Entrepreneurship Rooted in Values - Betsy Fore - Tiny Organics - Episode #72

We just catapulted right in terms of our, our sales in the earliest days. And it was around this time when we were approached by Shark Tank. We decided, okay, let's give it a go.

Welcome to not another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Pallidas. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.

Today's guest is Betsy Foer. Betsy is a serial entrepreneur and impact investor. She started a number of companies and nonprofits. She's the co founder and former CEO of Tiny Organics, a venture backed company creating whole food meals for babies and toddlers. Notably, Betsy became the first Native American woman to raise a series a round of funding. She now leads Velveteen Ventures as founding partner and managing director. A firm investing in solutions for children and the planet. Betsy is also releasing her debut book, Built on Purpose. Discover your deep inner why and manifest the business of your dreams. Set to publish one week from today on November 11th. Please join me in welcoming Betsy Foer.

Thank you, David. I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you for doing this with me early in the morning for you on the west coast. So thank you for doing this. Uh, let's jump in. First question, what is the one thing that you did at Tiny Organics, big or small, that had the biggest impact and you do again if you're CEO of another company in the future?

Our 101st believers, or as I called them, our 100 founding families. So we built the entire company with them. I was actually a new mom at the time myself. And it was pre pandemic in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I sent one email out to the Park Slope parent group. We got hundreds of inbound in the first few hours. We then had to cap it to try to deliver the food to these families. But what we did through that journey was meet the. Meet the mom or the dad where they were. Right. So we went into the home, we tried 12 different recipes of each one of our hero products that we launched with and we essentially built Tiny organics with our 100 founding families. And that's. I talk about it a lot in my book, which you mentioned as well. David. That was the secret sauce, right? We were meeting the parent where they were when they needed us the most.

Just to be clear, you're saying you went into group, sent out a message to the local parents and what, what did you say? Like you said, we're starting a company or we're trying, like what, what did.

You state to everyone baby food company seeking founding families essentially as co founders, right. And, and I did was able to say VC backed, right. Because we were already building within a venture studio in New York. I bu that company completely different than my first, which I'm sure we'll get into, where I built it solely with angels. And so I did exactly the opposite with Tiny. And we did have that bandwidth to be able to say we're going to learn, right. For, for the first year on making sure these products are what baby needs during each phase of development. But just getting to know these families by name, doing all the surveys with them, going into their homes, I mean babies are the best beta testers, right? Because they can't, they can't lie. It's like know exactly if they love it or they're doing it and what. And so yeah, for us it was, it was really, yeah, this idea that the, the first 100 were so obsessed, right, that that's what we were focused on that were. They were so in love or what I call the product market love, fit and journey, that they then told 10 of their friends who told 10 of their friends, right. And it just grew from there to where I built the company to over 13 million in revenue on direct sales alone in the first 24 months and then went on, as you mentioned, to be the first Native American to ever raise a series A round of funding. I think so much of that was because of this exponential growth we saw meeting our consumer where they were really making them a co founder in the company and building with us.

And so I want to get super tactical because this is actually something that I talk to founders about all the time, where I say that first set of customers that you work with in a tech world, you know, you would send the design partners, you know, the, the or the beta testers or whatever it is. They can have such a lasting impact, good or bad by the way, depending on the experience that they have and you spending that time with them.

It compounds like the value that they can bring to your company and the impact that they can have. How did you keep them.

Let's abreast of what was happening in the company or things that were coming out. Like did you have an email list of just those hundred that stayed with just those hundred the whole time that you were building the company? Was it just in those early. I again, I want to get rid this, this to me, I love when you first told it to me, I was like, I love, I love this. How did you keep that group Engaged.

