When Brynn Putnam sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million at the beginning of the pandemic, it appeared to this editor she sold the smart fitness company too early.

Instead, the timing proved brilliant. The home fitness craze crashed nearly as abruptly as it peaked during that first year of lockdowns. Meanwhile, after a year as a general manager at Lululemon, Putnam had new operating insights, a big win under her belt, and a fresh idea that she has since turned into a new company that will launch publicly in 2025.

The venture firm Lerer Hippeau has already joined a very competitive round for that stealthy startup -- the firm led Mirror's $3 million seed round years ago, too -- and last night in New York, I spoke with both Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer and Putnam about what she is building. We also discussed a more general rebound that's finally happening at scale for consumer tech – some of it led by founders who led the last wave of successful consumer startups.

That follows below, lightly edited for length. You can also view a full recording of our conversation below.

Ben Lerer on writing that first check:

And when we invested in Mirror, Brynn had this totally convincing, utterly janky demo, basically like a two-way mirror with a computer screen behind it to show you what a mirror would look like if she was able to raise tens of millions of dollars to actually produce such a thing. Really interestingly, she designed a contraption that was proprietary to her at the time [own line of boutique gyms]. and when we saw it, it just became clear that Brynn was not just a smart business builder who had built a great gym brand for herself but an inventor.Brynn won us over very, very quickly and possibly looked crazy for a few years, but eventually less so. Brynn Putnam on selling Mirror just four years after founding it:.We weren't for sale. We weren't looking for an acquirer. We had just really launched.

But we had a longtime partnership with Lululemon.
I worked with them in my gyms for about a decade, so we had spent a lot of time with them, doing content and interesting events with them. It just seemed like the right fit to really take Mirror into homes across the world with speed and certainty. We just really felt like it was something we couldn't pass on. As to whether Lerer chipped in with advice on that sale, he said: I did have an opinion on it. Look, venture is an awfully weird business, just because of the power law and the idea that you're supposed to take these moonshots-and you are going to have a bunch of losses but your big wins are going to change the whole world. I believe in the power law, but sometimes I do think that venture loses sight of just really basic, good, sound business decision-making.

And there are a few general principles in business, like: sell when others are greedy, and buy when others are scared.

You don't always have to go back to the casino again and again and again. In this case, when Brynn came and said, 'Hey, I got this offer, I'm really thinking about taking it,' I said, 'Yeah, you should do this for you; this is amazing for us.". And if you're getting pushback from other folks [like later-stage investors with a different cost basis], I'm happy to try to be helpful, but you're frankly much more forceful and powerful than I am and you'll take care of this.' For a year or two after, I think Brynn probably got some people who second-guessed it, and now I think people see the arc of the entire category and realize it was just a totally brilliant move. Putnam on working afterwards as an executive at Lululemon, which later threw in the towel on Mirror: An investor who I admire. .told me at the time that I should be gracious and learn, that throughout the life of your company, you're selling your company. You're selling it in small pieces, or you're selling it in bigger pieces, but you're always selling your company.

And the best thing you can do once you've made that decision is really to try and learn as much as you can about from this business that you have chosen to sell to and try to tackle something with purpose in this new role.

And that's what I did. And I learned just an incredible amount in the year that I was there, and it was just incredibly interesting.But I think ultimately, when you go from being a founder and CEO to effectively the general manager of a division, it's a very large change, and for some people, it's a fit. And for me, it just wasn't. I'm really a builder. Putnam on what led her to develop her new startup: When I left Lululemon, I was really just at a different stage of my life. Pregnant, then two children, and in fact, really, just making stock of what was important to me at that point. Mirror was very much about me. It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better. As I entered that next stage, life was very much more about family, friends, relationships, and those other things in life that were growing important to me. I was really, really struggling to find quality time with my loved ones, you know, in the same way as I had growing up around the table eating a meal, playing a board game, looking each other in the face.

Quality time was a bit of a tougher test for my kids, who grew up glued to iPads or smartphones, of course.

So I really started to think of, how could I take what I learned at Mirror and apply those lessons to the category of play? How could I use tech to build better social relationships and connections? And that's what I'm working on now. It's a new consumer hardware company but in the gaming space rather than fitness really designed around how we spend time together face to face, not where technology is the experience but more of an enabler towards building better relationships. Asked if her new product is for children or fits in one's pocket or one wears it on their face, Putnam said: It's for everyone. It's for friends and families spending time together. It's not a kids' company, although we do hope you'll participate with your kids. It's not an education company, although we do hope that people find it interesting and strategic and creative, but it's really about using tech to connect people to each other. (Here Lerer declared he was sworn to secrecy by Putnam.) Putnam on the confluence of AI and hardware and software that just seems very much top of mind for founders and investors suddenly: I think we're about to enter a golden age of hardware.

All the VCs here are going to be so excited to invest in hardware founders soon, hopefully, because a few things are happening. The iPhone was 17 years ago. That is the last mainstream consumer hardware success story since Oculus. I feel that there is an opportunity in this market for something new. Lots of the fundamental building blocks of these technologies are becoming much more mature and therefore much more affordable, so building, in our case, display technologies is certainly possible today in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago.

And then of course AI is opening up the door for how we actually interact with our devices.

So naturally, there will be new devices on the market.

We're speculating: no other personal computer but a new shared device in the house-that's precisely what we did with Mirror, and that's what we are doing again here.

It is a sense of technology somehow bringing your home and your family closer together and that's where we really believe the future lies. Focus less on technical details of hardware specifications, but on how the experience is built up, "Putnam said. I recently read about Nintendo design philosophy. They have this concept of using 'withered' technology with lateral thinking. So the idea is using mature, affordable, more readily available technologies but making a really interesting experience around them, and that is what we did with Mirror. It was rather commodity hardware. It wasn't frontier tech. And [that's] what we're doing again now. On bringing family and friends together as an investing theme (here, this editor brought up the new startup of Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn, Pie, which focuses on bringing people together offline), Lerer said: I’m an investor [in Pie]! Okay, I have young kids, same challenges all my friends have and everyone else has: we're all completely hopelessly addicted to these devices at a high level, and a lot of interest in alternatives to that addiction and new formats of entertainment or opportunities to get people off of screens or out in the world. We actually just closed a relatively new application layer deal not announced yet in an AI company that's in the travel space and one which we just announced last week in another application layer company in the aftermarket automotive space, that is actually the largest hobbyist area by spend in the United States. Finding ways to tap into people's passions is always a good bet in the consumer space.

On the feeling that 'consumer' as a category is swinging back – including thanks to a new $500 million fund announced this past week by the well-known consumer-focused firm Forerunner Ventures, Lerer said:

As a fund, we’re founder first, but we’re also New York first, and [with] the first [founder] generations of New York in the early 2010s, there was a lot of consumer, a lot of media, a lot of direct to consumer commerce.

And there were a few trends that really drove that.

You had the rise of the iPhone and the App Store. You had social media kind of exploding and the arbitrage ad ecosystem opportunity to go and grab customers faster than ever. Maybe the rise of Shopify as well created a great time to go build consumer businesses with a wide-open imagination. Over the last four, five, six years, there's been very little in terms of big tech changes that inspire people to do anything that doesn't feel incremental. And I believe AI is that catalyst today. We're seeing a very high-quality set of founders saying, 'Now's the time to get back in the pool.' There are things that are possible today that weren't possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is steep right now with respect to using your imagination.

So I'm more excited about consumer than I have been in a long time, which is really exciting for me because that's my passion.

I built a consumer business. I love investing in consumer founders, and it's been pretty crappy the last few years, quite frankly.