Introducing our Venture Partners: Shawn, Mike, and Kofi

At Listen, we love to bring the best minds to the table. In addition to the core squad backing extraordinary founders and building their brands, we’ve added a few incredible folks to the team as Venture Partners to help scale our Port Cos businesses.

Last year, we introduced Shawn Dennis as our first Venture Partner (and Listen’s official Fairy Godmother) which was a key expansion for Listen to make sure we have expertise around the table for our entrepreneurs as they scale. Shawn’s career and leadership spans an incredible amount from DreamWorks to Universal to American Girl to the NFL. She’s been so helpful to Listen and our portfolio as she sits on the board at Slumberkins and Codeverse and we’re thankful for her partnership.

So we decided to expand the program. We added Mike Apostal, the CEO of Factor, who has long been a part of the Listen fam. With our exit to HelloFresh, he can bring his ninja-like operational expertise to all of our founders as they’re scaling their business and need to drive efficiencies. It’s humbling to have an entrepreneur that we backed and doubled-down on from the beginning to want to come back and work with us.

And last but not least, we’ve brought on Kofi Amoo Gottfried. Kofi is a remarkable individual who Jeff grew up with at Leo Burnett in their advertising days. He’s gone on to blaze a phenomenal trail in the marketing and advertising world as the Head of Brand at Facebook and then moved on to be the Head of Brand, Marketing, and Growth at DoorDash. He’ll be instrumental in helping our portfolio companies grow their marketing organizations and build their brand narrative as they scale.

We could not be more thrilled about this Venture Partner team we’re building and look forward to seeing how they help our brands grow.