What happens when overlooked innovators are empowered to solve problems for communities often left out of the conversation—and, even more, when those innovators have lived experience of the challenges they’re addressing? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia sits down with Brittany and Rich Palmer, a dynamic entrepreneurial couple, to explore how true innovation and impact are ignited at the intersection of necessity, lived experience, and meaningful capital. Brittany and Rich Palmer are not only successful entrepreneurs and angel investors but are also the visionary founders behind Adaptation Ventures, an investment firm and community dedicated to empowering startups focused on disability, neurodivergence, accessibility, and aging. Brittany, herself born with a limb difference, brings firsthand perspective to the conversation, while Rich’s journey includes a personal medical challenge that became a catalyst for his mission-driven career shift. Together, they’ve built a unique fund and ecosystem that actively includes investors and decision-makers with disabilities—something almost unheard of in the traditional VC world. This episode covers why only 1% of venture capital currently flows to accessibility-related innovation, details Brittany and Rich’s journey to plugging that gap, and shares stories of the groundbreaking companies they’re backing—from hardware innovations with million-dollar pipelines to products with the “curb cut effect” that benefit everyone. Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, or passionate catalyst for change, this conversation reveals how capital, community, and lived expertise can combine to drive scalable, high-impact solutions. If you care about innovation that truly changes lives, this episode is a must-listen—showcasing why Adaptation Ventures’ ecosystem model may reshape the future of inclusive investing.
What happens when overlooked innovators are empowered to solve problems for communities often left out of the conversation—and, even more, when those innovators have lived experience of the challenges they’re addressing? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia sits down with Brittany and Rich Palmer, a dynamic entrepreneurial couple, to explore how true innovation and impact are ignited at the intersection of necessity, lived experience, and meaningful capital.
Brittany and Rich Palmer are not only successful entrepreneurs and angel investors but are also the visionary founders behind Adaptation Ventures, an investment firm and community dedicated to empowering startups focused on disability, neurodivergence, accessibility, and aging. Brittany, herself born with a limb difference, brings firsthand perspective to the conversation, while Rich’s journey includes a personal medical challenge that became a catalyst for his mission-driven career shift. Together, they’ve built a unique fund and ecosystem that actively includes investors and decision-makers with disabilities—something almost unheard of in the traditional VC world.
This episode covers why only 1% of venture capital currently flows to accessibility-related innovation, details Brittany and Rich’s journey to plugging that gap, and shares stories of the groundbreaking companies they’re backing—from hardware innovations with million-dollar pipelines to products with the “curb cut effect” that benefit everyone. Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, or passionate catalyst for change, this conversation reveals how capital, community, and lived expertise can combine to drive scalable, high-impact solutions. If you care about innovation that truly changes lives, this episode is a must-listen—showcasing why Adaptation Ventures’ ecosystem model may reshape the future of inclusive investing.
To get the latest from Rich and Brittany Palmer, you can follow them below!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/therichpalmer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanytofinchio/
Rich's first appearance on the Angel Next Door
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MARCIA
0:02
Brittany and Rich Palmer, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast. And Rich, I guess it's. Welcome back.
RICH PALMER
0:08
Thank you for having us, Marcia. I really appreciate it.
MARCIA
0:11
Well, I am excited for you coming back and we will of course link your first episode to the show notes so that everybody can hear what you were talking about before and your journey. Brain aneurysm, exited successfully, entrepreneur became an angel investor, did all these really amazing things, and now you are doing something even more crazy, even more amazing, even more incredible, and you're getting to do it with your wife, which is totally cool. So tell us all about Adaptation Ventures.
RICH PALMER
0:41
Yeah. So thank you again for this opportunity, Marcia, number first thing, congratulations on the new book launch. I know that's number two. I was a very happy beta reader and just loved how everything came together. You're at the right moment to release something like this, so thank you and congratulations. Yeah, I'll kick some stuff off, but Britt and I are gonna go back and forth. I call her my better 7/8, not my better half. Definitely wanna share.
RICH PALMER
1:06
Share the air here. But yeah, we're really, we're focused on. I'll cut to the punchline. It's Adaptation Ventures, which is what we launched. Is pioneering combination of a pre seed fund and investor community that's all focused on disability, neurodivergence, accessibility and aging, which, if you may know, we definitely know. Massive populations of people, like staggering silly numbers of folks with some really cool stuff. We'll probably get into of, like, interesting dynamics of how loyal these people are when they get products and services that work for them. How you're both.
