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I'm the Founder and Executive Chairman of Propeller Industries, an embedded finance and…
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Chris Fenster shared thisHard to believe this actually happened last night on Fallon. Great awareness for Riff and congrats to Daniel Humm, Mark Ramadan and the team. It really is a great product.Chris Fenster shared thisIt was an absolutely surreal feeling to see my co-founder Daniel Humm cooking Riff with Jimmy Fallon last night! After 18+ months of building the company in near-silence, the surround sound support over the last week has been incredible. Thank you to Questlove for being a great judge and picking the right dish...but really, with Riff, anyone can be a great cook in only 15 minutes 😁 https://lnkd.in/g8_rHMBMChef Daniel Humm Cooks a Pasta Dish with Jimmy, Calls His Food Brand Riff a Friend in the KitchenChef Daniel Humm Cooks a Pasta Dish with Jimmy, Calls His Food Brand Riff a Friend in the Kitchen
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Chris Fenster shared thisOne of the many great things about getting older is the way that wisdom and relationships start to compound together. More lessons learned + more trust built + (hopefully) more freedom to be intentional about what you do and who you do it with. It's been really fun to partner with Mark Ramadan and David Pepin to help bring Riff to life - not just because it's more fun to build with friends but because I've known Mark for over a decade and I can observe both of us making decisions differently, and more intentionally, than we would have before. Propeller Industries almost never gets engaged pre launch -- let alone 18 months pre-paunch -- but there was no way we were going to miss out on the fun of seeing this incredible team come together to built this incredible product. Excited to see where this can go. Congrats to the Riff team on an successful launch!Chris Fenster shared thisI’m incredibly excited to finally be able to share with the world my new company, Riff! It’s been more than 20 months of development, tastings, commercialization, design, and collaboration to arrive to this point, and it’s surreal that we've finally arrived: Riff is now available nationwide at Target and at EatRiff.com! Chef Daniel Humm and I met many years ago and became fast friends through our shared love of food (big surprise), and a desire to build something new and meaningful. Daniel wanted to help people cook more easily, more joyfully, at home, and I felt like the boxed meals space was ripe for innovation. Any time I see a shelf in the grocery store packed with brands that have been around for 50+ years, it brings me right back to 2008 when Scott and I saw a wall of Heinz and thought, “we should do something about that…”. So, Daniel and I decided to co-found Riff together and build a modern solution to an age-old problem: what’s for dinner? I’m so proud to reveal Riff: a boxed meal kit designed for the way we actually live today. Each kit combines organic, bronze-cut pasta or organic, air-dried noodles, a seasoning packet made from real spices and vegetables (no “natural flavors” or anything artificial), and a packet of crunchy toppings for texture. As simple as making mac and cheese, each kit becomes a delicious, restaurant-quality dinner in less than 20 minutes (in one pot!) and fills your home with incredible aromas along the way. And, if you’re feeling creative, Riff makes it easy to “riff” in your own way, customizing your dinner by adding fresh veggies, protein, citrus, and herbs. I’ve spent my entire career helping to build better-for-you CPG brands, and I’ve never been more excited by a combination of product, category, brand, and team as I am with Riff. Speaking of team, I’m overwhelmed with joy to be able to build Riff with an incredible group of leaders: David Pepin (our CEO), Hannah Bricker (our Head of Brand), Jake Brekke (our Head of Operations) and Daniel Klausner (our Head of Commercial). What a wonderful reunion this has been for many of us – and I can’t wait to see what this next chapter brings! A huge thank you to Daniel for inviting me into this project, to David for becoming our fearless leader and trusting me with a third company, to Target for giving us the opportunity for a dream launch, to Bella for encouraging me to take this leap, and everyone who has been so supportive over the past ~2 years. I can't wait to hear what you all think! https://lnkd.in/giJTCC39Eleven Madison Park Chef Daniel Humm Turns His Michelin-Star Expertise to the Mac-and-Cheese AisleEleven Madison Park Chef Daniel Humm Turns His Michelin-Star Expertise to the Mac-and-Cheese Aisle
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Chris Fenster posted thisTomorrow at 12 ET I’m doing a live session with Charlie O'Donnell of nextNYC : The Hard Part of AI Isn’t AI — What It Actually Takes to Automate Your Finance Function. A preview of the argument, which starts with a heresy: nobody should care about bookkeeping automation. Venture has spent a decade and $500M+ chasing it — and none of it has returned a dollar yet. Even when the automation works, you’ve trimmed <1% from the cost of measuring your business while spending 50x that acquiring customers and 20x on payroll. AI is the most transformative technology my generation has ever seen and you’re pointing it at a rounding error. You’re not gonna cut your way to enterprise value through your accounting bill. The CFO’s job is capital allocation: where the next dollar goes to earn the best return. So the AI question worth asking is whether you can make your number with one less engineer, or 20% less ad spend — and whether you trust the numbers telling you where that dollar goes. Getting to “yes” on that last part is the actual work, and it’s why the hard part of AI isn’t AI. If your company is somewhere between “we should be using AI” and “why isn’t this working,” join us. It’s 30 minutes, it’s free, and you’ll leave with a playbook. Registration link in the comments.
