Hey, friends of Soapbox! Welcome to our August newsletter.

We are in the dog days of summer! Back to school season is right around the corner… Enjoy these last few weekends of summer <3

We’ve got a great issue ahead, enjoy!🥂

Written by Maria
Read & share this Soapbox Moment Here

Becoming my cultural diet and what it means for founders
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Nothing screams chronically online more than walking into a grocery store, rubbing Chobani yogurt all over a stiff pair of jeans, filming it, and then posting it on TikTok. 

why? 

All because the lyrics in the song “Jeans by 2hollis” sound like he sings “put chobani on my jeans” instead of “put your body on my jeans” – viscerally different situations. 

Jeans became the song that framed my July photo dump on Instagram as a nod to the fact that I have seen this trend, find it funny, and ultimately, it’s become a part of who I am (in, albeit, some weird way). 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot – how the content we consume every day becomes who we are. Humor, conversational references, restaurant choices, politics, etc. are all profoundly influenced by the content we consume and how long we let it marinate in our brains and bodies. 

As the internet and its culture have intertwined with our lives, it has changed how I think, act, and operate, as I believe to be true for most consumers. I think Lisa Kholostenko says it best, “consumption isn’t just passive enjoyment—it’s dynamic, it answers back.”

It introduces the concept of a “Cultural Diet” that the content you consume becomes a part of you. It can lend itself to an era of your life, a fleeting Instagram photo dump, a phrase you repeat to your friends, or it can transcend chapters, inform your politics, and trickle into the core of your personality. 

No bigger indicator that more people are becoming a steady reflection of their cultural diets than the dialogue around taste. “Taste” — who has it and who doesn’t —is all VCs, founders, tech people, and performative matcha labubu keychain hipsters want to talk about. As defined by Emma Lou Cogan, Taste is “the byproduct of our worldview, the measure of our exposure to varied newness, & the invisible thread that ties together our emotional, psychological, and cultural instincts.”

I believe that taste is what evolves from your cultural diet. People focus on manufacturing taste via the content they consume. Except there is no filter for consumption. There is no way to limit the content you read, watch, and react to every day.

You can curate your feeds to what you perceive to be high quality, unsubscribe from newsletters, mute accounts, and follow only those you know, but the flood never really stops. Algorithms surface “related” posts, friends forward viral clips, group chats ping with whatever celebrity look-alike contest is happening at your local park this week, and billboards replay the same slogans as you commute. In an ecosystem where the internet and reality are divulging more and more, content behaves like background radiation: it seeps through every filter, ensuring that the endless stream of headlines, hot-takes, and ads still becomes part of your cultural diet whether you consciously invite it to be or not.

Vice versa, if you’re always feeding yourself content that feels good, is comfortable, and is familiar, it’s like only eating Big Macs; you feel wonderful when eating it, but slow, sluggish, and left behind in the tides of conversation when those who have tried salads, soups, and sandwiches come around and reference another world of taste. You are what you eat. 

This leaves a question for founders building their companies today: how do you become a part of people’s cultural diets? 

It’s a more fun way of saying distribution matters.

How you distribute (feed) your product into your consumer's cultural diet (the content they consume) determines how quickly you can move. Distribution is becoming increasingly paramount as certain product features, data, and previously “moats” are becoming commoditized. The company that most rapidly incorporates itself into its customers’ cultural diet, so convincingly that consumers experience the product as an extension of their own identity, unlocks a flywheel in which every operational building block (distribution, retention, pricing power, and brand equity) compounds at an accelerated rate.

It happened with Lovable (0 to 2.3M users in 8 months) by making “vibe coding” part of the engineering zeitgeist. Rhode (0 to $1B acquisition by e.l.f in 3 years) by bringing a high-fashion lens to affordable beauty. Ramp (0 to $22.5B valuation in 6 years) by embracing the “underdog” narrative online and making something people hate (expense reporting) actually enjoyable.

Each company’s story is now inescapable. Scroll a feed, open an email, cue up a podcast — each touchpoint repeats who they are, what they build, and why it matters. The product becomes a piece of their unique customers' unique diets.

