Around the time that President Donald Trump proudly displayed his master list of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, a group of founders and investors gathered at the Public Hotel in Manhattan for a summit hosted by Red Sea Ventures on consumer tech.
While many venture firms and operators have abandoned the sector for the higher-margin fields of B2B software and ChatGPT wrappers, New York remains a hub for consumer tech, though the direct-to-consumer goods boom of the 2010s has inevitably given way to AI-enabled apps. Consumer goods as a category haven’t completely vanished—just look at Pepsi’s recent $1.95 billion acquisition of the prebiotic soda brand Poppi—and I was curious whether tariffs would have a more outsized and immediate impact on the sector.
