How Do You Build A Massive Consumer Brand?

In the early days of the mobile web, when Harley Miller decided he wanted to focus on consumer businesses—after many investors felt they’d been burned by brands that failed—he faced criticism. Then he made a whole lot of money with companies like Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, and The Farmer’s Dog, just to name a few.

Some look at the millions of customer transactions it would take before a consumer brand could produce the kind of returns that would justify venture capital funding as too risky and too much of a long shot. But what Harley sees in all those numbers is data, which, if studied, can make a company’s growth potential clear.

He explained his approach to Camber Creek General Partner Jeffrey Berman and Head of Platform Lionel Foster.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Jeffrey Berman: So we’ve got Harley Miller, the CEO and co-founder of Left Lane, here with us today. Harley, you have a fascinating background, and we really got to know each other over the Bilt investment. Obviously now we’re in SERHANT. together. We serve on the board together, and we’ve also been in other deals together, like Jackpocket.

Give our audience some of your background so they can understand who you are and why we’re having you on the Catalyst podcast.

Harley Miller: For sure. In addition to being suspiciously tall, as you always like to remind me—for those who can’t see me waist down—I grew up in middle-class Pittsburgh suburbia, public-school educated. Very entrepreneurial growing up, nothing tech-related.

This was the mid-’90s in Pittsburgh, so if you had a PalmPilot, you were considered advanced. I was very athletic, played a lot of sports growing up. I always knew I wanted to go to Wharton undergrad and made that my mission.

At Wharton, I was surrounded by a lot of smart, hard-charging folks. But it conditioned people toward banking and consulting, and I knew I didn’t want that type of professional career path.

A lot of friends and fraternity brothers told me to go interview for this fund called Insight Venture Partners, which I had never heard of. I wasn’t familiar with the whole venture capital/growth equity scene. Mind you, this is 2010. They were one of a few firms that would recruit folks right out of undergrad alongside groups like Summit and TA.

So I interviewed with them. I prefaced with, “Guys, I can barely turn on my television, let alone tell you what infrastructure software is.” And they said, “Never mind that. Talk to us about the businesses that you started throughout your youth, and how did you go about getting customers?”

And I talked about doing door-to-door sales or cold-calling mothers to sign them up for Camp Harley Baseball, which is a real thing. Vanity aside.

Jeffrey Berman: Wait, wait, wait. Let’s stop right there. You have a brand called Camp Harley Baseball?

Harley Miller: Oh yeah. I taught kids how to be ballplayers, little dudes. That was kind of the tagline. I started when I was 14 and ran it until I was like 21, and it became a serious enterprise in Pittsburgh suburbia.

Jeffrey Berman: First of all, that sounds like an awesome brand. Camp Harley Baseball. CHB. I can just imagine the swag.

Also, I’ll say this: look, I’m wearing Camber Creek swag, but it’s right down the fairway as far as corporate swag. Left Lane has amazing swag. I have one of their pink—It’s pink, right?

Harley Miller: Yes. Hot pink.

Jeffrey Berman: Hot pink. The hoodie. It’s amazing swag. So I can imagine the Camp Harley Baseball swag would be extraordinary.

Harley Miller: That swag existed. Maybe toward the end of the podcast I’ll go dig something out of my closet.

Last year, some of the kids, who are now in their mid-to-late 20s, reached out and said Camp Harley was transformative for them in their youth, athletically and in life. Someone even sent me an old shirt from 2004 or 2005. It was a relic of my teenage years and when I first started doing enterprising things.

My Wharton application was largely predicated on my entrepreneurial pursuits, culminating in that business. Even when I interviewed at Insight, they didn’t grill me on tech. They asked why I started it, how I built it, and what opportunities I saw.

They told me I’d learn tech along the way. They were right.

I worked at Insight for 10 years. It’s a world-renowned growth equity and venture firm, mostly focused on enterprise software and B2B SaaS. I chose a different lane, no pun intended, and focused on consumer internet with the advent of mobile and smartphones.