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Chris Fenster shared thisWe don't go to a ton of events but Founderland.us, is one of my favorites and it gets better every year. Excited for year 3! Propeller IndustriesChris Fenster shared thisThank you to Entrepreneur Media for the coverage and for sharing our vision for Founderland. When we dreamed up Founderland, we thought about what we always wanted as founders and investors: • The best founders and CEOs in one place • Retail decision makers who can change the trajectory of a company • Strategics, collaborative investors and industry thought leaders who genuinely want to partner and grow together • A community built around opening doors, providing access and lifting each other up • An experience helping shape what’s next across the consumer, health and wellness industry Now, in our third year, Founderland will be our most prolific yet. Because one relationship, introduction or opportunity can change the trajectory of a company. Bringing together the people who can make those moments happen, and building an ecosystem where founders, CEOs, retailers, investors and industry leaders can create meaningful value together, is an honor and a privilege. Founderland. October 1st. Malibu, California, at Calamigos Ranch. Built by founders, for founders. ✨ https://lnkd.in/gdxQg8SJ Sean Kelly Shannon Kelly Jon Bier Jonathan Small Founderland.us #foundersThis Festival Gathers 1,000 Founders and Dealmakers to Connect, Pitch and Get Discovered — Getting In Isn't EasyThis Festival Gathers 1,000 Founders and Dealmakers to Connect, Pitch and Get Discovered — Getting In Isn't Easy
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Chris Fenster shared thisPropeller Industries — the zero-day close isn't mythical. But the timeline is the story, and it's the part everyone is skipping. Sarah Friar is a world-class CFO with effectively INFINITE CAPITAL, ALL THE AI in the world before anyone else gets it, and no decades of legacy ERP to unwind. She set the zero-day close as an ambition two years ago. Her words this week: "we are still building toward both ambitions." Now notice what's missing. In the same piece she tells the rest of us exactly how to measure this — cycle time, share of transactions reconciled automatically, exceptions requiring review, time to explain a variance. She never reports OpenAI's. In fairness, with a confidential S-1 on file she probably can't. But the scorecard she handed every other CFO is the one she left blank. Two years, that team, those resources, and the destination is still a destination. Corporate (human) inertia, dirty data peanut buttered across who-knows-how-many systems of record, hand-me-down processes that long ago strayed from the documentation they were supposed to follow. All of it joins forces to make this slower than it should be. No model closes that gap for you. Which is what I'd want every CFO reading her piece to sit with. If the best-resourced finance function on earth can't buy its way to a real-time close, the constraint was never the technology. The work is everything underneath it. This prob should have been a tweet. Also, sorry for the shouting.Chris Fenster shared thisOpenAI reports that it's building towards the mythical zero-day close. “The work has already changed how our team operates," Says CFO Sarah Friar. "It has pushed us beyond the limitations of static spreadsheets, manual searches for supporting records, and presentations toward live tools built on the full context and data of the business.” If you're thinking that a fully automated zero-day close might require a downsized finance team, you'd be wrong. In fact, Friar has been building out her finance team "from the ground up" to "make AI fundamental to how we work, make decisions, and support the business." Her goal is a team equipped with real-time understanding of the business and kick-ass modeling capabilities, so the company can make "better decisions, faster." Here's the zinger, though: The AI isn't the hard part. As Sarah puts it, the hard part is: - redesigning work around the decisions that matter - giving people room to experiment - building clear accountability into every workflow, and - measuring the dependable work AI completes to provide a clear ROI Think about this: These are messy human behaviors. Collaborating, prioritizing, codifying, experimenting, owning. Now think about this: The WSJ found that top tech companies have allocated a whopping $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet spending on AI. Ramp estimates that AI accounts for 2-3% of all business spending. How much of that money do you think is going to the hard part, which ... isn't actually AI? 🤔 Has your company committed funding to training finance team members on AI, documenting key processes, deciding what business goals to focus on, and giving people room to test and try things? Would love to hear. https://lnkd.in/eCEeTwcT
