SILICON VALLEY TO INVEST IN SMART FASHION

Investors and disruptors from Silicon Valley set their sights on Smart Fashion: a new economy and value creation

In a striking pivot that signals a major shift in the fashion industry's future, Silicon Valley investors are turning their attention—and their billions—toward what industry insiders are calling Smart Fashion. This development comes at a crucial time when traditional fashion houses are grappling with declining sales, market volatility, and disrupted supply chains.

Fashion's Current Crossroads

The fashion industry finds itself at a critical juncture. Global sales have plummeted by 15-30% compared to previous years, while market capitalizations of major fashion houses continue to decline. Traditional retail models are showing signs of strain, with supply chain disruptions affecting more than two-thirds of fashion businesses worldwide.

Beyond Wearable Tech: A New Vision for Fashion

What makes this moment different from previous attempts to merge fashion and technology is the fundamental approach. Smart Fashion isn't merely about adding tech features to existing products—it's about reimagining the entire fashion economy and ecosystem.

This new wave of innovation goes beyond simple integration of AI, blockchain, or augmented reality. Instead, it focuses on creating entirely new value propositions. The Meta and Ray-Ban collaboration serves as a prime example of this approach, demonstrating how traditional fashion brands can be reimagined through a tech lens while maintaining their core identity.

The Investment Landscape

The upcoming Metaverse Fashion Week 2024 is set to become a pivotal first step in this transformation. With participating venture capital funds and angel investors managing collective capital exceeding several billion dollars, the summit signals Silicon Valley's serious intent to reshape the fashion industry.

Democratizing Fashion Investment

One of the most revolutionary aspects of this transformation is the democratization of fashion investment. Smart Fashion initiatives are opening up new possibilities for retail investors to participate directly in fashion's future, extending beyond traditional stock market investments in established brands.

This democratization aligns with the concept of "self-fashioning"—allowing individuals to not just consume fashion but to participate in its investment.

The Road Ahead

As Silicon Valley prepares to inject significant capital into Smart Fashion initiatives, the industry stands on the brink of transformation. The upcoming MFW 2024 Summit will likely mark the beginning of a new chapter in fashion history—one where technology doesn't just support fashion but fundamentally reimagines it.

For an industry that has often been criticized for its slow adaptation to digital transformation, this influx of Silicon Valley investment could represent more than just capital—it might be the catalyst for fashion's next great revolution.

“BE THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM, AND BECOME FLUENT IN THE LANGUAGE OF SILICON VALLEY"

Andrew Romans , McGraw Hill, Masters of Raising Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from Silicon Valley In the fast-approaching iteration of a new fashion economy we call Smart Fashion, designers and brands are evolving into startups. This shift is not as far off as it might seem. Today, the number of AI and Web3 startups focused on fashion is growing noticeably. Our prediction: their total number will multiply several times over in the next few years. This is where the venture mindset comes into play. To avoid the pitfalls, new startups need both knowledge and sound business fundamentals. There are two choices: learn from your own mistakes (as I made all mentioned in the book, having been an entrepreneur and angel investor in media and fashion since 2005 and in financial engineering and blockchain projects since 2014), or turn to a reliable source. A standout and timely guide is a new and cool book by Andrew Romans Masters of Raising Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from Silicon Valley.

Writing a review of Andrew’s book is challenging for two clear reasons. First, the book speaks for itself, delivering insights with the commanding clarity of Caesar narrating the Gallic Wars after his triumph. Romans writes from a personal, assured perspective—direct, inspiring, and precise, as only leaders do. It’s a straightforward and comprehensive manual, almost an encyclopedia for venture capital. "This book is about NOT making mistakes after the first or ninth VC funding round. Trust me when I tell you that raising angel and VC funding well is not very different from walking through a minefield" - he says in his own words. Just scanning the Table of Contents reads like a Pater Noster, and here’s a glimpse of just a few sections:

• The Big Picture of How to Get Funded While Still Owning Some of Your Company at the Time of Exit
• Be the Smartest Person in the Room, and Become Fluent in the Language of Silicon Valley
• Understanding VCs – The More You Speak Their Language and Understand Them, the Easier It Will Be to Get Funded
• Everything You Need to Know About Your Board of Directors (BoD) and How Not to Get Shot in the Back
• Top Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Raising Venture Capital
• Who Wins or Loses in a World of AI? Do I Need to Move to Silicon Valley to Attract Funding?
• Most Exits Are Sub-$50m
• Advice for Non-American Startups Raising VC Funding or Seeking to Raise from U.S. Investors
• How to Be a Successful Angel Investor
• Helping Others Selflessly Is the Magic Dust of Getting Ahead

The second challenge in reviewing a masterwork is the formidable expertise behind it. Previous endorsements of Romans’ work include industry giants like the head of Eric Schmidt’s family office and legendary crypto-investor Tim Draper. Collectively, these figures manage capital worth tens of billions—what more could I add? Yet, there is immense value here for new entrants to the venture capital scene and the emerging economy of Smart Fashion. For them, Romans’ book will not only be a practical guide but also a foundation for the future. Someday, they’ll write their own reviews—and add new chapters to the history of fashion.