Consumer investing had been a pejorative word for many GPs and LPs. People got burned during the dot-com era, the financial crisis, and most recently during COVID and ZIRP, zero interest rate policy.

But I saw an opportunity: mobile transforming offline industries into digital, commerce-oriented platforms—food delivery, education, healthcare, financial services. These weren’t just informational websites anymore. They were digitizing multi-trillion-dollar industries.

Within that, I focused on the most resilient forms of consumer investing, businesses with long-term economic relationships, hunting annuity streams across the real economy.

Lionel Foster: Could you give examples of more durable income streams?

Harley Miller: Think of Delivery Hero, the DoorDash of the rest of the world. I led an early growth round in 2013. Insight ultimately made over a billion dollars in capital gains.

At the time, I was ridiculed. People said food delivery was already done with Seamless or Grubhub. They said it would be a race to the bottom. They asked why anyone needed mobile to order food.

But with mobile, you expand an already large industry through discovery and habituation. It’s something people use monthly, weekly, sometimes daily. That’s what I call the Google toothbrush rule: if you’re using something twice a day, that’s a good business.

You’re not relying solely on new customers. You’re compounding annuity streams.

Jeffrey Berman: For listeners, you were early in a lot of these businesses. Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, The Farmer’s Dog. When you look back, what do you think you were seeing that other people weren’t seeing?

Harley Miller: I think a few things.

One, I was very focused on mobile as an enabling layer. Everyone saw the internet. But mobile changed the level of convenience and frequency. It wasn’t, “I’m going to sit down at my desktop and decide to do something.” It was “I’m standing on a street corner, and I want this right now.” That frequency changes everything.

Two, I was always drawn to businesses that had an underlying unit economics path that could become very strong, even if the early narrative sounded like, “This is too competitive” or “This is too commoditized.”

Three, I was obsessive about data and cohort behavior. Consumer businesses look chaotic at the top-line level. But if you track cohorts, frequency, retention, repurchase, contribution margin, and you see that improving, it tells you whether the engine is working.

With Delivery Hero, for example, it wasn’t that ordering food was new. It was that mobile lowered friction, increased frequency, and gave the marketplace the ability to grow into categories, locations, and customer segments that weren’t accessible before.

Lionel Foster: A lot of people hear “consumer investing” and they think of brands where the story is everything. You’re describing something much more analytical.

Harley Miller: That’s right. Brand matters, but venture returns require repeat behavior at scale.

What makes consumer hard is not that it’s unknowable. It’s that it often takes longer, and you need a lot of transactions before the economic engine has enough data to validate itself.

A consumer company is basically an applied statistics problem. It’s behavior. Do people come back? Do they do it again? Do they do it more? Do they do it with higher margin? Do they refer friends? Do they become habituated?

If you can see those signals early, you can underwrite the outcome with more confidence than people assume.

Jeffrey Berman: Talk about Insight. You were at one of the best firms in the world. Why leave?

Harley Miller: I loved Insight. I owe them a tremendous amount. It was an incredible training ground. But Insight was built as an enterprise software and growth equity powerhouse. Consumer was not the firm’s historical center of gravity.

As I built conviction in consumer and mobile, I wanted to build a dedicated platform around it—brand, network, sourcing, underwriting frameworks, and the ability to support founders in a very consumer-specific way.

It’s hard to do that inside a firm where the primary identity is something else, even if people are supportive.

So I started to think: could I build something where consumer investing is not a side dish, it’s the main course?

Lionel Foster: And that becomes Left Lane.

Harley Miller: Exactly.

But before that, there’s a very important piece: Insight was generous in letting me build that track record. I led deals, I sat on boards, I built founder relationships. I had the autonomy to do something different from the prevailing internal consensus.

That’s rare. A lot of firms don’t let you do that. So I owe them gratitude.

And then, in late 2019, I spun out with my team to form Left Lane.

Lionel Foster: You’re saying “spun out.” Walk us through that.

Harley Miller: We started Left Lane as an independent firm, with a focus on consumer internet and consumer technology. We wanted to be very specific in what we do, what we don’t do, and how we support companies.

