SINCE 2025
Antler
Head of Scouting
- Full-stack zero-to-one growth
- Category-agnostic consumer growth
- Growth marketing × sommelier
- Founder scouting from day zero
Head of Scouting · Antler · NYU Stern
McKenzie Hagan
New York, New York
She makes gated categories — wine, homes, venture — reachable for everyday people.
McKenzie 'Kenzie' Hagan is Head of Scouting at Antler in New York, running the founder pipeline — 78 events hosted on Luma — that fills a residency fund's cohorts. She arrived through a decade of full-stack, zero-to-one consumer growth: toothbrushes at quip, wine at Usual Wines, homeownership at Foyer, where she wrote roughly 55 first-time-homebuyer guides. She is also a certified sommelier running her own import wine club, Matilda Imports — and she closed her telemedicine startup Quido with plain candor when demand didn't show.
- 10K+Foyer app downloads
- 78Antler founder events hosted
- ~55First-time homebuyer guides written
- 4.9★Foyer app store rating
HAPPENING NOW
STANDING TODAY
HOW SHE THINKS4 BELIEFS
Four beliefs run from a wine bottle to a seed-stage check.
THE IMPACT
Pull out any one — a decade of taking consumer categories zero to one.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 11 WORKS
THE TIMELINE
From toothbrushes to term sheets, one zero-to-one build after another.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
2025–PRESENT
Scouting the next generation of founders
As Head of Scouting for Antler in the US, McKenzie runs the top of the funnel a residency fund lives on — 78 events hosted on Luma, from Interview Superdays to Investor AMAs to Founder House coworking. It's the same top-of-funnel craft she practiced selling to consumers, now pointed at founders from day zero. On the side she runs her own wine club, Matilda Imports.
2023–2024
The 401k for homeownership
As Head of Growth at Foyer, McKenzie planned the launch of a fintech marketing itself as "the 401k for homeownership," then built its acquisition engine: roughly 55 first-time-homebuyer guides under her own byline mapping the whole homebuying journey. The bet was that for a research-heavy purchase, education is the channel. She joined as a consultant in 2023, went full time in 2024, and led growth through March 2025.
“Foyer hired me as a consultant to plan for the launch in 2023 and I joined full time in 2024.”
2021–2022
Founding and backing companies across Latin America
McKenzie's cross-border chapter: she co-founded Quido, a Mexico City telemedicine startup for uninsured patients backed by Nido Ventures, joined the founding team at the e-commerce operator Merama, and became a Latitud LF6 fellow. Quido wound down after just under a year for lack of demand — a founder lesson, told straight, that she now brings to the other side of the table at Antler.
“Ultimately, we wound down our operations after just under a year because we didn't see strong enough patient demand.”
2019–2020
Full-stack growth, one bottle at a time
The crucible of her craft. As VP of Growth for VINEBOX and Usual Wines — the DTC wine brand spun out of VINEBOX — she owned the full acquisition stack for the first time and became the brand's published voice, writing opinionated, jargon-free wine education. It seeded two things that define her: the full-stack growth toolkit and a wine expertise that later became a sommelier certification. She also began backing and advising Stojo.
“If it's in the salad dressing or condiment aisle instead of the wine section, leave it on the shelf and move on.”
2013–2018
From NYU Stern to selling toothbrushes online
McKenzie's foundation: a triple concentration in Marketing, Finance, and Chinese at NYU Stern, a term at NYU Shanghai, and an early performance-marketing seat at Constellation Agency. She then went in-house at quip, the DTC oral-care brand, where she ran product and performance marketing and learned to move real volume online — the base of the full-stack toolkit she would carry across every category after.
“Learned growth marketing and how to sell $XXM+ worth of toothbrushes online.”