READ MORE ABOUT THE BOOK

https://metaversefashioncouncil.org/tpost/2aksx96xy1-now-silicon-valley-investment-has-gone-g

"NOW SILICON VALLEY INVESTMENT HAS GONE GLOBAL"

Andrew Romans is a seasoned venture capitalist with a notable track record. As a former tech VC, M&A investment banker, and current General Partner of 7BC Venture Capital and founder and General Partner of Rubicon Venture Capital, he has guided numerous startups to successful exits. His expertise spans angel investing, corporate venture capital, and advising governments on VC policy. A prolific author, Romans' books have been published by McGraw-Hill in English and translated by major publishers into Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and Russian. He is a sought-after speaker who has delivered keynotes in over 20 countries and appeared on major networks including MSNBC, CNBC, and ABC. His academic contributions include teaching at Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, while also holding a Distinguished Professorship at Chapman University. With a global perspective shaped by his multilingual capabilities, Romans has studied in the US, France and Germany.

His latest book, "Masters of Raising Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from Silicon Valley," was published this fall and immediately became a must-read in Silicon Valley.

• Tell us about 7BC. Its advantages approach, notable successes and challenges.
• Well, what can be seen as a disadvantage is also an advantage. We have not raised money from the large institutional investors that are basically pension funds, endowments, big, multifamily offices, although we're succeeding with multifamily offices now. Basically, a lot of investors that back Sand Hill Road will look at us and say, our minimum check size is $50 million or $25 million and we would never be more than 10% of your fund. So your minimum fund size needs to be $500 million, if not a billion. That disadvantage almost becomes an advantage when individuals, like some of the people that you met when we were together in Palo Alto, they work at a big tech company or are a family office from Southeast Asia or Europe or Latin America or somewhere. And they literally want to be in the asset class. Our funds tend to make a bigger cash-on-cash multiple than the large funds and we pay the fund back faster.
• We're seeing clear signs of market revival and recovery in the U.S. post-elections. Stocks are rising, and crypto is reaching record highs. With anticipation of a soft landing and a potential Fed interest rate cut, could this be a sign of easy "printed" money (which can have negative effects) returning to the economy?
• This might be overly optimistic. I feel like we are still recovering from the growth stage startups that raised money at 2021 valuations. I'm not sure 2025 is going to be a total bounce-back. Okay, the very beginning of it maybe yeah March, yeah?
• Another reason is the recovery of the US economy...
• So I would hope that those less experienced people will be more experienced when this new bull market that you're anticipating takes off. So short advice is: determine the correct capital requirements for the business, raise money for a 24-month runway, even if revenue is flat, but you understand what spending is. And as revenue does go up, model for a 24-month cash runway, and when you're one year in, start raising that next round, make sure you don't run out of money. Over the past two years, I've personally spoken with over a thousand business leaders, founders, and emerging VCs. Here's a telling insight: around 80% of them, often without realizing it, seem focused solely on raising capital rather than building and growing a real, sustainable business. If you have no path to profitability and the appetite from investors dries up, then that's very dangerous. So I would just say I agree with you. A key mistake that we've seen throughout our career is the startups that are solely focused on raising capital and not focused on getting to a business that is on a clear path to profitability.
• How do you identify con artists, particularly those you mention in your book within the blockchain and NFT sections?
• I don't want to give too much time to a negative topic, but let's cover it. I would say that normal entrepreneurship with technology to start up Silicon Valley or the many Silicon Valleys all around the world from Kyiv to Singapore or S?o Paulo, the whole world now is a long-term patient game.
• You have a strong educational background, with a German education in political science and French studies in literature and languages—a unique blend for a traditional legacy VC, giving you a broad perspective. In a recent blog post, you suggested the idea of increasing the U.S. population to 2 billion. Could you expand on that vision?
• I believe the immigration policy of the US has been totally backward. We have been incentivizing and rewarding people to break the rules, come to the USA physically without filling in the normal application paperwork, essentially cutting the line and getting better benefits than what we give our own citizens. healthcare, housing, food, free education, supplies. at the same time we do not let in that Ukrainian engineer that works for a Palo Alto VC-funded startup. I wrote a blog post outlining a policy to let in a mix of high net worth and highly skilled immigrants and use AI to identify funded startups from all over the world, managers of large hedge funds and other successful people and invite them to come to the USA and live and work here legally. Rather than pay their housing, these productive immigrants would pay tax. When you do the math on growing the US population from roughly 334m to $2bn and the new 1.7bn are all highly skilled people with high earning jobs just imagine how profitable and powerful our country would be? We could then offer benefits to American citizens that the current administration only provides to asylum seekers cutting the line and just showing up at the border. Let’s come up with our criteria for highly skilled migrants, wealthy migrants, even programs for unskilled labor migrants, do this legally, profitably and build new cities in the U.S. unleashing a boom town era that will give us 20% GDP growth for many decades to come. Countries should compete and the USA should use AI to personally invite the best to come. Let’s create a total brain drain and bring the best to the USA and grow our population to 2bn.

