Money, politics, tampons: How ‘for women, by women’ startup Lola views its investor’s Trump ties – By Maria Aspan (Fortune) / Feb 20 2020
Where does your money come from? For the venture-backed startups whose entire business models have been made possible by wealthy institutions and individuals, it’s an increasingly fraught existential question.
Take Lola, a policy-minded, women-founded seller of organic tampons, menstrual pads, and other “feminine care” products. The New York company has raised $35 million from investors including Spark Capital, Alliance Consumer Growth, Serena Williams, Lena Dunham—and RSE Ventures, the firm co-founded by real estate developer Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins and donor to President Donald Trump.
In August, Lola was one of many Ross-backed companies to face a customer backlash after the developer hosted a high-profile Hamptons fundraiser for Trump’s re-election campaign. SoulCycle attendance dropped; celebrities publicly quit their Equinox memberships; Momofuku founder David Chang donated a day’s worth of his restaurants’ profits to charity. And Lola, which touts its “reproductive care for women, by women,” suddenly found itself on lists of companies to be boycotted by Trump’s critics—and facing increasingly common questions about the combination of venture money, politics, and the branding of “empowerment.”
“Every company is working through questions around who their partners are that we weren’t necessarily thinking through pre-2016,” Lola co-founder Jordana Kier tells me, in the company’s first public comments about its relationship with Ross.
She says that Lola did not consider trying to buy out Ross’s stake directly or asking another investor to do so. However, it’s possible that could change in the coming year, says Kier, as the company seeks to raise a Series C round of investment. “That is an opportunity, and the moment where a bigger investor will want to come in to clean up the cap table” by buying out smaller investors, she says.
Continue to article: https://fortune.com/2020/02/20/lola-stephen-ross-trump-tampons/
