Closing The Gap Between Founders And Investors
As featured in Forbes: A look at what it takes to lose the game, rebuild the rules, and invest like a founder.
This post is inspired by my feature in Forbes, where we unpacked my journey from building brands to backing the people behind them.
You can read the full article here:
Forbes: Closing The Gap Between Founders And Investors
When I look back on the past decade, I see a journey that started with a vision and ended with transformation. As the world shifted, so did my own purpose.
Beautycon was never just a business to me, it was a movement. A space for creators, misfits, and Gen Z disruptors to shape the culture around beauty, identity, and power. Letting it go during the pandemic “was one of the most difficult times of my life. It gutted me. I had to let go of a vision I had been building for a long time. It felt impossible to accept. But the world was changing, fast. I had to move on and realize you can’t reach your full potential until you lean into those tough times.”
That moment changed everything. And it made something painfully clear: founders don’t just need capital: they need context, community, and people who’ve lived through the chaos themselves.
What came next wasn’t part of the plan. It was a response to urgency.
When the pandemic hit, the beauty industry flatlined, factories closed, founders froze, and uncertainty took over. I started a weekly Zoom call just to figure out what the hell we were all supposed to do. What began as survival mode became Beauty United, a nonprofit built on collective power and community. We brought together founders, execs, and operators; not just to vent, but to solve. And what I saw over and over was this: founders needed more than advice or capital. They needed someone who had been in the trenches. That’s what made the next chapter obvious.
After Beautycon and Beauty United, I started seeing the entire game differently. I didn’t just want to build companies, I wanted to back the people building them. I wanted to bring operational insight, pattern recognition, and real founder empathy into venture capital.
I joined Intuition Capital, then co-founded Kinship Ventures with Gwyneth Paltrow, a fund backing early-stage companies shaping how we live, work, and care. But I don’t lead like a traditional VC. I lead like someone who’s been in the fire: cap table headaches, team turnover, burn rate panic, reinvention fatigue. I’ve been there. And I’ve stayed.
Being a founder while the culture shifts from traditional capitalism to stakeholder capitalism is a very real kind of pressure. As I told Forbes:
“I’ve had to really focus on rethinking the benchmarks of what’s important to me, to society, and how I can make the most impact for founders who want to change entire industries.”
That’s what I bring into every deal, every room, every founder conversation. I’m here to close the gap, between capital and culture, investors and operators, systems and soul.
Let’s be honest: investors don’t always get founders.
But I do.
And I’m betting everything on the builders who are here to make it mean something.
If that resonates, here’s the full story:
If you’re a founder navigating the chaos, I’d love to hear how you’re thinking through it. Drop a comment, share this with someone in the trenches, or subscribe to stay in the loop.