Table of Contents

What I’ve been up to…

Hot Deals🔥

🙌 Portfolio Company High Fives

📰 News and Food for Thought

🌈 Founder’s Corner

🍰Shop Women-Founded Brands/Current Obsessions

🍦Other Things No One Asked For

What I’ve been up to…

Dream Ventures Winter Accelerator Celebration: Annie Evans and I hosted the first Dream Ventures Celebration day of the year. Our 25 graduates flew in from their respective corners for a wellness morning at WTHN, a pitch competition at Peoplehood (congrats to Kadi Lee of Highbrow Hippie on her win!) and celebration dinner at The Standard with our favorite active angels, VCs and start-up community. I am so proud of this cohort and the businesses they are building (check them out here).

PS: applications now open for the spring cohort- send to your very favorite founders that want to get ready to kick off their first fundraise. Cool article about it here 🙂

Baby’s First SXSW: I just returned from my first SXSW and had an epic time. The highlights:

The Cherub Pop Up (shop IRL for angel investments)

Connecting / reconnecting with women in VC at a breakfast hosted by All Place’s Jessie Gabriel

A friendly and oddly proportioned donkey

Playing poker with 100 women with Poker Power and Project W

A wellness morning with Little Honey Money

Texas BBQ at Terry Black’s

Meeting my icon and crush Esther Perel at the hotel bar

The many amazing new connections I made (discounting 3 particular tech bros and one overly spiritual Uber driver)

Laying on a bed of individually wrapped croissants (environmental impact unclear)

Hot topics of convo: the disappearing DEI dollars, the massive, imminent wealth transfer to women, $74k Bitcoin (fun! for a day), innovations in feminine health, repro rights and Alabama’s terrifying treatment of embryos,

Hot Deals🔥

4AM Skin

4AM SKIN is disrupting the $450B wellness market with a bold promise: keep your bad habits and still have good skin. Their research-backed solutions reduce the impact of modern stressors like alcohol, sugar, disrupted sleep, and air pollution.

Female, BIPOC-founded brand— featured in the likes of Vogue, W Magazine, and Nylon

Growing 80% MoM despite selling out 12 times

High profile partnerships (including Barry’s Bootcamp, 818 Tequila, Standard Hotels) as well as retail expansion (Revolve, Urban Outfitters) puts 4AM on track from viral sensation to a generation-defining brand

All scale accomplished with under $200k in total funding, 2 employees (the founders), and no paid ads

4AM reached profitability in July, but with ongoing conversations with giants including Sephora and Ulta, 4AM is raising capital to keep up with demand, diversify product offering through R&D, build out a highly specialized team and win in retail.

Reach out for more info.

***********************

Matteri

Materri is a technology platform for consumer product brands, manufacturers, and supply chain partners. The company is addressing a $50B market opportunity to save companies $1M+ per year using machine learning to help them produce products 10x faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.

Materri is in its MVP stage with design partners already onboarded from TOMS, Huckberry, Red Wing, DUER and Ponto Footwear.

The founding team, Kira Erickson (CEO), Enrico Milletti (CPO), and Alec Jenab (CTO) bring a combined decade of experience in the materials and B2B software industries to Materri.

Deck here

SPV is open through the week for smaller angel checks;

Reach out for more info.

FIRST

First is a modern prenup process for the forward-thinking couple; the partner for your partnership. Think: Bumble for family law (going to market with prenuptial agreements, with expansive roadmap)

Family law is already a $13b/ year industry and growing

~40% of couples 18-35 have embraced prenuptial agreements, with 46% increase of women initiating prenups

First modernized the tedious process with a digital experience for savvy couples seeking a path to a legit prenup, reviewed by actual lawyers

AI/ML allows for reduced cost ($2,650 as compared to $5k-10k industry abverage)

~$200k left in $3.5m seed round, led and incubated by EXPA

Reach out for more info.

🙌 Portfolio Company High Fives

📰 News and Food for Thought

M&A Activity

Burch Creative Capital Takes Majority Stake in Rowing Blazers

Shopping platform NTWRK Acquires Complex from BuzzFeed for $108 million

Guess makes first acquisition in its 43-year history with deal to acquire trendy New York brand Rag & Bone

Matches Fashion is closing down (just 2 months after Fraser’s acquisition)

Harry’s files confidentially to IPO

News / Reads

Leap Day Financial Pros and Cons

This is SO good: The New Consumer/ Coefficient Capital Consumer Trend Report (Expo Special). I found this slide interesting👇 (get your bag, yuzu!) and am so fascinated by the GLP-1 effect (stage name: Ozempic) in consumer culture.

Hedi Slimane Launches Celine Beauty Line

Why DTC Brands Aren’t Swayed by Cheaper Social Media Ads– Brands still looking away from Meta and into ad spend in offline channels, Google, Amazon, Tiktok

Been thinking about this podcast on Slow Productivity with Cal Newport which led me to buy his book: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

The Beauty Company Giving the Industry a Master Class in Creative Marketing– Topicals refuses to miss. I am in awe of this brand.

This is a baller move: $1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School (and a fun video to watch if you need some feel goods)

A Gel Injected Into the Scrotum Could Be the Next Male Contraceptive: This is groundbreaking but every male I surveyed has a strong averse reaction to a needle in the scrotum, despite the ease of the procedure and positive impact to their partner.

Peter Rahal (co-founde of RX bar) Announced his New Protein Bar Brand ‘David Protein’ It’s kind of 90’s and mar-a-lago coded in its branding but I want it.

Outdoor Voices is Closing all of its Stores: This week is a bummer for brick and mortar

This book has been keeping me up late (book club links here) .

🌈 Founder’s Corner

Female Founder’s Day in NYC, hosted by Female Founder Collective is next week (March 21)! Tickets here

Gen Z Broke the Marketing Funnel: This is a good read. TLDR; the brands winning with Gen Z are those creating content and activations that touch each one.

Grants:

$150k in no-cost inventory financing from Kickfurther (deadline March 20)

$10k-$30k with Latinas in Tech (deadline March 22)

Check out Nancy Twine’s $1m grant program for women founders

$25k from Rockland Trust (deadline April 7)

🍰Shop Women-Founded Brands/Current Obsessions

DOUBL– the first to market made-to-measure bra ordered and fitted directly from your smartphone (via app body scan!) I am excited to try this- Kickstarter launches in next month, but they are also offering an early bird discount- click here.

Experiment is launching a lip product and I have never waitlisted so fast. I have accumulated more empties of Super Satty than any other product in my cabinet so I have high expectations.

I think about the 1990’s MTV Show House of Style hosted by Todd Oldham and Cindy Crawford way too often (what is the modern version of this, or is it just having a good tiktok algo?) and recall a scene where a french photographer was frustrated with his gorgeous model on the beach and stopped the shoot and yelled in a very french way “OIL THE GIRL UP!”, to which his staff immediately did and everything was better. Which brings me to: This hair and body oil from Koba is called Gold Drip, is gorgeous, and makes everything better.

🍦Other Things No One Asked For

I met a sloth named Tony in Costa Rica. Here he is.

Want more from this newsletter? Less? Reply and let me know! If you really love it, share with a friend.