RICH PALMER
1:47
You have acute needs. If you acquire a disability, you have lifelong needs as you have accessibility needs. But only 1% of venture capital goes to it right now. And most of that is later stage. So you can't be later stage without having the early stage folks. And so that's this like, gap that we're filling is with so many cool things that we'll get to, but that's the gap we're really filling.
MARCIA
2:10
Nice. And so how. What made you come up with this? Like, what made you say, hey, we need this?
RICH PALMER
2:17
Yeah, so maybe I'll keep holding the mic because that'll be nice. When we last did the. The first episode together, I was on the ACA bored or I was just joining. I may have just done the testimony before Congress, which was fantastic. I. I'm happy I did it. I don't recommend anyone does it. That's so intense.
MARCIA
2:38
Oh, my gosh, that'd be so nerve.
RICH PALMER
2:40
Wracking, but nerve wracking and everybody's God. But a lot of what we talked about was the role of early stage capital fueling overlooked populations. Right. And that's both from startups are often overlooked. For our space in particular, you can go to, you pick something that's mission driven, female focused founders, black or Latinx climate femtech. Like they all have this sort of like ecosystem that had to be created at some point, but it's much more developed than it was at the first early days. And now founders have a place to go when they first start companies in there, in our space, there's nothing. And it's interesting because disability and accessibility have this like really interesting through line where if you think about climate change, people with disabilities are way more impacted by evacuation needs, disposable single use products as they're thinking about like catheters and other stuff like that, homelessness, return to work.
RICH PALMER
3:42
There's always this through line where disability isn't the largest population, but there's never a space for those companies to like congregate. And as we were sold, the company have been angel investors for I think oh gosh, 7, 20, 19. So going on seven years now. Right Brett, we kept coming into the space where, you know, I'll let Brett introduce himself in a second. We should probably do that too. But the we're meeting incredible companies in the disability of tech world making angel checks in and consistently we're hearing, hey, it sounds good, can you lead my round? I have 3, 4, $500,000 soft circled and with my 10 20k check sometimes smaller it I was a very happy participant, we were very happy investors, but we couldn't lead, there's no credible leading there. And we kept hearing this like over and over again to the point where we were like, I think we should do something about this because we often call ourselves a very small but mighty domino that kind of like high conviction unlocks that, that capital. But maybe it's important to hear why we care about this space too, which maybe Britt, I'll pass that over to you.
BRITTANY PALMER
4:58
Yeah, yeah. I was born with a bilateral below elbow limb difference. So I'm missing my arms from a little bit below the elbow down on both sides. And I grew up adapting to everything in my world and back then too it was you didn't have the Internet of everything to look for resources and adaptive devices and all of that. And I just, we made what we needed to and I adapted how however I needed to. Right. To be independent. And I actually Went into law to do environmental health and safety law.
BRITTANY PALMER
5:39
And I was doing that and doing consulting for a little while. And then I started to get more interested in sort of the disability tech space, which wasn't really even a term five, six years ago. And after Rich sold his company, I started a company in the disability tech space and the travel space. So it was tried to bring equal access to travel for people with limited mobility and other conditions that prevented or inhibited travel. And so that's when I really got introduced to a world wider than mine in that space as well as like the senior space and how corporate groups look at this and how like education, like schools and things like that look at this space. And I was, I would be talking to venture capital groups and telling them how huge this space is just in limited mobility, not even in the general, just disabilities in general. And more than once I got, yeah, this seems pretty niche. I don't believe that.
BRITTANY PALMER
6:50
Okay, I have all the paper. Paper is all to back it up. But people just really didn't look at this space the same way that they're starting to now. And that was also a discussion that Rich and I had. How do we amplify this space and make investors or show investors like that this is a space not just to not an impact, but can also generate a lot of capital and can generate venture level returns. And so back in 2020, there were no VCs in this space and now there's five or six. But as Rich was saying, a lot of them are focused on the later stages or are like very specific to just neurodivergence or just future work. And so we decided to be that gap, that bridge and really look at early stage companies, but across all sectors and industries, including diagnostics and prevention.
BRITTANY PALMER
7:59
It was a very long kind of travel job wise for both of us to get to this point. And I now am on the advisory board for Perkins School for the Blinds Innovation center and doing some other work as well with other organizations to try to again amplify this work. So it's a work in progress for sure and I think it will be for a long time. But we're excited that we really get to work in this space and help lift it up.