Yes. So initially it was through sending these emails for them to come and meet us in at Prospect Park. And I lived around the corner, so these moms were my neighbors, right. And I was very heavily pregnant with my first at the time. I then gave birth and brought my grand new baby boy to meet everyone. So there was this level, it was pre pandemic. There was a level of trust there as a new mom. Right. But also I think the, you know, it put more confidence in these founding families because they knew we were building out of a VC firm in, in the, in Manhattan. But also we were able to just. We were really like the moms doing the thing, right. And feeding this to our kids. And so the cadence at which we did it was every other week initially where we would meet the families in the park. We would then gift them the hero products, right. They would bring it home and try. They would fill out the surveys. We did have drop off of, as you would expect. So I think we actually wound up with like one hundred and twenty five families that we started out with, right. And then it sort of came down to the hundred where we knew their kids by name. And eventually with this type of business, you do age out. So many of them did have another child and we were able to join them in that journey. Actually, all three of my children have eaten tiny growing up and have. They really do love vegetables. And I believe because of this. And so I think, you know, we were able to, yeah, just meet them where they were and continue that cadence until the pandemic hit, actually, we were able to kind of continue to meet with them, continue to test with them. And then it became, instead of physically meeting in the park, just shipping them, right? These, we were, we were making it in Harlem at a little hotbreak kitchen that was our very first manufacturing site. And then, and then we eventually moved into the Roberta's Pizza Kitchen in Berkeley. Like that, that space where they had this massive brick oven. I mean, it was so cool. That's when I knew we'd made it right, if we were like working out of their, their space. But we, yeah, that whole journey in the earliest days never had a CO man. So we were doing all the everything, the quality control. And of course, for babies, this meant partnering with folks like that I had brought on from day one, which was like Dariush Massafarian at Tufts, ensuring that this was exactly what baby needed when, during each phase of development, right. We then caught the attention of the former first lady Michelle, who was about to launch her veggies early and often campaign since founding it in the White House a decade prior. And we were the perfect fit for her program and to be a founding board member of that because that was our exact stance on what we were trying to deliver here. To rewire the gut health of a generation to prefer vegetables over sweets essentially or the way that I had grown up. Right. And so I think we had so many key insights, but there were all these hypothesis that we were trying to test out and we did that with the founding families. Right. So they actually. Yeah, they got a certificate saying they were a founding family. We never, we never dished out equity. But we didn't need you because they had such a love for the product, given the love for their baby. And there was a deep need there that we were meeting.

So let's compare this. You mentioned to your first company. Can you talk a little bit about how you did it differently and what didn't work with that first company in this particular area?

Yeah. And that company was actually a hardware company that I built for my first baby, my dog Whiskey. It was the first Fitbit space for dogs on the market. This was early 2000s whistle and I launched around the same time. My product was wonderwoof. I thought we were living the dream because I launched us in every major retailer, had millions of dollars in POS from Petco. Launching the pet tech category across all of the us. I initially launched in Harrods in London where I was based at the time. Went down to Colette for, for Paris Fashion Week. We went to Manhattan to go to Story Bloomingdale's and then was doing the things that kind of do not scale right. During that time with these sort of one retailers. But then I hit every Best Buy in North America with the product and a massive point of sale display. And I thought this is it. Right. I actually took my dog in the car with me driving around Canada to the different Best Buys to meet with the sales rep. I mean totally doing things that do not scale here. Right. And saying this dog inspired it. Right. And so I had the belief of these B2B customers to the point, as I mentioned, millions of dollars in purchase orders, these massive displays, they were putting marketing budget behind it and everything else. But what I hadn't done yet and as a first time founder at the time had not realized was that I actually wasn't meeting the consumer where they needed us or where they were at. Right. Because we were a first of a kind in pet tech. People were just getting used to wearing a Fitbit for themselves. And they couldn't quite translate. What does this actually do for my dog? Right. Yes, it counts its steps. But we were getting to a point where we could track if they were sleep, sleeping or even dreaming and then had the dog walker taken them, where did they go? And there were all these different key insights based on, on your dog's makeup, right. Like their. What they might need for exercise. And it was really to get my dog down to his goal weight. And I just thought by putting that story out there that people would get it or understand her at my click. But we weren't, we weren't sort of meeting them with something that they already understood in a way that we could. For instance, I'll give you an example. New moms are used to reaching into the freezer where they store their breast milk, right. To. To warm that for baby. That's, that's a behavior that we then just leaned into it Tiny because we got a lot of pushback. Wait a minute, Your. Your food is frozen? And then we were able to say that's even more fresh, right? Because you've just like the milk been able to capture it at the source at the very, the very start. And so we were leaning into behavior that the mom was already doing by reaching in to get that for baby. We weren't leaning into behav behavior that made sense. Right. With dogs at the time, it was a little bow tie device that attached to their collar. And so it was like too big of a leap for people. There was like this educational piece that was missing. We were almost a little too early and because of that didn't have great sell through right at the, you know, at the retail level. And at the time I had, I had launched D2C. It was very early days for D2C and consumer at the time. And so I thought I need to do both. Right. There were so many learnings that I had as a first time sole founder CEO at that company. We actually did go on to get Oprah's favorite things list. She was using the bow tie with her dogs, which was like a dream.

To see. And I was able to get Forbes 30 under 30 for manufacturing. Still have no idea how that happened, but they, you know, had heard of me. And you'll hear more as you. As we dive into this. David, with my background here, why this is kind of so amazing that I was able to even sell in these large retailers. I started my entire journey with a 50k grant. And so that was another thing I did so differently from tiny where I actually wound up raising from angel investors only like exclusively for that company. And what it meant was for a hardware company that requires quite a bit of overhead. Right. To manufacture these devices. And we built everything in house. At the time, you couldn't even buy anything off the shelf. You had to do it yourself. So the Firmware and the iOS and Android apps and everything. So we, yeah, pretty big team across three continent and trying to scale that without being VC backed at the time was near impossible. Right. So I was also. I didn't understand or what I was learning through that journey as well, where the funding shore should come from and that if you exclusively raise from individuals, it's very hard to then validate your valuation. Right. For an institutional investor down the line.

