Kirsten Green
Founder & Managing Partner, Forerunner Ventures
Built one of the first specialist "modern consumer" VC practices.
Before venture, Kirsten Green was an equity research analyst covering retail and consumer brands, spending as much time in stores as in spreadsheets to understand buying behaviour.
She founded Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and focused almost exclusively on direct-to-consumer commerce while it was still a contrarian niche — backing early breakouts including Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Glossier and Chime.
Forerunner has since raised seven funds and manages roughly $3B, closing a $500M flagship fund in 2025 aimed at emerging consumer applications and AI tooling. Its funds are built deliberately small in company count, reported at roughly 20 to 25 positions each.
How she invests
Concentration is the structural choice that separates this firm from most seed investors. A fund holding 20 to 25 companies cannot rely on portfolio size to catch an outlier by volume; every position has to be underwritten to matter on its own, and a wrong call costs proportionally more. That construction only works where the manager believes their selection is genuinely better than the base rate — a claim most portfolios are deliberately built to avoid having to make.
What an individual investor can take from it
The edge came from a job that was not investing. Years spent watching what people actually bought, in physical stores, is domain knowledge accumulated before any capital was deployed. The implication for an individual is narrow and useful: the categories where you already observe more than a full-time investor does — your profession, your industry, the things you buy and know why — are the only ones where concentration is defensible. Everywhere else, spread.
Where the lesson stops
Concentration cuts both ways, and the version an individual can run is far more fragile than a fund's. Forerunner holds 20 to 25 positions with professional diligence behind each and reserves to follow on; an angel concentrating into three or four companies has neither, and one bad call removes most of the portfolio. Domain knowledge justifies being selective about which deals you look at — not about how few you end up holding.
Named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People and Forbes’ Midas List multiple years running.
Sources
Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with Forerunner Ventures.