We also wanted to build a firm that looks and feels like the companies we invest in: modern, consumer-forward, brand-forward. That’s why the hot pink hoodie exists.

But we also wanted the rigor. We didn’t want it to be vibes. We wanted to bring strong underwriting and data discipline into consumer investing.

Jeffrey Berman: You used a phrase earlier: “track-record attribution.” 

Harley Miller: It means I’m given full attribution for the deals I led, as opposed to the firm being the only entity that gets credit. In venture, you can imagine a firm sees a lot of deals, but who led which, who sourced which, who underwrote which? Those distinctions matter when you form a new firm.

The reason you don’t always give track-record attribution is because a firm might want to say, “This was our success,” not “This was that person’s success.”

But I had led certain deals, built those relationships, and Insight acknowledged that.

Jeffrey Berman: And that matters if you’re going to raise a fund.

Harley Miller: Exactly. LPs want to know, “Is this your work? Or did you just happen to be near it?”

Lionel Foster: What were the early days of Left Lane like? Because you started late 2019, and then—pandemic.

Harley Miller: We formed the firm, started fundraising, started investing—and then the world shut down. That’s obviously hard in a lot of ways, but it also accelerated consumer behavior shifts that we already believed in.

E-commerce penetration jumped. Digital adoption jumped. People started using delivery, subscriptions, telehealth, remote work tools—everything.

So in some ways, it validated the thesis. But it also created distortions, because capital became incredibly cheap, and a lot of businesses were able to raise money on growth alone, without discipline.

Jeffrey Berman: This is the ZIRP era.

Harley Miller: Yes. Zero interest rate policy. A lot of people forget how much that changes the incentive structure.

When money is free, the market will fund almost anything that grows. When money is not free, you have to prove the unit economics. You have to prove the durability.

Left Lane’s philosophy has always been build resilient consumer businesses with real economics, not just hype.

COVID and ZIRP put a spotlight on digitization of the real economy. But it also created a bubble in certain categories, because the cost of capital didn’t force discipline.

So I think, like most 2020 funds, those vintages are probably going to be subpar relative to what came before and, hopefully, what comes after.

Jeffrey Berman: And where do you think you win in consumer? When you look at the consumer landscape, where are you grabbing the customer? Where are you meeting the customer? If you’re a consumer business, obviously social is a big part of it—Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.

When you look at a business plan, stage-agnostic for a second, how much does distribution factor into your underwriting? And how late will you go?

Harley Miller: It does matter by stage. You can’t really have a pre-seed investment and evaluate it empirically. There’s nothing there yet. That’s market, references, founder, business model.

We’re always post–product market fit. And I think product market fit in consumer can be deduced earlier because feedback loops are faster. Even at a few hundred thousand dollars of annualized revenue, you may already have thousands of users interacting with the product. That’s significant.

The earliest we play is typically post-seed. The latest we’ll play is something like Bilt, which was essentially a Series B growth round at a punchier valuation. But our sweet spot is broadly a Series A. Call it an $8 million to $30 million round at a $50 million to $150 million post-money valuation, where we’re leading and taking double-digit ownership.

We can go earlier. We can go later. But that’s the core.

A big emphasis for us is whether a company has some type of unfair distribution.

There’s no more arbitrage in Meta marketing or Google marketing. You can try to get an edge, but it won’t last. It gets competed away quickly.

So we look for businesses that either have tremendous surplus in unit economics—what I’d refer to as LTV to CAC—or, better yet, surplus plus an unfair distribution angle.

LTV is lifetime value of a customer at a gross profit level. CAC is fully burdened customer acquisition cost. Best-in-class might be a 3x LTV to CAC ratio over a three-year period.

Most of our investments, at time of investment, show 5x or 6x LTV to CAC or greater, with fast payback periods.

That means the company is already growing fast with surplus economics. They can reinvest that surplus and accelerate growth.

That’s the arbitrage.

We don’t just take metrics off the shelf. We pull raw data from the company’s data warehouse. Many founders, not with bad intent, overstate their metrics because they don’t know any better. We re-run everything.

