In March 2018, Forbes published a story about one of Kevin Durant's newest investments. The headline led with Durant's name — that is how coverage of celebrity investor rounds tends to work — but the more interesting story was the one behind the investment: a seasoned founder who had just executed one of the cleanest pivots in the recent history of marketing technology, and who had built something that a Hall of Fame athlete and his business infrastructure recognized as genuinely valuable.
That founder was Matt Britton. The company was Suzy. And the story of how it came to exist — through a decade of building, selling, spinning out, listening to the market, and being willing to make the hard decisions that most CEOs avoid — is one of the more instructive entrepreneurial narratives in the consumer technology space.
Today, Suzy serves hundreds of Fortune 500 clients as a real-time consumer intelligence platform, has raised over $100 million in venture capital, and counts some of the world's most recognizable brands among its customers. Britton has gone on to write a second book — Generation AI — and to build FutureProof as a parallel venture at the intersection of AI education and business strategy. None of it would exist if he had not been willing, in mid-2017, to look himself and his team in the mirror and make a decision that the conventional wisdom about startups strongly cautions against: the pivot.
The Forbes piece opened with a question that had a deceptively simple answer: what is Suzy?
"Suzy is a technology platform that allows businesses to harness intelligence from over a million consumers at the push of a button so everyday decisions can now be data-driven," Britton explained at the time. "It is built to take the guesswork out of nearly every marketing-related decision a business of any size makes."
This description — accessible, frictionless consumer intelligence at the speed of a business decision — captured something that the market research industry had promised for decades but consistently underdelivered on. Traditional market research operated on timelines measured in weeks or months. By the time a brand leader received insights from a consumer study, the decision that prompted the study had often already been made, or the market conditions had shifted enough to make the data stale. The gap between when brands needed consumer intelligence and when the research industry could provide it was a structural problem that no amount of process improvement within the existing paradigm could solve.
Suzy was built to close that gap entirely. Rather than commissioning a study, waiting for fieldwork, and receiving a report, brand leaders could ask targeted groups of consumers specific questions and receive measurable responses in the same meeting where the question arose. An apparel brand considering a new design could test consumer reaction during the design meeting. A financial services company developing a new credit card offer could validate the concept against actual consumer segments before any resources were committed to launch. The intelligence arrived when it was needed, not weeks after the decision window had closed.
The comparison to Siri — "the Siri for business" — was a useful shorthand for the Forbes audience, though the more accurate frame is closer to what Britton described as "an open exchange of human intelligence, a true platform built to make people smarter in ways that tools like Google can't." Google can tell you what people are searching for. Suzy could tell you what specific people actually think, want, and feel about specific things — on demand, in real time, from a panel of over a million verified consumers.
As of 2025, the market for AI-powered consumer intelligence has matured dramatically. Brands across every category are competing to build the fastest and most reliable feedback loops between consumer sentiment and strategic decision-making. The insight that Britton was building toward in 2017 — that real-time consumer intelligence would become a strategic imperative rather than a research luxury — has become the operating consensus of every major insights and marketing organization in the Fortune 500.
The Durant Company investment was part of a larger $5 million financing round led by the Foundry Group, one of the most respected venture capital firms in the industry. The round's purpose was to support the transition from Crowdtap to Suzy and fund the new product features being unveiled at SXSW 2018.
Britton's answer to the question of what attracted Durant was characteristically modest: "The Durant Company has recently been quite active in pursuing investments in innovative business and talented management teams. I would imagine that's what attracted them in this instance."
What Durant and his business partner Rich Kleiman saw in Suzy was what they have consistently sought across their investment portfolio: companies at the intersection of technology and practical business utility, led by founders with demonstrated track records of building and scaling organizations. By 2018, Durant's investment operation — now operating as 35V — was already assembling what would become one of the most sophisticated athlete-led investment platforms in modern sports business, with early positions in companies like Robinhood (invested at a $1.2 billion valuation in 2017, went public in 2021 at $32 billion) and Postmates (invested in 2016, acquired by Uber in 2020 for $2.6 billion).
The Suzy investment was consistent with a pattern Britton noted with genuine admiration: Durant's use of proximity to Silicon Valley — he was playing for the Golden State Warriors during this period — to position himself at the center of technology deal flow before most athletes understood that the transition from endorsement to equity was the more valuable play. "It's fascinating how they have used their proximity to Silicon Valley to put themselves at the center of the tech world," Britton said. "It shows how true influence can extend very quickly if done in a well-thought-out manner."