Interesting. And the lesson.

There.

You got the retailers excited and did all those things, but you hadn't yet figured out that product market fit with the, the end buyer, that end consumer. And that was really the. And, and, and I, I can fully get idea that in Tiny Organics, once you get that product market fit and you have, you know that this is something the consumer wants, it becomes even easier to go not only to the retailers, but even to drive the sell through and everything else.

So I wanted to. You mentioned fundraising a couple times. I want to talk a little bit about the fundraising path that you took. One of the things that we talked about. And I think you made these maybe the second person that I've had on the show that, that had some experience with Shark Tank. But your Shark Tank experience definitely is unique. I would, I would say. And so maybe you can share a little bit about where that was in your, in the journey, you know, just timeline wise and where it was in the world, you know, what was happening in the world and, and kind of how that, how that happened. And then we'll get to how you actually ended up raising. But would love to hear that story.

Yes, absolutely. And when we launched Tiny Organics, it was January 2020, so we were, we were ready to go. Right. We met mom where she needed us when she needed us most. With the pandemic hitting in March, we were actually supposed to be on stage with Michelle Obama 2020 in Chicago to kick off our partnership. Of course that had to be all virtual at that point. Right. But it meant that because we were delivering Frozen because mom didn't have to go to the grocery store, it made, we just catapulted right. In terms of our, our sales in the earliest days. And it was around this time when we were approached by Shark Tank we decided, okay, let's give it a go. And so that summer, before we'd figured out any sort of vaccines yet or anything, and my, my son was still. I had never really left him yet at the time I had to quarantine. I drove cross country to Vegas. That's where they relocated us for, to, to do this one for that season. And we, I was quarantined for over two weeks where I didn't see anyone in a hotel, right? Like, and then they, when they bring you into the tank, they wanted to know that you, you know, hadn't been exposed to anything and you wore a mask until you were like entering the tank. But when I got there, I realized.

All of the details that we had given for thawing our food. The, the tiny organics food itself had not been followed and it was still frozen. We were like, how are the sharks going to eat this food if it's like a solid, you know, rock of ice? And I, you know, you, at that moment, you're sort of thinking, it was right before I was walking into the tank. You know, I was removing the mask and all I could do at that point was my box breath was coming back to my breath and trying to destabilize my nervous system to be able to walk in there and do the thing. We actually, I can say this because we were on the introduction of the season itself where they showed my COO and I walking into the tank with, with tiny organics there and like the brand, but they actually didn't air us. So even though we, we were, the sharks, were vying for a deal with us, I was able to negotiate really well and we were thrilled with the outcome to the point where the shark was jumping up and down on their chair like it was, it was incredible. Could be still up in that era, I think, you know, that whole experience, I mean, now, I guess, you know, the thing that I've learned in life and what I've always tried to do is the reframe, right. So it's like, okay, there's still lessons and learnings from that experience. And one of them was this, you know, fight or flight mode that founders often get into where they're just putting out fires and trying to, you know, trying to build as fast as they can. Right. I think I was able to really understand that I had to come back to, to myself and to the mindfulness practices. Right. That I knew. And honestly, the values driven approach that I was raised with and wanted to. To gift to others because I understood kind of this Deep meaning behind it. As a Native American person. Right. I'm Turtle Mountain Chippewa. And so my, Our, our laws, as we call them, are our seven grandfather teachings of the Anishinaabe, which are things like truth, love, humility, bravery. We, we really try to live by these things. And I thought, okay, there, there's these moments where in your, in your founder journey where it feels like failure almost every day. Right. How can we as founders actually sustain ourselves through that and drive forward with a purpose and a sense of your responsibility. You're doing something greater than yourself and essentially trained to have a fulfilled life. I think there's been so many points in my journ from the outside looks like, okay, that's. How could that not be a failure? Right? But you can actually use it for your greatest good. And I think that's, you know, everything I talk about in the book that I know. We'll get into it in a bit as well.

Yeah. I mean, I would be so angry if that happened. Like if that. If I went and quarantined for two weeks and got in there and pitched, which I'm sure was nerve. I mean, I can't even. I would be so nervous. I mean, I would be so angry. I would literally. Because of course I. Again, I mean, obviously I haven't done that, but I've had some things where I've been featured in, you know, the New York Times, for example, and I did the interview six months before the article came out and the whole time there. Is it going to be this week? Is it going to be this week? It never came, you know, and I can only imagine because the impact that that would have on the business, obviously the business did well and scale, but the impact that that would have had would have been.

I mean, crazy.