Distribution is key. Does the company have a moat around distribution? If so, how much and for how long?

In the case of Serhant, he has a megaphone to the world. That was part of the thesis. In the case of Bilt, they don’t spend much to acquire customers because they’ve locked up the largest multifamily owners and operators. Customer acquisition flows through that channel.

Unfair distribution is a huge emphasis for us, especially post-market correction.

Jeffrey Berman: Let’s talk about that. Bilt is B2B2C. We’re part of the distribution network. But most consumer businesses don’t have that air war component.

Can you talk about an investment where the unfair distribution is purely consumer-driven?

Harley Miller: Sure. Jackpocket is a good example.

Jackpocket didn’t have some magical distribution hack. What they had was operational and regulatory moat. They figured out how to connect physical lottery terminals to the cloud in a compliant way, state by state.

OCR [optical character recognition] extraction, licenses with state attorneys general and lottery boards. That created a moat, because competitors would have to match that rigor and compliance framework.

But from a customer acquisition standpoint, they still had to pay to acquire users. There wasn’t some magical built-in funnel.

Another example is Kings League.

We invested in Kings League, started by Gerard Piqué, the former FC Barcelona superstar. It’s a seven-versus-seven football league with highly innovative rules designed for digital-native audiences.

The presidents of the teams are major Twitch streamers and YouTubers with enormous audiences.

Piqué realized something. He was famous in Spain, but he saw younger audiences gravitating toward streamers. So he paired football with digital-native distribution.

Kings League has millions of followers without traditional marketing spend because the team presidents are equity holders and mobilize their audiences.

That’s unfair distribution.

It skips the traditional J-curve of sports leagues, which typically require years of losses before scale.

We’re the largest investor and owner outside of Piqué. The business is expanding into Spain, LatAm, France, Italy, Germany, the Middle East, and the US.

That’s an example of combining spectacle, sport, and digital-native distribution.

Jeffrey Berman: How did you find that deal?

Harley Miller: One of our VPs in London saw the first season in Spain. We figured out how to get in touch with Piqué.

I was on vacation over New Year’s. We scheduled a 30-minute call. It turned into three hours.

We led the Series A. There was a smaller sports holding company involved, but we’re the largest institutional investor.

I think Kings League could become a multi-billion-dollar property. It’s not competing with La Liga. It’s a different sport: half sport, half spectacle.

It’s venture-style sports investing.

Jeffrey Berman: Let’s pivot to something topical: SERHANT.

Left Lane and Camber Creek are two of the largest institutional shareholders. We recently became global superstars thanks to the Netflix show.

Have you been recognized in public?

Harley Miller: Not by strangers yet, thankfully.

Friends and family send screenshots. I didn’t publicize it. I tend to be loud already. I didn’t need more spotlight.

Also, we didn’t have editorial control. We run serious asset management firms. It’s not unserious, but it’s not our core world. So there was a little anxiety at first: “Don’t embarrass us.”

As we got closer to launch, we realized it was elegantly done. My fiancée even had a line that got cut. But Owning Manhattan and being part of that flywheel has been fascinating. The media value equivalent of that exposure is incalculable.

Not every company has a superstar founder. But when you do, it’s one of the most unique assets imaginable.

Ryan Serhant is building an empire. I’ve met 30,000-plus founders over 15 years. I can count on one hand those more possessed than Ryan.

My only regret is we don’t own more.

Jeffrey Berman: We can fix that.

I think our firms complement each other. You’re internet consumer. We’re domain experts in real estate. SERHANT. is both.

Same with Bilt. Both ingredients have to click to create an outsized outcome.

Harley, thank you for joining us. It’s been a pleasure sitting in boardrooms with you. You’ve built an awesome firm.

Harley Miller: Jeff, thank you. Lionel, thank you. The feeling is mutual.

Working hand in hand on SERHANT. and Bilt and becoming friends in the process is one of the positive externalities of doing cool, lucrative things with people you enjoy.

Absolute pleasure. Hopefully we can do it again in the future.