I think the United States could absorb one and a half to 2 billion new people contributing to the country. So I think it would be beneficial to some extent for everybody.

You're a rare type of VC with a concise and precise communication style, and that's something we truly value here.

I think one of the big changes in my life was when I moved from the suburbs of New York to Paris and I went to a bilingual school, where I did half of my classes in French and half in English, and there were 41 nationalities in my graduating class. So everything was just very international for me. They were all from many different countries. And I think we were just 14% American. And even those Americans spoke 4 languages, some of them. So I think that has had an influence on my career and if I meet someone from Malaysia, I think a lot of Americans would say 'It's way too complicated, don't even think that's gonna happen.' And I'm like 'Why not? Let's fly to Malaysia!' And even if I'm investing in US companies, which is primarily what we do, the fact that I know family offices both in Chicago and Indonesia helps a lot. And if as a result you could get your Smart Fashion app onto 10,000 accounts as a trial with Telkomcel in Indonesia, and it works, then they could roll it out across a million handsets. And you can say, hey, let's use this for payments and whatever super app or the next Twitter or video thing, whatever it is. And then they could potentially roll it out across 200 million handsets. I think part of the international thing has been, I've been to a lot of countries as a speaker and we end up raising capital from a lot of family offices and sometimes corporations and conglomerates that own big business assets. And so when we're investing in the United States, we've found lots of opportunities through negotiations with them investing in our fund. So I would say that early experience of studying German and French literature and learning these languages and having somewhat of an international background early in life, has led me to believe in this. I had a call today with a billionaire real estate family in San Francisco, and they want to go with me to Taipei and Singapore and go fundraising, where they would be raising a lot of money and then ten percent of it would be put into our fund. So it helps a lot, this international aspect very specifically in the venture capital business, it gives us an advantage when we're investing in any company that we can check the company from their existing country and make introductions to people that we actually know that might be able to become a distribution partner or a customer and grow the revenue of the company. So sometimes the geographical footprint of your employees or customers can increase the value of your acquisition. So if you're raising money from five VCs in Palo Alto, that are all white men from Boston and they all went to the same boarding school. They have been dating the same girl, and they don't know anyone that the other guy doesn't know. And then you let me invest alongside those white guys. We can probably bring something to that startup that'll result in having a bigger exit in the end, I think.

One day, groups like Kering ng, LVMH , or Richemont could potentially invest in 7BC Venture Capital , gaining a pathway to invest in Smart Fashion startups through you, wouldn't they?

Yeah, why not? They want to invest somewhere because the European economy isn't doing well now. But they see that the American economy is way better, so they should invest somewhere.

An idea born right in this conversation—why not? On one hand, you could raise capital from these major groups; on the other, there's a broader vision for the future of fashion itself. As we see it, the next era of fashion relies on the integration of technology and style, where fashion serves as a social medium of self-expression within both the digital and physical realms. We're at the very beginning of this journey, but the future feels closer than ever. And you, with your expertise and influence, could be pivotal in leading this transformation.

If you're spending a lot of money for a label and a brand, you want it to be connected to some real value. I've seen a lot of business plans that have floated through my inbox over the years adding an NFT digital asset to the product itself. I remember there was a wave of these startups that seemed to be to some extent offering the same thing there. And I'm not sure exactly how successful it is. Do you know, are those companies making money? I remember they were all trying to pitch us and today I would say I'm happy I did not invest in any of those. I think the economy here can work rather this way: if you want to buy the latest album from Radiohead and Radiohead allows you to go to Radiohead.com and download the album for free and then it says, do you want to make a donation and actually pay for it? And we love it if you would pay us $20 and if you don't want to pay $20, then here's an option to pay fifteen, ten, twelve, five, seven, and even nothing. And if you like it, you can come back and pay us tomorrow. We'll send you an email. We know you've been enjoying the album. If you like it, do you want to give us one dollar or $20? And I think that by disintermediating a record label that was quite predatory, that even if they were selling for a lot less, it's a price elasticity—if I lower the price, how many more units do I sell? There was a time when Silicon Valley was only investing in semiconductors in the real silicon, and then they got into the Internet and now Silicon Valley investment has gone global. Why not invest in Smart Fashion