Building the premium venture studio and fund for consumer brands with Mike Jones, Founding Partner @ Science
Mike Jones, Managing Partner at Science Inc., breaks down how his venture studio has launched 150+ companies by combining pattern recognition with deep consumer insights. He argues that successful scaling requires founders to evolve their management approach at key inflection points, and that direct-to-consumer channels provide critical learning advantages over traditional retail distribution.
Key takeaways
- •Management skills that work for 30 people will actively harm your company's growth to 100+ employees.
- •Shopping at trendy LA stores like Erewhon creates dangerous blind spots about what real American consumers actually want.
- •Direct-to-consumer selling teaches you who buys and why they buy, while retail placement only shows you sales numbers without context.
- •Pattern recognition allows experienced operators to predict scaling challenges and guide founders away from predictable mistakes before they happen.
- •Sometimes ignoring investor advice and executing your own vision leads to billion-dollar outcomes that prove the advisors wrong.
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Best moment
The management skills that got you to 30 people won't scale you to 100
being better managers of a of a scaling organization beyond 30 or even, you know, a thousand people? You know? What do people have to learn from their own mistakes, or is there a way people can just listen to the advice and make that shortcut? I mean, I think that's super personal. Like, I learned from doing. It's really hard for me to learn from listening even though I try to listen a lot. You know? Like, it's I I'm definitely a doer, and it took me a while to realize, like, I can't deal with the amount of, for instance, incoming volume that Myspace represented from a day to day basis on decisions that had to get made or emails that had to get cleared or deals that had to get done. And so that took that took learning from me. I think many founders kind of have to go through this progression of, like, the skill set it takes to build a ten, five, 30 person company is different than going from 30 to a 100 people. That's different from going from, you know, a CEO to a board CEO, etcetera, right, or even a public company CEO. So there are these phases, I think, of management. Many entrepreneurs don't get to experience all those three phases because either at the earlier stages, the companies go out of business,
“But in both cases, the founders told me, we'll never do strategy b.”
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