Susan Lyne
Co-Founder & General Partner, BBG Ventures
Media and retail executive — CEO of Gilt Groupe, president of ABC Entertainment — who co-founded BBG Ventures in 2014.
Before venture investing, Susan Lyne ran Gilt Groupe as CEO, served as president of ABC Entertainment, and was CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia — a rare investor background built entirely in media and consumer operating roles rather than finance or engineering.
She co-founded BBG Ventures with Nisha Dua in 2014, backing founders who are women or otherwise diverse. The fund’s "Polyculture" research thesis — that overlapping cultural identities, not single demographic categories, now drive U.S. consumer behavior — grew directly out of Lyne’s media-industry read on where audiences were fragmenting.
How she invests
Lyne’s pattern-matching comes from having run consumer media and retail businesses rather than having only invested in them — she is unusually positioned to judge whether a founder’s read on a cultural or commercial shift is correct, because she spent a career making that same kind of call herself.
Ran three major consumer/media companies as CEO or president before co-founding BBG Ventures.
Sources
Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with BBG Ventures.