Ultimately, distribution is not only a question of reach; it is a matter of incorporation. When a product, message, or idea slips unnoticed into the daily cadence of alerts, shortcuts, and inside jokes, it migrates from the marketplace into the cognitive architecture of our brains and ultimately influences who we are.

The push-notification that triggers a reflexive glance, the reference that needs no explanation in conversation, these are signals that a product has been metabolised, not just adopted. In that sense, market penetration is inseparable from identity formation: what saturates our attention steadily rewires our assumptions about efficiency, status, and even community.

That realisation imposes a dual responsibility. For founders, the task is to design a product capable of that tenancy. For the rest of us, the question is curatorial: which inputs do we allow to occupy our limited cognitive real estate, and to what end?

You don’t need a 5 year career growth plan 🚨 🚨 🚨

In this video, Hannah breaks down linear vs circular career growth, inspired by a concept from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments (brb adding this to our reading list).

circular growth model: Take an action → reflect on it → take a new action based on what you learned. In your career, you can’t map out the next five years based only on what you know right now. The world changes. You change. Your interests, values, and opportunities will evolve and your career should, too.

You can also think about it like this:
Are you building your career like a skyscraper — rigid, pre-planned, always upward?
Or like a tree — growing in the direction of the light, adapting to your environment, and evolving over time?

Our Take: Forget the pressure to follow a perfect path!! Just keep moving toward what feels meaningful right now. That might be a new job, a better boss, a different city, or a new subject to explore. The goal isn’t a straight line but rather growth.

You’ve seen them. You probably want one. But how did Labubu go from a weird little art toy to a cultural icon?

Originally created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, Labubu was a niche designer toy. It was POP MART, the Chinese toy company, that took Labubu mainstream. Their “blind box model” and fast product iteration turned the creepy toy into a must-have accessory across Asia, the U.S., and beyond. Their mystery box model turned Labubu into a high-stakes collectible. Add in a perfectly timed mix of K-pop star sightings (hi Lisa), fashion week cameos, and social media unboxings, it took off.

The story goes deeper though. POP MART isn’t just selling toys. They’re running a cultural algorithm. They track real-time consumer behavior across TikTok, Shopee, and Xiaohongshu, then rapidly iterate product design, packaging, and marketing. When Lisa from Blackpink or Rihanna is spotted with a Labubu, they redirect development resources and double down on what’s working.

Now it's big business:
• POP MART’s 2024 profits jumped 188%, hitting $470 million
• Limited Labubus can resell for $500 to $2,000
• Collabs with Coca-Cola, One Piece, and the Louvre sell out instantly
• The POP MART app spiked in the U.S., adding $1.6 billion to the CEO’s net worth in one day

But the real unlock is how Labubu taps into Gen Z identity. POP MART toys aren’t just collectibles, they’re symbols of taste, individuality, and belonging. Unboxing a rare Labubu on camera is a flex, a personality signal. A way to show the world you’re in the know. Did someone say recession indicator???

Labubu is everywhere.

Our Take: You don’t need a Labubu!! Labubu is a lesson in how the internet manufactures demand and is not something you have to add to your cart. 🤷‍♀

Bonus: here’s our fav labubu video

Our favorite (and we would argue best) Venture Capital firm of all time is Union Square Ventures (USV).

Throughout the year, each USV team member writes short and long-form blog posts on topics that interest them and the firm.

This month, Rebecca Kaden, a Partner at USV, wrote a post titled “In Favor of Forgetting,” where she talks about using ChatGPT to help generate studying questions for her son and she asked ChatGPT to “remember that her son loves the New York Knicks.” Funny enough, the Knicks made their way into many of her subsequent responses not related to her son (including a spider web graphic she wanted to generate for another USV post).

Rebecca poses the question, “In a hyper-personalized ecosystem, how do we keep our preferences dynamic and implied rather than rigid and engraved? What about the ones that are under the surface, still forming, not yet ready to be named?”

Our take: While the answer to Rebecca’s question isn’t in the ether yet, we think part of the answer lies in keeping parts of your preferences private. In the early innings, maybe it’s about feeding less content so there’s less to forget. Keeping your taste to yourself and not allowing it to be tainted by an “o3 model.” Those preferences change and evolve purely driven by you and your human experience, not AI. No forgetting needed.

Also, the stats don’t lie on USV’s track record ⤵️ 👀

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