The CQ is Forerunner’s weekly newsletter rounding up the top consumer news, plus bonus musings from our investment team and portfolio highlights. Subscribe to get the latest each weekend.
The past few years have revealed a massive shift in how consumers treat money, from the rise of crypto assets to /wallstreetbets. The longevity of some trend-driven events, such as NFTs and the GameStop frenzy, is debated, but the staying power of the underlying consumer behavior is clear.
Kalshi saw more than a billion dollars in election market volume in just thirty days. In the collectibles space, Pokemon cards continue to reach new peak prices on a near-daily basis, with the collectible marketplace Courtyard going from $50K over $50M worth of monthly GMV in just under a year.
Consumers are no longer just investing; they are playing, and markets have become a form of social interaction. This relatively new behavior is what we’re calling “social gaming” — a blend of financial wagering, competition, and community.
We believe sports are the ultimate arena for this. They have consistent events, shared cultural stakes, and an inherently competitive structure. Yet the dominant sportsbook platforms operate like traditional casinos. The economics are opaque, margins are high, and skilled traders are routinely banned, so instead people turn to informal bookies or offshore accounts to trade.
There has been no true home for transparent, dynamic sports trading in the United States until Novig. The company is building the first zero-commission, peer-to-peer sports prediction exchange that combines fairness with a highly engaging full-featured user experience that mirrors financial markets. They have already scaled to $2B in annualized trading volume in less than a year since debuting their peer-to-peer marketplace, and they continue to rapidly improve their product experience to drive new users at scale.
Ultimately, Novig aims to become the NASDAQ of sports, offering professional-grade trading tools, while adding a social layer. Send Novig to the sports fans in your life and read more about our investment here.
And for more from our portfolio, just from this last week, some highlights:
Topline Pro, the AI-powered OS for home services pros, raised a $27M series B. See here for our piece on why we led the series A.
AmplifyMD is in the top quartile of the Inc 5000, a list of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies, based on revenue growth over the past three years.
Stan makes Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.
Jump, the ticketing and live experience platform upending industry standards, raised a $23M series A. See here for their Forbes feature and here for our piece on why we’re so ambitious on this company led by Jordy Leirsure, Marc Lore, and Alex Rodriguez.
Teal Health, the first-ever at-home cervical cancer screen, launched its debut product, The Teal Wand, in California this week after getting FDA approval earlier this summer.
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What We’re Talking About on Slack:
The economy is cracking. This trend is most alarming. “The economy is increasingly dependent on a small sliver of superstar companies and wealthy consumers to stay afloat because these are the only firms and families able to withstand the tariff onslaught. A highly concentrated economy increases the risk of a downturn—and will leave many middle-class Americans frustrated and strained.” The top 10% of earners are driving about 50% of all spending—up from 36% three decades ago—while the bottom 80% are only keeping pace with inflation. Job growth has stagnated, and nearly every sector aside from healthcare has been faced with layoffs. The stock market’s recent gains are narrowly concentrated in a few mega-cap tech and financial firms, while the broader economy shows signs of weakening, including a drop in consumer spending growth from 3% in 2024 to just 1.4% in the second quarter of 2025. Rising delinquencies in credit cards, auto loans, and student debt signal that the middle class is financially stretched, raising the risk of deeper economic instability if tariffs or job losses continue.
Inside the $10,000 job search: Thanks to the convergence of a stalled hiring market and a newly booming industry of job search tools, job seekers are spending up to thousands of dollars on AI tools and full-service career coaching (upwards of $10,000) to stand out in a slow labor market — even though there’s no guarantee of success. The average job search now takes 24 weeks, nearly four weeks longer than last year, and the number of long-term unemployed is rising.
What even is Instagram now? Wired takes a look at the identity crisis facing the social media platform, which has made a habit of copying features from competitors like Snapchat and TikTok, including its AI chat tool, shopping functions, Reels, and the location-sharing map. “By piling these new features on top of the old ones, Instagram is trying to make the app feel chummy and personal again. But it's too far gone from that ideal, and the attempt to shift the feed’s focus from influencers to your IRL friends just feels awkward, and ultimately unconvincing.”
Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains. The labor force participation rate for U.S. mothers with children under 5 dropped nearly 3 percentage points from January to June 2025, reaching its lowest level in over three years. Return-to-office mandates, lack of employer flexibility, cuts to federal jobs, and the rollback of DEI initiatives are making it harder for working mothers and caregivers to stay employed. One analyst provides a stark view: “Their lifetime earnings will be lower, they will most likely come back to a job that does not pay the salary they were making when they left. It’ll be harder for them to get back in, harder to move up the ladder to senior management positions because they’ve had this gap in employment.”
Why young Americans dread turning 26: health insurance chaos. That’s the age they lose access to their parents’ plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Currently, about 15% of 26-year-olds are uninsured, the highest rate of any age group, and many others settle for inadequate coverage mostly because of just how confusing and expensive the insurance marketplace is. Over half of Americans aged 18 to 29 have incurred medical debt in the past five years, and more than 30% report working in gig or part-time jobs that don’t provide insurance. There are publicly funded “navigator” programs to help people choose insurance plans, but most young people don’t know they exist. Ten states still haven't expanded Medicaid, leaving up to 1.5 million low-income Americans uninsured, and subsidies enacted under the Biden administration are set to expire at the end of 2025, which could further threaten the coverage of millions more young adults.
11 women, 9 dogs, not much drama (and no guys): The Bird’s Nest is a women-only tiny-home community in rural East Texas of mostly retired, mostly single women, aged 60 to 80, who have been affected by layoffs or limited retirement savings. They live independently but offer each other mutual support with the goal of aging together and avoiding nursing homes “as long as possible with little to no financial cushion.” The Bird’s Nest style of communal living speaks to a “fantasy” of “aging among female friends” that many women dream of as a way to redefine retirement on their own terms. According to AARP, half of American women 65 and older are single, and among unmarried Americans aged 50 to 64 who are not retired, 64% of women have under $50,000 in retirement savings, compared to 52% of men. Women also receive Social Security benefits that are 20% on average lower than men's, due to discrepancies in lifetime earnings. But the inhabitants of The Bird’s Nest may be on to something, considering a 2019 study found that women with more social ties have a 10% longer life span and 41% higher odds of surviving to age 85 than women with fewer ties.
Teachers are warming up to using AI in classrooms. Approximately 60% of K-12 teachers now report using AI tools for tasks like lesson planning, parent communication, and grading. A Walton Foundation and Gallup study found that weekly AI users among teachers save an average of 5.9 hours per week, giving them more time to create personalized lessons and provide student feedback. And while there are still concerns of student cheating, teachers are starting to see more of AI’s potential in schools to enhance critical thinking and empathy among students. “One example is prompting AI to ‘redesign the first-day experience for a relocated student entering a new middle school.’ AI created the action steps and the essential questions necessary for refining students’ initial solutions.”
How Warby Parker has kept the price of glasses at $95 for 15 years, even as competitors have raised prices significantly: To offset rising costs from tariffs and inflation, the company has increased prices on premium products and shifted more production away from China, aiming to reduce China-based sourcing from 20% to under 15% by the end of 2025. About 60% of Warby Parker's 296 eyeglass models still cost $95, but the average revenue per customer has steadily risen since the company went public in 2021. This past April, the brand introduced a one-time price bump on some of its pricier products. “Warby’s long-held strategy is to remain under the price umbrella of its competitors. This year, it told investors that the markups of name-brand competitors were so large that Warby had room to raise some prices while remaining more affordable.”
Portfolio Highlights:
Axios covers Novig’s $18 million in Series A funding, featuring quotes from our Principal Fawzi Itani.
Topline Pro raises $27 million in a Series B round, reports Axios.
CNET, Oprah Daily, Engadget, and Forbes cover the launch of Oura’s new pregnancy and perimenopause feature.
Prevention gives a first-person review of the Prenuvo MRI body scan.
Ritual Founder and CEO Katerina Markov Schneider pens an op-ed on the dangerous misinformation prevalent in the wellness industry for Business of Fashion.
Forbes recognizes Joy as one of the 12 startups “proving motherhood over 40 is a market advantage.”
Forerunner Highlights:
Our Founding Partner Kirsten Green is quoted in Fortune on the state of the IPO market related to Figma’s debut.
Job of the Week:
Brand Designer and Acquistion Manager at The Farmer’s Dog, one of the U.S.’s top pet food brands, which is changing the landscape of overall pet health.
There are ~1450 other open jobs at Forerunner portfolio companies, check em out.