The broader celebrity investor phenomenon that Forbes used as context for the story — Nas in Ring, Ashton Kutcher in Skype, Jessica Alba in The Honest Company — has since matured from novelty to standard practice. Durant has gone on to build 35V into a platform spanning more than 100 startup investments across information technology, fintech, cryptocurrency, health and wellness, and media. Athlete capital is no longer a curiosity in venture circles; it is a legitimate source of patient, network-rich investment that can provide unique distribution advantages for the right companies.
The most substantive part of the Forbes interview was Britton's account of the entrepreneurial architecture behind Suzy — the chain of decisions, pivots, and reinventions that led from a one-person youth marketing agency founded in 2002 to a real-time consumer intelligence platform backed by one of the world's most successful professional athletes.
The lineage is worth tracing in detail because it illustrates something important about how durable businesses get built:
In 2002, Britton founded Mr. Youth, a youth marketing agency that grew from a single employee to a 500-person global operation by working with brands like P&G, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Visa. As the agency scaled, Britton and his team built an internal software tool called RepNation to manage and measure the performance of their college ambassador program. When outside agencies started asking to use RepNation, Britton recognized a market signal and spun the technology out as a standalone company — Crowdtap — in 2009. In 2011, Mr. Youth was acquired by LBi International (later absorbed into Publicis) for approximately $40-50 million. Crowdtap was not part of that acquisition, having been spun out as an independent entity with its own venture financing from the Foundry Group.
After leaving MRY, Britton spent two years writing YouthNation and conducting a speaking tour spanning three continents, 21 countries, and over 100 appearances. In late 2016, the board of Crowdtap approached him to join as CEO. By mid-2017, Britton and the team had made a collective decision to pivot the company's focus from influencer marketing to consumer intelligence — and Suzy was born.
Each step in this sequence represents a different kind of entrepreneurial judgment: building an internal tool that solved a real problem, recognizing when that tool had standalone market value, separating the software from the agency, staying close to the markets that mattered, returning to leadership when the opportunity was right, and being willing to redirect the entire company's focus when the evidence demanded it.
No part of the Forbes interview generated more instructive insight than Britton's extended discussion of the pivot — both its necessity and its execution.
"I think many entrepreneurs don't do enough listening," he said. "Listening to the market, customers, even employees. If you listen hard enough and put any prior notions aside, you can see where the need states exist and begin to reverse-engineer your business to deliver upon them."
In the case of Crowdtap, the listening had produced an uncomfortable but clear conclusion: influencer marketing had become "saturated, somewhat risky for brands and largely a 'pay-to-play' strategy." The category had lost the genuine authenticity that had made it compelling in its early days, regulatory pressure from the FTC was increasing the compliance burden, and the competitive landscape had crowded to the point where differentiation was structurally difficult. The hard question — "Will this company really achieve its goals on its current path?" — had an honest answer that pointed toward radical change.
The pivot guidance Britton offered is worth preserving in full because it is the opposite of the platitudes that usually appear in startup advice: "When you see the right opportunity and know that a change is needed, my take is to always create clarity in vision and purpose, gain organizational alignment, and then proceed boldly... and look past your fear as the biggest risk was probably just staying the course."
The emphasis on organizational alignment before execution is significant. Pivots fail most often not because the new direction is wrong but because the organization has not genuinely committed to it — because the team is executing a new strategy while privately hoping the old one will prove viable again. Britton's sequencing — clarity first, alignment second, bold execution third — describes a process that makes the pivot durable rather than tentative.
His framework for the indicators that should trigger a pivot is equally precise: hard indicators like customer renewal rates, top-line growth, employee retention, and product efficacy; and soft indicators that are more instinctual — the question of whether the current path actually leads where you need to go. "Too many leaders are either too deep in the 'dirt' (tactical everyday performance) or too high up in the cloud (i.e., don't have a good handle on how they will ever generate revenue)," he observed. The judgment required to pivot correctly demands simultaneous clarity about the data and the vision — neither is sufficient without the other.
One of the sharpest questions in the Forbes interview concerned the shift from founder conviction to data-driven decision-making: at what point does passion give way to logic in building a company?
Britton's answer rejected the premise of the binary. "I don't think it's a binary exercise. You need to continually balance IQ like product data and revenue with ER (gut instinct and inertia)."
This framing — IQ and ER as complementary rather than competing inputs — captures something important about how successful founders actually operate. The founders who rely exclusively on conviction tend to persist with failing strategies long after the evidence demands a change. The founders who rely exclusively on data tend to lose the forward-looking vision that distinguishes genuine strategic leadership from competent operational management. The ones who build durable companies are those who can hold both simultaneously — using data to stress-test conviction and using conviction to give data its proper strategic frame.
By the time the Forbes interview was published, Suzy had over 70 major customers on the platform — enough real-world validation to confirm that the pivot had been correctly timed and correctly executed, and that the "grand aspiration" of becoming an "open exchange of human intelligence" was not simply a founder's dream but a trajectory grounded in genuine market evidence.
