🚀 Which startup exit are you?

BuzzFeed selects its path to the public market!

Justine Moore

Jun 27

Justine Moore @venturetwins

2020 was a tipping point for fashion resale. From @thredUP's new report: -36M people sold secondhand clothes for the first time (newbies were ~70% of all sellers) -33M people bought secondhand for the first time -86% of consumers age 18+ have bought/are open to buying secondhand

Online consignment store thredUP (which went public earlier this year!) released new data about what consumers did with secondhand clothes during the pandemic. As the graph above illustrates, traditional thrift & donation declined, while resale climbed nearly 30% to $9B.

Whether they were clearing out their closets, looking for extra income, or just getting rid of their office attire, more than 35M people resold clothes for the first time last year. This was 70% of total sellers! There was also significant growth on the demand side - 33M people bought secondhand clothes for the first time, and 76% of them expect to increase their spend over the next five years.

As you might expect, Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving a meaningful amount of resale activity. 42% bought secondhand (shoes, apparel, or accessories) in the last 12 months. However, Gen X is flocking to resale at an impressive rate - 32% shopped secondhand last year, up from just 16% in 2016 and 20% in 2019.

The full report has a bunch of interesting data on what drives consumers to shop secondhand, the tradeoff between thrift & fast fashion, and how retailers are implementing resale programs. Check it out here!

Quick update - as some of you noticed last week, Olivia is on vacation for the next few weeks! In the meantime, you can follow what she’s up to on Twitter @omooretweets.

news 📣

🗞️ BuzzFeed announces SPAC. Millennial media startup BuzzFeed is acquiring Complex Networks and going public via SPAC (the combined co will be valued at $1.5B). BuzzFeed + Complex did $421M in revenue last year, down from $425M in 2019. While declining revenue isn’t particularly impressive, it’s hard to deny that BuzzFeed has a valuable audience - 73% of millennials & Gen Zers visit monthly. The challenge now is monetizing those eyeballs beyond low-margin ad revenue. More on that here!

📈 Confluent pops in IPO. Data streaming platform Confluent went public on the Nasdaq this Thursday, closing its first day of trading up 25%. The company ended the week at a $22.2B market cap. Confluent was founded in 2014 - it came out of Kafka, an open source project built within LinkedIn (the team decided to commercialize the software after a viral blog post!). Today, Confluent helps companies like Walmart and Citigroup store and manage the data they collect in real-time.

💸 Funding round recap. Growth rounds aren’t slowing down for the summer! A few that were announced this week:

Design tool Figma raised a $200M Series E at a $10B valuation (a 5x increase over the past year). Figma enables teams to collaborate on designs in real-time - customers include Uber, Dropbox, Zoom, Square, and Coinbase.
Sneaker marketplace GOAT raised a $195M Series F at a $3.7B valuation. The company did $2B in GMV over the past 12 months, with 500% YoY growth in its new streetwear business.
Lower, an all-in-one platform for buying a home, raised a $100M Series A. The Ohio-based company was founded in 2014 - it’s scaled to $300M in revenue (and is profitable) without raising any outside capital.

You may be familiar with food ordering app Snackpass, which has 500K users across 13 college towns. The company just announced a $70M Series B at a $400M+ valuation!

Snackpass makes it easy to find local restaurants, order food, and earn reward points and discounts. Almost all of the orders placed through Snackpass are for pickup (not delivery), and users are highly engaged - CEO Kevin Tan told TechCrunch that the average customer orders 4.5 times a month 😮.

what i’m following 👀

What does it take to pitch your D2C brand on Shark Tank? Thingtesting investigates.

Private members’ club Soho House has filed to go public.

Twitter is now accepting applications for users interested in testing new paid features - Ticketed Spaces & Super Follows.

Lenny Rachitsky on how North Star Metrics vary by business model.

Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

The Bloomboard is live! I’m excited to launch my job board, where I curate and share unique roles in finance and tech every week. The goal? To promote access and spread awareness of amazing companies. THREAD: Becoming a go-to place for candidates and high-growth companies...

If you spend time on VC Twitter, you’ve probably seen an explosion of posts about job boards! Newsletter authors & community managers like Sahil Bloom, Greg Isenberg, and Magdalena Kala are curating open roles for their audiences (sound familiar? 😂). But instead of linking to postings, like we do below, they’re using a new platform called Pallet. Pallet is built on the premise that the future of hiring is driven by communities.

What does this mean? Imagine you work in marketing at a D2C brand and join a Slack group with other marketers. Brands looking to hire would love to access this group, even if they have to pay to post their role. Hiring can be an extremely long and expensive process - getting in front of the right candidates is invaluable!

But distributing job postings through Slack groups (and even newsletters) can be clunky, as we’ve learned with Accelerated. What if you wanted to quickly browse all of the roles we featured in previous editions, sort them by location, or even see which ones are still hiring? It would take forever - and be pretty frustrating! Pallet is looking to fix this. It also provides cool features for the community leaders who curate job boards (what if you could make $ from placing people in roles?) and the companies looking to hire.

I’m curious to get your thoughts - would you like Accelerated to try using Pallet, or do you like the way we currently post jobs?

jobs 🎓

OnDeck - Program Associate (Remote)

Gather - Strategic Partners Associate, Strategy & Biz Ops Associate (Remote)

StitchFix - Strategy Associate (SF)

Discord - Data Analyst (SF)

Cornershop - Shopper Ops Specialist, Capacity Analyst (SF)

Outschool - Biz Ops Associate (SF, Remote)*

a16z - TxO Program Coordinator (Menlo Park)

FIGS - Associate Product Manager (LA)

Whatnot - Ops Analyst (LA)*

The Farmer’s Dog - CRM Associate (NYC)

Bubble - Startup Relations Associat e (NYC)

ERA - Global Program Manager (NYC)

Ophelia - Chief of Staff (NYC)*

*Requires 3+ years of experience.

internships 📝

Harlem Capital - Fall Interns (Remote)

Shopify - Fall Content Design Interns (Remote)

Zendesk - Design PM Intern, Story Design Intern (Remote)

ContentFly - Social Media Intern (Toronto, Remote)

Cerebral - Social Media & Community Intern (SF, Remote)

WorkBoard - Product Dev & Infra Ops Intern (Redwood City)

ProducePay - Finance Intern (LA)

Foursquare - Product & Data Support Intern (NYC)

Block Renovation - BD Intern, Design Lab Intern (NYC)

BARK - Talent Brand & Diversity Intern (NYC)

Seasons - Software Eng Intern (NYC, Remote)

puppy of the week 🐶

Meet Birdie and Daphne, twin Great Dane puppies who are almost four months old.

Their hobbies include swimming in the pool, napping on the couch, and playing with their big brother Oakley (a Golden Retriever).

Follow them on Instagram @the_oakie_dokie!

Hi! 👋 I’m Justine Moore, an early stage consumer & SMB investor. I’m currently Thanks for reading Accelerated. I’d love your feedback - feel free to tweet me @venturetwins.