And to work with that shark that we actually did the deal with. Right. And stuff too. Because you don't do that if you don't get the. If you don't err.

So yeah, so you, so you did, you did raise Series A, and you raised a good amount of money. And, and can you talk about what that fundraising process, the more, let's call it kind of traditional, you know, venture fundraising process, because I, I eat fatty. I have raised a lot of money, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in my career. And I don't think I know that. My experience is probably very different from the experience that you face for a whole host of reasons. And I've had a couple of women on the show who have talked about how hard fundraising has Been and some of the stuff that they, some of the stuff they told me, some of the stuff they told me on the show and sometimes they told me after the show. But some of the stuff that they've experienced is honestly crazy. Like I can't imagine what. So can you talk about maybe what that experience was like was that how did you get in front of these VCs was did you get the first offer, the first person you pitched? How many no's did you get? Can you share a little bit about that experience?

Yeah, absolutely. And it did start with that 50k grant for my first company. So even though prior to that I had built with the founder of Calm, the meditation app, his previous company Mind Candy in London to wild success. We were the darlings of Silicon Roundabout in London at the time where we had built Moshi Monsters. I grew it with him to over 80 million registered users online. We then were the number one toy brand in all of UK for six years on. And it was like so incredible, beating even Lego and Star Wars. I was a toy inventor right after university and so that's kind of how I was able to fly out there and convince him that we need to do this and build a physical franchise around his like up and coming digital brand. But this has now been like two decades on that he's been a mentor and seeing him build and raise venture funding and as a sole founder at the time, I thought maybe I could do this too. And I had the idea for my dog to help him lose weight. Right. I just wanted to build it for him originally and then it wound up that I thought okay, I'm going to try to give this a go, right. And as he was leaving to Buildcom, I then left to build my company Wondermento, which our first product was Wonderwoof. We yeah, in so many ways in terms of being a first time founder CEO, I sell this. This is, this must be success, right? This is what it looks like, like you're getting all this sell through all this momentum. But where I didn't know what to do or where to start was with the funding. So I'd seen Michael Ray's funding as mentioned, but I never done that myself at all. I, when I was growing up, I. The entrepreneur that I saw was my uncle store on our reservation. He owns Azure's Auto Body and I thought okay, he started a course for his life, right. Built this business. It's still um. And you know, maybe I could do that too. So I did have these entrepreneurs in my family where I thought okay, that's super inspiring. But we didn't have a kind of friends and family around or even know that someone could pay you to build an idea, right. Or anything like that. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to try to apply for grants because I, because I didn't, you know, I was trying to network in the London scene at the time, but hardware was just so new and especially in the pet space, there was no one yet. And so it was very difficult to raise. And when I went to the US I applied for something called an Arch Grant in St Louis and I got it, the 50k grant. But on that, those judges were actually Maxine Clark, CEO and founder of Build a Bear, which as a former toy inventor I was like, oh my goodness, this is phenomenal. And then Jim McKelvey, who was the co founder of Square with Jack Dorsey. And so when they were my judges and decided to, you know, come in through the grant, they actually invested themselves and, and then, and then opened up their networks. Right. So I found that if you're a first time founder that, you know, trying to have that sort of snowball effect of the introduction from one investor to another is how I got there. And I sort of pieced it together, as I mentioned, where I was able to piece it together enough to get these massive POS and deliver on them and you know, update the hardware and the apps and everything else. But once we got to a certain scale, I then couldn't, I couldn't get there, as mentioned, without the venture capital. So even though we technically exited that company, right. And I was able to remain on the board of another pet company that the data went with, the product itself does not exist today. And I think when I was then deciding, okay, what's next, I was pregnant at the time with my first as mentioned, and I thought, what's the greatest gift I could give my, my son outside of my love? It's probably a love of vegetables from the very first bites, considering how I was raised on kind of like a sugar roller coaster of sorts. And I found that that really resonated with people. I mean there's, when it comes to investors, you do want to be able to, to connect with them on a level right. Where they feel like they're providing a lot of value too. But I think, you know, even if we don't have children, everyone's been a child. Same with dogs. Even if you don't have one, you, you understand what that feeling is, right. And that connection. And so those were things that really served Me in the journey, right to that human connection with, with investors. And the way I did it on my second company, Antenna Organics, was to become an eir, an entrepreneur in residence. So I definitely went about it a different way where I interviewed many firms throughout New York and then decided to move forward with Human Ventures. I think you're also, yeah. Friends with there, David, in New York. And I, you know, from there was able to have that sort of almost year long process of really discovering and meeting that deep need within the 100 founding families. Right. Because I had that kind of launch pad for myself having founded something prior, right. Like being able to come in and say, okay, I'm going to do this again, but from a different perspective with the, you know, with the VC dollars. And then my, my first outside funding that I was able to bring in was.