MARCIA
8:30
Yeah. Wow. Just the idea of, first of all, amazing what you're doing to help founders who are working on solutions for people with disabilities, founders who have disabilities and are working on solutions. This is so needed because a lot of times we'll talk about how women get very low percentage of venture capital funding, people of Color also very low number. I think people with disabilities not even on the radar. So how do we, like, how do we change that? And I just love that and the fact that you're an intersection kind of between angels and vc. So talk a little bit more about that.
RICH PALMER
9:10
Yeah. So what's really cool is the being on the board of the aca. I was running Launchpad Venture Group, which is a bit big. 185 member Angel Group up in New England, co managing director of that. And it was this beautiful journey between. They were my first check in. We were all the way up through Seed. The former leader of Launchpad was on my board, helped me sell the company and literally the first day the check hit the bank for the acquisition, I signed up.
RICH PALMER
9:40
It was like even off cycle, I just harassed them to be like, I need to join you guys. Cuz like you changed my life, the life of all of my employees and the people that we helped. And we were doing like you alluded. I was a Wall street kind of engineer who had a brain aneurysm rupture and wanted to take the. I had to learn how to read and write and walk and talk all over again. I wanted to take that, the dark arts of Wall street and the dark side of all of that and apply it to something that's like good and something that just creates happiness and warmth and light in the world. And so we did AI for social good was the, the approach there. But what I really learned was like I ended up raising from 43 individual angel investors through this.
RICH PALMER
10:27
Wow. Oh, it gets better, Britt. I think we ca. We tallied you had 80 investors and funds.
BRITTANY PALMER
10:33
Most of them were angels.
RICH PALMER
10:34
Most of them were angels. So we got to see like two things. One, just how much happens when like a traditional vc. We ran the numbers recently. I think it was like they have 17 LPs and so you get one or two brains focused on you and 17 people have written checks. And usually the VC does not want the LP involved too much. It's a very arm's length thing. So you get the cash but you lose the benefit of the kind of team sport aspect of startups.
RICH PALMER
11:06
Right. And on the flip side, seeing angel groups where you see the team sport but a lot of like individual decision making and just like trying to get to a consensus across so many people. When it works, it's amazing. And oftentimes it's slightly frustrating for a founder to come in and not know how much they're going to get or who makes the ultimate decision. And so we saw both of these things like post exit, Ran, Launchpad, co led, Launchpad, whatever. You really, it's really specific. I always say ran, but that's not true. It was a lot of amazing people I work with.
RICH PALMER
11:39
We are LPs and funds and we joined other angel groups and so got to see this like wide array of like operating models. And so adaptation is effectively a, the best of all of it in our humble, not so humble opinion.
MARCIA
11:54
Right.
RICH PALMER
11:55
And so yeah, we are structured as a fund. We're a 506C qualifying venture capital funds. So we get to talk about things,
MARCIA
12:03
remind our listeners what a 506C is. We've talked about it on the show. 506B. 506C gets crazy. And of course I am an SEC advisor and my opinions are my own.
RICH PALMER
12:13
Opinions are your own. Your expertise is more than ours. And what I am most excited about is I'm allowed to publicly talk about the fund. We are allowed to publicly discuss the raise the fund, like anything. And part of it is because a lot of the conversations around disability, they haven't been happening like Brittany was mentioning or there's stigma associated with it. And we often find ourselves talking about what we do in rooms that don't know anything about disability and don't have any kind of exposure to people with disabilities. We'll get to a really interesting moment in that. But what's cool about the model is that yeah, we're a fund, but we set our minimums, like angel level minimums, which is quite cool.
RICH PALMER
12:59
So we're 36k over a 3 year period. So 12k per year over 3 years. A lot of funds they call capital right before investment happens and you're getting whiplash across so many things. We do it once a year, so it's like you predictably know when the capital is going to be called.
MARCIA
13:17
That's nice.
RICH PALMER
13:18
Our fund of funds, LPs and our family offices and so they write bigger checks, but everybody gets access to some really amazing things, which is you can come and see every pitch. We had one just this morning where we had a blend of all of our LPs. You don't have to. It's always. It's passive, it's active. You get to come and go as you please, but you get to see the pitches. You get to ask Q and A of the founders, you get to join diligence if you want, mentor the companies. It's Brittany and I still have to make the decision of the investment or else we'd be LPs and not GPs.
