I got very excited about a new business idea this weekend. It wasn't a venture investment, but one that I thought would be very interesting if I had the time to start it myself. It's the definition of "un-sexy" - I want to open a butcher shop.
The idea came to me when I was shopping for produce at Wilson Farms in Lexington MA. It occurred to me that there are many people who shop at high-end grocers for their produce, but most don't go to a high-end butcher for their meats. There are obviously a bunch of these places scattered around the city, and when I lived near Palo Alto, I would go to a wildly popular meat shop called Shaub's . But it struck me that there seems to be a real dearth of places like these, and there might be an opportunity to create a small and successful chain of specialty meat stores in surrounding neighborhoods of major cities.
OK, maybe there are a lot of reasons why it might be difficult to start taking over the world one butcher shop at a time. But it got me thinking about un-sexy businesses in general. Being an early stage VC, my firm gets access to many businesses that promise to be the "next hot thing" in the "next hot sector". We've certainly made our share of investments in sexy spaces like video delivery, social networking, and mobile. But often, some of the most interesting opportunities are the ones going after very un-sexy opportunities. Actually, true innovators are the folks who can take seemingly boring, stale businesses and find new ways to compete.
Take my favorite example: Method. Who would have ever thought that there was room in the market for another soap company? And yet, Method has exploded, stealing meaningful share from some of the world's biggest and most competitive companies.
My old firm Ebay got its start by attacking unsexy categories. Who really knew how big the collectibles market was until Ebay started doing billions of dollars of volume selling things like American Girl dolls or WWII memorabilia?
We've seen a couple companies come into Spark recently pitching ideas to revolutionize old, forgotten, and unsexy businesses. My view is that we could use many many more of them. There are so many inefficient markets out there that are ripe for an entrepreneur to make more efficient through a creative business model and by leveraging modern technology. Personally, as I think about how I can help our firm focus our potential investments, it might make sense for me to create some discipline around identifying boring and unsexy industries that might just be ripe for the kind of innovation we love to be a part of.
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