Will from Elizabeth Street Ventures. And he's actually still, he's on my advisory board for my fund to this day. And it was on my board and everything. He, it was a game changer, right? Because in consumer he's made some of the best bets, had the biggest exit. So I think when you are able to align yourself with people who really like, deeply understand and have seen success within your industry from the get. From the like from the very jump, then that can make all the difference for validating it for other venture capitalists down the line. Right. So again, it was kind of this snowball effect that of course once we had done the, you know, in the first 24 months, 13 million in revenue, it was much easier because the metrics spoke for themselves, right. At the series a level that I was able to raise eventually in combined venture dollars, over 20 million. And I think, you know, before I even left the company, I did another round just prior because you know, that kind of brings us up to the point where I realized, wait a minute, in my legacy work, in this work that I do in life, for how I'm going to be able to give back to my community and really and really use these skills that I've learned, right. For the good of Indian country in many ways. And you know, and with my Native American relatives and community, I wanted to start a nonprofit. And so I thought maybe I could remain on the board of Tiny and then be able to still do this thing where I can feel like I'm making a huge impact. Right. Because I think as a founder and we kind of touched on this, David. I know we've chatted about it previously as well. You, you feel like you identify yourself with your company and then I think once you, once you sort of built so many companies, you realize or even once you actually have babies for yourself, you're like, well, that wasn't really my baby, right? Like that wasn't that really. And, and when you can start to view your companies as, as a work of art, right? Like it's a, it's a canvas that you've painted, but it's not you. It's a, it's an expression, it's a symbol, right? It's something out there that's meant to be helpful or someone can learn from and project on or even feel like, you know, it's part of them as well. As soon as you can, can do that. And I'm a very visual person. So for me, it like, was very helpful to. When my executive coach kind of took me through this years ago, right, to make me really understand like, I am not Tiny Organics. I am not Wonderwolf. I am not. It's. And then that's when I had this kind of aha moment of okay, I'm going to figure out how to give back, how to build for community, how to create the greatest ripple in this one precious life. And. And I did that through founding a nonprofit called Natives Rising, where we're now the largest community of native founders and technologists with our members representing over 100 tribes. My co founder is Palmo, so her homeland, they're literally SF in, in Silicon Valley, where I am now. She built at Facebook at the time as one of the first product designers there to build the indigenous community. And then it. And then went over to the top other tech firms to do so and replicate that model. I then joined forces with her because she was a bit of a legend, right? We met an MIT Indigenous Women in STEM events. I joined forces with her to then launch this together after we did pow wow together one year. And it was such an awakening because through this work I actually became an NLP practitioner, Neuro linguistics programming, which literally helps you rewire your brain through science, right. And through these processes and practices to, to get out of the negative loop or the fight or flight or what. We talked about kind of putting out the fires as a founder and into the positive mode and the reframe right around your life, but ultimately showing yourself compassion. And I think because Danielle and I, my co founder, had healed ourselves in this work, we were then able to help and heal others as well through that. So we hold healing retreats and it's just been such a labor of love and, and I'm now on the board of that, of that nonprofit because I've been investing for the past six to seven years now out of two different funds into women and underrepresented founders. One is X Factor Ventures where we backed over a hundred female led seed rounds in the nation. And that's been, yeah, incredible. We're on our third fund, 23 of us partners for all series and beyond founders ourselves. And then when I moved from New York to Chicago, I joined a firm called Long Jump that has written the most pre seed checks to underrepresented Chicago founders. So We've done almost 50 deals now and I was able to build a track record to then launch my venture capital firm, which I know we're going to get into here in a moment as well.

One of the things that you said there that I want to.

Focus on it, I, I never actually heard someone describe building. I've always said the company is kind of like your child. You know, that's, that's what I feel. And it is so much of who you are. And I actually, I don't even think.