RICH PALMER
13:53
Right. But the opportunity to get involved is something that's incredible. We have a lot of. I'll hold the mic for another second but we have first time folks who are just like learning from experts. We have brittle probably share a little bit more about how we've structured the lp like who's in that group which is part of our superpower as well. But the merging between founders knowing like our minimum check size to them and when opportunities to co invest come, the ceiling is unbounded. But at least you know that going through the diligence process is going to be worth it for you because you know how much money you're going to potentially get on the end and what's
MARCIA
14:32
the range that you're.
RICH PALMER
14:34
We're going to be 150 to 250 with 20% or so in reserve. So most of it is pre seed. So we are that Part of what's interesting we were mentioning the strategy is working out in an incredible way where we often come in as the high conviction people with disabilities. LPs have disabilities, but maybe. Can I run with it or do you want to talk about this part? This is one of the things that makes me so excited to think it's incredible. We have high net worth individuals and family offices and angel investors and financial professionals on one side. But then I'm 99% sure we're the only fund that has people with disabilities as their LPs so accredited folks who blind, deaf or hard of hearing have spinal cord injuries, paralysis, memory disorders, neurodivergence or caretakers, teaming up with Paralympic athletes and disability authors and influencers, all coming at problems from different kind of lived experiences and perspectives. So that when we do make a decision, it is with extremely high conviction that we're on the right track.
RICH PALMER
15:50
So it's quite exciting to do that.
MARCIA
15:52
Nice. That seems like it's such a win for the entrepreneurs. So tell me a little bit more, Brittany, about some of the companies that you've seen so far. You said you had a pitch date even this morning, so yeah, all the goodies.
BRITTANY PALMER
16:07
Yeah. One of the reasons why we bring the companies in front of our LPs is because we want them to get to know these entrepreneurs and be a community for them. I think we talked about the qualified venture fund aspect before, but it allows us to have well over 100 LPs if we so choose, which really creates that community aspect. And we tell entrepreneurs now when you have a request, it doesn't just come to Rich and I It comes to us and all of our LPs and you're aggregating everyone's expertise and connections that help our portfolio companies. So when we first started the fund we were thinking maybe we'll see some hardware companies but will probably be mostly software companies. And we've actually seen half and half, maybe even a little bit more hardware than software companies. And it's been interesting especially with the like surge of AI development in the past six months and looking at do these companies have a moat that they can stand by? Is someone going to create this tomorrow and be your competitor? And hardware companies actually don't have that problem to the extent that software companies have it now. So that's just been generally interesting.
BRITTANY PALMER
17:38
But the companies in this space have had to be so scrappy to begin with because of the limited capital that flows to it that when you compare them like a pre seed stage company in this space to a pre seed stage company in other spaces ones in our space, we've just seen them much further ahead. So one of the companies today that pitched that's a hardware company, they have $2 million in the pipeline and have $800,000 in deposits and they're raising a precedent round of funding and they've got their manufacturing figured out and they've got, they're well on their way to their go to market strategy figured out. And it's just really incredible to see what these founders have done with limited capital. And I'm sure they all would have loved to have more of it for sure. But it just goes to show the dedication that some of these founders have. There's another company that precede round also hardware is selling to the VA and getting insurance coverages already.
RICH PALMER
18:54
Wow.
BRITTANY PALMER
18:56
And we just signed our first investment document this week actually for a company that integrates software and hardware for people who are blind and low vision and also in the neurodiversity space using haptics or facial cues. So thinking if you can't see someone in a non verbal communication as 80% of a conversation, then they're missing a crucial part of socializing and conversation. How do you give that back to them? And this company has done an incredible job so far developing it and garnering live buzz in the space about it. And we're super excited to be supporting them. And I already have an agreement with Meta and they're just, they're well on their way to doing amazing things with that. We also see founders who like more founders who are, who have disabilities and like there, there was a, a study Done. I believe in the UK that showed that founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to raise funding than their able bodied counterparts. Wow.
BRITTANY PALMER
20:19
Staggering. Staggering. That is raping. Yeah, yeah. And so we, like other spaces also deserve, they're definitely underrepresented and they deserve to have people that focus on and increasing that representation. But people with disabilities like you mentioned, like they're not even founders in that area, aren't really on people's radars yet. And I think some of the technologies, both software and hardware that are coming out are going to change that. What we love about this space is what a lot of these companies are developing, have a curb cut effect, which means their development of these products and services can't.