The arc of Suzy's evolution from that $5 million SXSW announcement in 2018 to the platform it is today is the validation of everything Britton articulated in the Forbes interview. The company has raised over $100 million in venture capital, serves Fortune 500 clients across virtually every industry category, and has positioned itself as a central infrastructure layer for the real-time consumer intelligence that modern brand decision-making requires.
The market it serves has also matured dramatically. AI-powered consumer intelligence is now a category with dozens of competitors, significant institutional investment, and recognized strategic importance among the CMOs and insights leaders of the world's largest brands. The insight that drove the Crowdtap-to-Suzy pivot — that brand leaders needed consumer intelligence at the speed of a meeting rather than the speed of a traditional research project — is now the consensus view of the entire industry. Britton and Suzy were building toward that consensus before it existed.
This is, in retrospect, the most important thing about the Suzy story: not the celebrity investor angle, not the SXSW timing, not even the elegant entrepreneurial architecture of MRY to Crowdtap to Suzy. It is the fact that Britton correctly identified a structural gap between when brand leaders needed consumer intelligence and when the research industry could provide it — and built a company to close that gap — at a moment when most of the market had not yet recognized the gap existed.
That is the signal worth studying. Not the announcement, but the timing of the conviction behind it. The brands and investors who understood in 2018 what Britton was building toward are the ones who built advantages that competitors spent the following decade trying to replicate. The ones who waited for the consensus to form arrived late to a category that had already been defined.
Suzy is a real-time consumer intelligence platform that allows brands to get targeted feedback from a panel of over a million verified consumers at the speed of a business decision. Rather than commissioning traditional market research studies that take weeks or months to complete, brand leaders can ask specific questions in multiple formats and receive hundreds of measurable responses during the same meeting where the question arises. The platform is designed to eliminate the guesswork from marketing decisions by making consumer intelligence available when it is actually needed.
The pivot was driven by a clear-eyed assessment of the influencer marketing category that Crowdtap was serving. By mid-2017, Britton and his team had concluded that influencer marketing had become saturated, was increasingly risky for brands due to regulatory pressure from the FTC, and had largely devolved into a pay-to-play strategy with limited differentiation potential. Simultaneously, they identified a large and underserved need in the consumer intelligence space — brand leaders needed faster access to consumer feedback than traditional research methods could provide. The pivot to Suzy was the result of matching an honest assessment of Crowdtap's trajectory with a genuine market opportunity in consumer intelligence.
Kevin Durant's investment through The Durant Company (now 35V) was part of a $5 million financing round led by Foundry Group announced at SXSW 2018. The strategic significance was less about the dollar amount than about what the investment represented: validation from one of the most sophisticated athlete-investor operations in modern sports business, which had already demonstrated its judgment through early positions in companies like Robinhood and Postmates. Durant's proximity to Silicon Valley had given him early access to deal flow across the technology ecosystem, and his investment thesis — which focused on innovative companies with strong management teams — made Suzy a natural fit.
The most durable lesson is about the timing and courage required to make fundamental strategic changes before they become unavoidable. Britton made the pivot when Crowdtap still had customers, revenue, and operational momentum — not when it was in crisis. The willingness to redirect a company that is working adequately toward a larger and more defensible opportunity, before market pressure forces the change, is what distinguished the pivot as strategic leadership rather than reactive adaptation. The framework he articulated — clear vision, organizational alignment, bold execution — provides a practical sequence for founders facing similar decisions.
Suzy, in its current form, required every prior decision in Britton's entrepreneurial history to be made correctly: the founding of Mr. Youth with the right clients and ambitions; the recognition that RepNation was more than an internal tool; the clean separation of Crowdtap from the MRY acquisition; the years spent writing and speaking and staying close to the market; the return to Crowdtap's leadership at the right moment; and the willingness to make a pivot that the company did not technically need to make in order to survive.
None of those decisions was inevitable. All of them reflect the judgment of someone who had spent two decades developing a specific skill: the ability to identify where consumer behavior was heading before the market had made it obvious, and to build organizational and technological infrastructure in that direction before the opportunity had been claimed by others.
That skill did not disappear when the Forbes article was published. It is the foundation of everything Britton has built and written since — from Suzy's ongoing evolution to Generation AI, his examination of the next generation of consumers who are growing up with artificial intelligence as a native feature of their world.
For more on that next frontier — what Generation AI wants, how it will engage with brands, and what leaders need to build toward — Generation AI is the essential guide. And for ongoing conversations with the founders, investors, and brand leaders navigating these questions in real time, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those discussions happen.