My strong opinion is, I'm not sure that founders can go from zero to something without the company being everything in their life. You know, and, and in your example, right, when you're having your first child and you're starting tiny organics and you're literally going to the park and meeting the families and going to their houses and it's, it's, I'm sure it was everything in your, in your life at that moment, you know, leaving your child to go to Shark Tank and, and, and like it's everything to you and it's your whole person. But no one's ever described it to me actually as something, that canvas that you're painting on that you're, that's a, that's an interesting way of, of thinking about it and it's an expression, you know, of. I don't, I, I still don't know how you could separate in the early days. I don't know how you can separate, but as you start to transition out, I've talked to, I don't know, 30 founders on here that are former CEOs and have now left their companies or sold their companies or whatever. And so many of them talk about how hard it is to make that transition, but this is actually an interesting way of, of looking at it through, through kind of a different light. So I want to, I want to. We have a lot to cover. We don't have so much time. I, the one thing I want to talk about here for a second. Is, is. Can you talk a little bit about Built on Purpose and, and talk a little bit about the book and why you have so much going on between all the various companies and the investing and, and, and I, I have written a book not mine was about how to manage SaaS applications. You know, so that, but it, but it was, you know, a couple hundred pages and it was, it was, I wrote two different books and anyway, it's a lot of work to do that. And I'm curious what drove you to write the book and what is the book about? I think most of the stuff we've been talking about is probably in there, but can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yes, definitely. And you're absolutely right. It took over five years to write this book. So the first time I had the idea for it, I was sitting in a London cafe with Michael with the founder of Comics Boss and I said to him, what you've done for meditation by making it less woo and more accessible to people, I want to do for manifestation. Because I believe that we all have a creator spirit in us that's just waiting and willing to be unleashed. And that actually founders are the ultimate manifestors, right? We create something out of nothing. Like our deck is our vision board, right? And we believe it, we believe it to a fault, right? That this thing is already realized, like it's going to happen. That can be replicated. These things can be learned, right? And I, and I believe that anyone can tap into that. And so it was trying to bring this access to others who maybe haven't had that opportunity previously or even known where do I start? Like what is my purpose? And so you mentioned it earlier, but the subtitles discover your deep inner why and manifest the business of your dreams. So I really take the reader through discovering your deep inner why from a values driven approach. So I include the grandfather teachings from my tribe, but also 40 other value sets within the book where you go through these exercises to discover what are my top five and then truly embodying those feelings within yourself. And so through the neuro linguistics programming work that I've done, I weave these spiritual practices into the nuts and bolts of building a business. And I do it through my, my own journey. And then I interview 26 other founders. Some have IPO, some are double unicorns, but over half are women and a third are Native American. So I'm really excited to bring these perspectives to market. And the biggest learning in my journey that I wanted to give is the gift here is the, the idea that we can have a calm nervous system as founders, that we can come from a place of, of really peace and like fulfillment that is sustainable. That's sustainable success. Right. And ultimately everything ends. Right. Change is the only constant in life. So if you can, if you can find your home and your peace within yourself, no one can, can take that away from you. Right. So I.

Help founders understand this idea of the canvas, like we talked about, David, this idea that, you know, you're. It's something outside of you, and yet you can pour all of your love and energy and attention into this thing, and especially during a period of your life. Right. It's just like a. In your reference, it too, just like a child, eventually one day you have to just like set them free. Right.

I think that, you know, I talk about this in the book and there's four different sections and the last one really speaks to this is how do you live sustainably in a way that really honors who you are. Right. And that the most important relationship you'll ever have with the founder is actually not with your co founder, it's with yourself. Right. And if you can dig into that and the knowingness of where you stand on your, on the values, you know, spectrum and how you're incorporating those into your decisions and then using these tools that I teach throughout the book to kind of get you there and bring you back home to that, that place, I think that's where we can really see people thriving from this space of abundance. Right. And, and, and coming out of that sort of fight or flight or scarcity mode into a place that truly serves and honors who they are.

I know this is going to be a hard question to answer, but of those interviews that you did, because I can only imagine probably some very impressive people on that list. What, what was your favorite interview? What would, what was the conversation that maybe someone said something the most surprising, you know, that that really opened your mind to something because, because you probably had some pretty. You probably had some amazing people.

So I don't even have to think about this one, David. I told her when we had the interview as well, that Bobbi Racette, the founder of Virtual Gurus, who was the first native woman to raise a Series B actually around A funding. Right. So on the A as well. But she came from a community I was just in, actually up in Canada yesterday, where she was, you know, just like me, first in her family to, to go to college. Right. But she, she created something based on her, on her value set and that, and, and I don't, and I won't give too much away because it's all in the book there. But where you would never have have expected her to kind of build this thing, right, that she did it out of a deep need and alignment within herself. She, she had so many incredible insights from scaling a company to this size. But like, I'm just trying to think of a couple that I could pull out right now for you. But I would definitely say her interview was one that was like, so, so incredibly inspiring and just like against all odds, right. To, to get there. Of course. I absolutely loved interviewing my former boss, Michael. His, his, his, his story is weaved in through the whole book because, you know, he, when I'd first seen a YouTube video of him before I'd ever even been to London and you know, decided to fly out there, he was building something called Perplex City. And I thought, whatever this guy is selling, like he's the next Branson, like it's going to go to the moon, right? And it wasn't actually that one, that, that, that, that made it. He had to pivot that company into Mind Candy, into Mashi Monsters, into what we wound up building together after that. And in many ways you could say massive success. Right. But he believes that everything was building up to, to calm, to what he then wound up doing after. And so it was all driven by that deep inner why and those values the same way it was in Bobby's journey as well. And I think many, many surprising like twists and turns thrown in there too. But just, yeah, some incredible learnings and, and I do get really tactical in the book around the nuts and bolts of actually building a company as well, but doing it through this sort of purpose driven and spiritual lens.