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Chris Fenster shared thisFirst finance hire problems... Thanks to Charlie O'Donnell and nextNYC for the convo.Chris Fenster shared thisYour finance hire will usually last longer if growth is slow rather than if growth is fast. The counterintuitive truth is: High growth breaks early finance setups faster than missed plans. In a conversation I had with Chris Fenster of Propeller Industries, he explained why utility-player finance hires survive longer in “okay, not great” scenarios and why success itself creates complexity around audits, compliance, forecasting, and strategic depth. Great perspective for founders planning headcount around aggressive growth targets. Thanks to Propeller Industries for making this series possible! #ScalingStartups #FinanceTeams #FounderLessons #GrowthStage #VentureCapital #StartupOperations #PropellerIndustries
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Chris Fenster posted thisEvery finance team has an AI guy now. The controller who started experimenting on nights and weekends. The analyst who rebuilt the forecast around a workflow nobody else quite understands. The close that used to take ten days takes four. Great. I'd take the four-day close over the ten every time. But the win comes with two caveats nobody says out loud. First, it's his. It lives in his head and his personal account. Nothing got written down, and the judgment about when to trust the output lives nowhere but in him. So you didn't build a faster finance function — you hired one, you're renting it by the month, and he's the most recruitable person in the market rn. The day he leaves, the four-day close leaves with him. That's a manageable risk: take the win, then work to own it. Second, and bigger: it only works this cleanly on a simple company. "50 prompts to turn Claude into your AI CFO," the demo where the books close themselves — that runs beautifully on clean data, one system of record, and no history. In other words, on no real company. If you're like me, your feed is full of this stuff. The proof is who's doing the hard version. Microsoft is hiring 6,000 forward-deployed engineers. The frontier labs are standing up whole services arms to install their own product inside enterprises. The richest companies on earth, with the best model access on earth, are not running a prompt library. They're in the trenches with dirty data across a dozen interconnected systems, and with people. Lots of people, moving at the speed of institutional inertia. If the technology could deploy itself, the companies that build it wouldn't be hiring thousands of humans to do it by hand. The hard part of AI was never the AI. I've spent eighteen years at Propeller Industries, inside the finance functions of high-growth companies, and I wrote about what the demo leaves out. Link in comments.
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Chris Fenster shared thisSix years ago Propeller Industries brought in our first outside capital to the firm we had bootstrapped to > 150 people. Around that time, my job went from client CFO > de Facto head of BD > CEO. It was a bunch of things you might guess: fun, hard, and also weird. I’d say the shoes fit, until they didn’t. And then the ChatGPT moment happened and we had to make a choice: wait for the scope and scale of disruption to sort itself out and fast-follow, or self-disrupt and lead. This conversation is about two things: 1. The willingness to break something good to build something better; 2. An open convo about the Founder > CEO > Chair thing and one example of how that went down. Thanks to Charlie O'Donnell for hosting and to Raymond Nieuwenhuizen for being a great partner to me, to the firm and to our many clients. Exciting times ahead...Chris Fenster shared thisMost founders don't get to choose when they transform. The market chooses for them. Founder Chris Fenster and CEO Raymond Nieuwenhuizen are joining Charlie O'Donnell of nextNYC on July 28 to talk about what it looks like to make that call on your own terms before the pressure forces your hand.
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Chris Fenster reposted thisChris Fenster reposted thisOne of the fastest ways to lose a team isn’t bad strategy, it’s moving too fast. I had a live convo with Raymond Nieuwenhuizen of Propeller Industries about what he would do differently stepping into the CEO role. His answer was: slow down the change. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because the team wasn’t ready. When change feels like it’s being pushed onto people, it creates resistance, feels chaotic, and it becomes emotional. Even if everyone agrees with the direction. The lesson learned was that execution isn’t just about what you do, it’s about how quickly people can absorb it. Big thanks to Propeller Industries for partnering with us on this series! #Leadership #ChangeManagement #Startups #Scaling #CEOTransition #nextNYC #PropellerIndustries
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisFounderland Day 1s stand up 🙌🏽!!! Excited to make it to another Founderland.us and rep for Siddhi Capital, shoot me a DM and/or would love to meet up there! The tagline says it all: Where Founders Have Fun. And Deals Get Done. Shout out to the whole Founderland fam (Josh Wand Sean Kelly Sean Conner Anna Johnson Rachel Doueck (she/her) Julie Fabricant etc.), absolutely love the way y’all have built community!
