it is also more difficult than it’s ever been due to the challenges of gaining consumer attention in today’s fragmented media marketplace, she added. “Yes, your financials are essential, you have to have healthy business fundamentals, you have to have incredible gross margin, you have to have EBITDA that’s trending up year over year, you have to have growth,” she said. But, she added, she knows a lot of startups that had all the right business fundamentals and still couldn’t get off the ground. “They went out of business,” Olszewski said. Ultimately, on top of the business fundamentals, startups need great storytelling expertise—something that Lunch Partners limited partners are adept at. “Great marketing is great marketing—whether you’re doing it with a big budget, or a small budget, we’re all trying to earn attention,” Martin said. “We’re trying to move people from feeling one thing to acting in a certain way,” he added, saying “that doesn’t change whether you’re working on a really huge global scale, or you’re working in a growth area.” Below, a closer look at the Lunch Table’s limited partners: • Ross Martin, president of ad agency Known, who previously founded brand strategy firm Blackbird. Schireson Associates acquired Blackbird to form the basis of Known in a deal announced in 2020. Martin also previously served as Viacom’s executive VP of marketing • Jesse Angelo, founder and CEO of Checker Media. Angelo previously served as president of global news and entertainment at Vice Media Group, was the publisher and CEO of The New York Post and was chief of digital advertising solutions for News Corp • Katie Bayne, president and founder of Bayne Advisors, who previously served as the North American chief marketing officer for Coca-Cola • Sanjay Gupta, executive VP and chief transformation officer at Novant Health who previously served as CMO at Ally Financial • Tariq Hassan, McDonald’s USA chief marketing and customer experience officer and former Petco CMO • Ken Hertz, senior partner at law firm Hertz Lichtenstein & Young and founding partner at memBrain, an entertainment marketing and strategy consulting firm • Amy Israel, president of television at North Road Company, who was previously executive VP, original programming at Showtime • Seth Kaufman, president and CEO of Vintage Wine Estates, was previously president and CEO of Moët Hennessy North America and during 19 years at PepsiCo his roles included CMO of PepsiCo Beverages North America • Jeff Kingsley, serves on the board of Known and is the agency’s former president and chief operating officer • Lisa Licht, marketing advisor at Build-A-Bear and former Live Nation Concerts CMO • Udi Miron, CEO and president of Ananey Communications and a 30-year TV industry veteran • Sean Moran, former president of ad sales at Viacom • Jason Ostheimer, a co-founder and partner at Advancit Capital who sits on Known’s board of directors • Kern Schireson, Known’s chairman and CEO, previously Viacom’s chief data officer and corporate executive VP and chairman of Schireson Associates • Nicholas Tran, Farfetch CMO and former head of global marketing at TikTok • Mark Weinstein, Hilton’s senior VP, global head of marketing • Carl Stern, former Boston Consulting Group chairman • Dan Riess, executive VP and chief growth officer at Univision Subscribe to Ad Age Sign up now for the latest industry news and analysis Click here

Inside Lunch Partners, a venture capital fund run by marketers

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