And in terms of Velveteen, this now this venture fund that you started.

Another thing where, you know.

I think going from being an operator to being an investor.

It'S pretty big, pretty big change in a lot of ways. And.

Inspired you. I know you mentioned X Factor. You mentioned the, the other fund that you're working with in Chicago. Like what, what inspired you to start your own fund.

Yeah, it really got to a place I think like many founders feel where it was like, if it's not me who, like I, I have to do this work, right? Like I, I, my, my soul longs to do this. Like this is something where.

I partnered with one of the only other native women to be an asset allocator throughout her whole career. Actually. She grew up in rural Alaska. Her name's Carla Brolier, where she saw the permafrost melting firsthand. She then built seven climate funds, most recently for Yvonne Chouinard of Patagonia, who had seen her speak at New York Climate Week and said, carla, I'm thinking of giving all my revenue from Patagonia, the clothing company, to the earth. Can you help me figure out what that looks like, how we do that? Together she built the Patagonia Purpose Trust and then spun out the Home Planet Fund, which deploys all the revenue to indigenous communities worldwide. I had started a group with her many years ago with Valerie Redhorse called Native Women Asset Managers. And I'll never forget on a retreat one year, we were driving up the California coast and she was at Patagonia. At the time, I was still investing and working at my nonprofit. And we said this idea that I had to build a venture fund based on my background in the children's space. You know, what if her and I joined forces in this work and made an even greater impact together, bringing these new perspectives to the market that really haven't been at the table and investing in people that experience the problem firsthand, right, that are solving for those problems and building the solutions. And the rest is kind of history where it was like fireworks, we were able to join forces in this way. We now invest in mainly healthcare and climate and also as it pertains to children, right within the consumer and community verticals and mainly pediatric space as well. We are an ROI driven like proper venture fund, so we're not an impact fund. However, the way that Carla and I weave impact into the foundation of the firm is that a portion of our carry goes directly back to tribes. And so we, we are planning to make a massive impact for our communities and doing this in a way where it weaves in our values at the very core. We'd never seen this done before. We got creative around how we were building the fir, and we plan on making sure that we're creating generational wealth for the next seven generations for, for our communities.

So, you know, let's talk a little bit about your, your background. You've mentioned it now a number of times and, and the story. But where are you from originally?

Yeah, so I'm from a little village of less than a thousand people in very rural Illinois where I would make the 17 hour drive every year, multiple times to go visit my reservation in North Dakota on the Canadian border. I'm Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and my family is still there. We, you know, I, I grew up between these two worlds. Of, yeah, very sheltered, essentially, like this, this country girl at heart. The first city I ever visited was Chicago at the age of 17, where I really like spent time there and then wound up going to university there as, as I mentioned, you know, studying industrial design and becoming a toy inventor. Originally. I actually thought because I grew up in the garage tinkering and building motorcycles with my dad, who's a motocross racer, that I would build motorcycles for Harley Davidson. That was like kind of the dream and deal at the time. And I, I was like. And it's so interesting, David, because the dreams, you know, when you, when you go out there and start to live it, it's like they just get bigger and bigger. But that's like the beauty of when you can, when you can live in the, the dream realized. You, you realize that it's beyond your wildest dreams actually what, what, what you're living in. Because I could never have fathomed where I am today, right? But when I, even when I became a toy inventor, I was like, it doesn't get better than this. Like, I thought that during every point in my journey, right, like, that I'm like, this is literally mean I get to like, play for a living, right? And like, never have to grow up. And I was able to invent toys from Mattel, for Hasbro, from Spin Master. And I learned what it meant to like, fail quickly and approach each new idea with that same enthusiasm like so many startup learnings from the earliest days there in the toy invention world. And then that's what gave me the confidence as a toy inventor to then approach Michael, who I had never even, you know, nobody in my family had been abroad before. And I flew out there not knowing anyone and walked into our old, old offices in Battersea and said, I'm here to meet with Michael. I have my massive portfolio in hand with these films for mock ups that I'd made in my $400 a month garden apartment in Chicago at the time, right? So I'd flown out with this, with this thing and said to him, you know, I want to meet with Michael. I mean, it was, when I finally got to meet with him, it was like the fifth time. And when I walked in, you know, I was able to chat with him for over two hours. He hired me on the spot. The rest is history, like we've talked about here, right? It really catapulted everything for me in terms of y international experience, but really the startup experience, it gave me the wings to believe that I could, you know, also become A founder. And now it's going on two decades of friendship and mentorship after he had went on to build comm as well. So I think, you know, for me, it was every, Every point in my journey. I've had these incredible mentors, and I'm really feel just I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Right. That got me here. And so I think one of the very first things I do or I coach my founders and that I invest in is, is to create a stacked advisory board from day one. Yeah. And that's something I did even with my, My. My firm, my Velveteen Ventures, Mike. I was able to. Even before we brought on all our LPs and the institutional funding, I brought around just this incredible group of advisors and really earliest believers as well. Right. But that fit within all the verticals that we're investing in. And I think for a founder, that means, like, looking at, okay, marketing, product, social impact. Right. Making sure that you have. Have that sort of wish list of advisors for each of these categories stacked within your world. And that can happen even pre revenue. That can happen, you know, pre funding, that you get these believers around you to do the thing. So let that be like an initial step. Once you have your idea, you have the passion, you create. You've created the mvp and you're trying to, you know, kind of monitor and get some data out there. It's like, get. Get other believers excited that are on your wish list and dream super big. Right. Because that's what got me here. It's all those folks that, that believed in me right along the journey.