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisAll the retailers in one place. Here's a look at a few of the retail teams joining us at Founderland.us--'Where founders have fun and deals get DONE' ✨ The Retail Den presented by Citizen's Private Bank will be hosting intimate sessions all day. The schedule is below and on founderland.us. No sign up needed... but I'd get there early. See you tomorrow. Whole Foods Market Sprouts Farmers Market Walmart
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisYesterday, Stride Consumer Partners announced its latest $550m fund, making it the latest group to announce a fundraise in a flurry of cpg related raises on the heels of plenty of massive exits Bansk Group leads the pack with a $1.45B Fund II, up 81% from its $800M debut. Its best-known bets include the amika and Eva NYC haircare platform and Red's All Natural. CAVU Consumer Partners closed Fund V at $325M, its largest fund yet. CAVU was the institutional backer behind Poppi. Encore Consumer Capital (Fund V, $350M) grew its fund 36%, and Stride's grew 30%. LPs are sizing up the managers who have delivered. Founders, here's who has the powder!!
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisI am very excited to announce Settle has closed on a $240M credit facility! This will allow us to keep scaling and offer cheaper capital to the many growing consumer product companies out there. We hope to drive a lot of interest savings for companies, which go directly to their bottom line, so they can reinvest that capital otherwise into further growth. We have crossed $4 billion in originations since inception and are now processing $3B annually in payments and growing. Thank you to our partner banks and shout out to our stellar capital markets team Julie Jew Maggie Podolsky Julie Montgomery and the broader Settle team for making this happen. It takes a village! Your work will continue to help challenger brands in the physical economy drive better experiences and lives to people across the globe. More exciting stuff launching later this month as well - stay tuned!
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisAnthropic released 10 finance agents. They are available for CFOs to download at GitHub. I installed the Model Builder and gave it the kind of task most CFOs would only trust to a senior analyst. Imagine handing a new hire your historical financials and asking them to build a 3-statement model from scratch with a P&L export and a balance sheet. Then asking them to extend it with ratios. Then asking them to build a 3-year forward plan with Base, Upside, and Downside scenarios. A weaker AI is the new hire who guesses. It hardcodes cash flow lines. Breaks retained earnings logic. Gets the working capital signs wrong. Hands you back something that looks polished until the moment you change an assumption. Then it falls apart. What the Model Builder did is what a senior FP&A analyst does on their best week. It read the historical data. It reverse-engineered a cash flow statement from the P&L and balance sheet. It ran every integrity check a senior CFO would run. It stopped at every checkpoint where a real CFO would push back on a junior analyst. Then it told me before moving on: balance sheet balances. Cash ties out. Net income links. Retained earnings rolls forward. Debt schedule reconciles. All in 5 minutes. Then I asked it to build a forward plan. FY2026 budget. FY2027-2028 outlook. Mix-shift revenue logic. Margin expansion linked to the mix shift. CapEx schedule. All checks still pass. That is not a chatbot answering a question. That is an AI that knows when to stop, when to check, and when to push back. Which in finance is the whole job. I shared the full newsletter with the AI CFO Office subscribers. The test files, the exact prompts, and a step-by-step walkthrough so you can run this on your data. How to install Anthropic's finance agents in Claude: https://lnkd.in/dNsYfqzv P.S. Most of the ten are built for bankers. Three are built for your job: the Model Builder, the GL Reconciler and the Month-End Closer.
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Chris Fenster liked thisChris Fenster liked thisThese founders are changing how we experience health. The quantified-self movement gave us more data than ever. But data alone doesn’t make us healthier. The next frontier is turning all that information into action - and action into lasting behavior change. Prediction: Christine Wang is going to bring down the house moderating a convo btw: - Superpower and its CEO Max Marchione are reinventing the healthcare experience with a deeply personalized AI doctor that knows your data, understands your health, and is always at your fingertips - Allara and its CEO Rachel Blank are creating a new healthcare experience for women—one personalized platform that evolves with them from fertility and hormonal health through metabolic health, GLP-1s, peptides, menopause, and beyond - Lumia™ and its CEO Daniel Lee are reinventing the wearable experience by turning virtually any earring into a powerful health tracker—bringing continuous health insights into something people actually want to wear every day - Kin Health and its CEO Arpan Parikh, MD, MBA, FAPA are redesigning the patient experience inside the doctor’s office—using AI to capture every conversation, make sense of it, and ensure nothing important gets lost after you walk out the door At The Family Fund we invest in category defining consumer companies that elevate the human experience through the improvement of health outcomes. And that means a significant portion of our investments go into health technology companies. We're not a CPG fund. We're a consumer health & wellness fund. We believe this allows us to create more impact, and with it, higher returns. (And also allows us to have more fun) Hope to see you at Founderland in Malibu October 1st. Let's roll! Josh Wand
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