Lerer Hippeau’s Ben Lerer shares his priorities for scouring seed deals

Enterprise software startups are changing how they infiltrate companies, and investors are taking note.

Last week, I chatted with Lerer Hippeau‘s Ben Lerer after his firm had just led a seed round in Air, a digital asset management platform. I used the opportunity to pick his brain about what he’s searching for in early-stage investments and which trends he believes are shaking up enterprise software.

Lerer Hippeau leads $6M investment in Pinterest-like digital asset manager Air

Below is a chunk of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

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TechCrunch: What kinds of things are you looking at recently? Anything notable?

Ben Lerer: The market is always shifting, but 40,000 feet up, nothing has changed in that we’re always just focused on investing in people. But, beyond people, there’s certainly been various areas of opportunity that over the years we have had different kinds of focus on. One that I’ve been most focused on traditionally has been a category that would’ve been called direct-to-consumer brands. Now you would probably just call it “future of consumer” or “future of retail.” Now, I think direct-to-consumer is not the entire pie but just a piece of the pie. So generally my focus is doing consumer deals and then sometimes I focus on deals that are not necessarily consumer, but they’re SaaS businesses, often SaaS businesses that my consumer companies are current or potential customers of.

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