Me. What do you. What does your family think about what you've been able to achieve?

Yeah, I think I dedicate the book to my family. I think that, you know, I. I write in the dedication for my ancestors to our wildest dreams. Right. So I, I do believe. I do believe that it is, you know, an answer to their prayers. Right. That I, that, that what I'm doing today, that it's a. It's a responsibility and that I carry with me. Right. That it's something so much bigger than myself. And that's. Yeah. That I, for me, they know that everything I've built has been out of love. Right. And this love that I have for. For family. And so in that way, it makes sense. But it's. Yeah, it's. It's every day, it's just like, better than I could have imagined.

I mean, it's. It's amazing from one generation. You know, we talked about this when we first Met in. I. I recently had. Took my family to Greece and saw where my father was born, grew up, you know, and kind of the, the amazing thing of what one generation, how much can change in that, in that period. And I mean, from what you've told me about your family, even more, you know, there's. What you've been able to do is. Is really, it's. It is truly amazing.

Thank you so much, David. Yeah. And I was so inspired to hear your story as well. And those humble beginnings, it really resonated with me because I am literally the first generation to not go to residential school, which I think most Americans don't even have a concept of what that entailed. Right. And it. It meant being completely, completely stripped of every tradition that you held. Even your hair was cut. Right. You couldn't be native. And so I think, think the fact that, you know, I'm the first generation, I can feel like we are claiming back our traditions. We are native and we are still here. Right. The idea that we were going to be annihilated or that there would be, you know, no more Native Americans left, it's like that is just not true. Right. And we are still here. We're going to empower. And Natives Rising really embodies that. That spirit of, of. Yeah. The. The kind of courage that I think it takes to say.

We will not kind of fall into the background anymore. We are actually going to stand up for our values and empower one another and try to be the example. And I think that, yeah, in so many ways.

It'S just been amazing to get to experience the journey of seeing natives thriving in this way in my community. And.

I think, yeah, it's been probably the greatest. One of the greatest joys of my life. Definitely.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you've mentioned it now a couple different times with different examples, but I've heard this in countless interviews where founders can point to a person that they saw do it, that made them believe they could do it. And it sounds like you've had a couple, you know, from your uncles.

Auto shop too, to, to your. To. To Michael and to calm. And you know, it's. And it's, it's. And I think for. I. I'm gonna assume that there's a whole slew and generation of people who are going to see this and see your experience and read your book and all that. That will feel that same way. And it's. It is kind of amazing because that one person. You've said it again. I've had literally countless people say this to me, that one person was that catalyzing moment where they said, oh, if they can do it, then I can do it. If I, you know, by. By watching them or by being with them, by working with them, like so. It's amazing. Last. Last question for you. Knowing everything you know today and all the experiences that you've had in your career, what is the one piece, only one piece of advice that you would go back and give yourself at the very beginning of your career?

I believe it's what I touched on earlier, David, where I had always thought that because relationships are everything, right? When it comes to founding a company, when it comes to building a company or even selling your product, I think the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. And when you can truly understand that and spend the quiet time necessary in the same way you would showing, you know, love or compassion to your founding team, right? Showing that to yourself, that will take you so far, because then you have abundance that overflows for others. And I think it's something that. In such a noisy world where we're told, okay, gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta be, you know, and we are doers, naturally, as founders, right? We want to build the thing. But I think that when you can just sit quietly with yourself, to be able to truly understand what is it that I want, what is it? What is my purpose? That will. That will always serve you, and you will live a fulfilled life.

Essie, thank you very much for doing this with me. I really enjoyed this conversation. It's been. I can't wait to read the book. I haven't had a chance yet, but I will read it right there. It's a beautiful cover. I'm gonna. I'm gonna read that book, and I'm excited for it.

Thank you so much, David.

Awesome. Well, for those of you listening, I hope you enjoyed. If you did. Please share this out with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.