BRITTANY PALMER
21:10
Like they're solving for a particular person's problem, but in doing so it can benefit so many more people. And we've seen that in a couple of companies that we've looked at and it's just incredible to see this company that was developed for people with blind low vision originally has neurodivergent applications, has applications for businesses who do cross country business, has applications in potentially like robotics and law enforcement. And so when you see all these different opportunities come out of something that was designated for a specific group of people, it's one of the things that we get most excited about. And I think a lot of people don't know that electric toothbrushes were originally created for people with disabilities. And so we're audio books and the OXO kitchenware that lots of people have. Curb cuts, right? Like literally curb cuts in the sidewalks has benefits to a lot more people. When you create things with accessibility in
MARCIA
22:25
mind, I love that. Yeah. Curb cuts, of course, you gotta roll your suitcase up there, right? You're an able buyer.
RICH PALMER
22:33
Strollers, the upper person.
BRITTANY PALMER
22:36
Yeah.
RICH PALMER
22:37
And what's amazing, this is not a new phenomenon either. Typewriters came from someone trying to help their blind friend be able to type a letter sms like the actual texting was a precursor of that was with the disability community. Everything from speech to text to. It's incredible seeing this thing where you design for the kind of hardest user in mind and it's this intersection of like necessity that when it hits universal appeal, that's like life, literally life changing. It's when it's disability, it's life changing on the scale for that. And when it hits that universal appeal, it just explodes. So that's part of our thesis too is while you're with us, you might be a disability or neurodivergent or accessible tech company. But we're always looking at like the intersection later, once you hit that, like series a realm and we go into some of these incredible spaces.
RICH PALMER
23:33
It's quite exciting from a diligence perspective because you get to be extremely serious on the short term, but then think massively for the long term.
MARCIA
23:41
That's great. That is so exciting. And you know what? I always love an entrepreneur who will see a problem because they have the problem or they've experienced the problem in some way, and then they are just so adamant about making sure that they can find a solution to it, that the solution is actually really good. I'm sure you're seeing that like tenfold.
RICH PALMER
24:05
You mentioned we were talking about founders with disabilities. It's probably like a third of who we see as a founder or co founder with a disability. Who else has a better lived experience? Who else can tinker until they solve their own problem and then solve enough copies of that problem? And now you have a business or folks with a very strong lived experience through the lens of a caretaker or a sibling or a parent or any of that. We see that where they came into this space, whether you're that or like a researcher or anything, you don't come into this space because you're chasing a trend. You come into this space because you almost can't help solve the problem, which we absolutely love. Because, like, they're going to take it seriously. They're gonna think capital efficiently. They're going to like, just not stop until the problem is solved.
RICH PALMER
24:56
And we get pushback every once in a while from folks saying, oh, are you still doing good? You're. You keep talking about exits and you keep talking about venture capital. And we know the exit only happens when you reach scale and when scale is met. We have helped tons of people on the other side of this. So it's not disconnected concept. They're like one in the same. We can't get the exit without scale and we can't get the scale without attracting capital to help these founders go forward. So it's pretty, pretty.
RICH PALMER
25:28
It's pretty incredible to be able to unlock the this for, for an audience that we also represent.
MARCIA
25:34
Yeah. And so with the way that you have structured the fund, can you have roll in closes so that people who are interested since we are allowed to talk about market on a podcast. So tell us like all the things like how are you structuring that in order to get more capital to invest in these amazing founders?
BRITTANY PALMER
25:53
Yeah. So we, we held our first close earlier this year and we can hold rolling Closes through the. We're looking. The goal is to have the last close at the end of this year. We can do it a little bit later, but the goal is to end it at this year. Okay.
RICH PALMER
26:15
And for us to extend that. We're looking at probably 20 to 30 companies. It's the same as the power law and all this kind of stuff. Now we're not immune to any of that. So trying to get folks both like the diversification across the sector. What's really cool, we're was talking about like SEC hardware enabled or software enabled? Hardware and software. So we see all that across all sectors. Both ones that people have familiarity with.
RICH PALMER
26:41
So education, fintech, insurance, retail travel, socialization. But then also things like caregiving like we mentioned or prosthetics or especially like for neurodivergent innovation like executive function work and like workflow stuff and all of this rehabilitation. Right. You get to see this cross section of stuff and this whole other world that you probably wouldn't have access to before for the size of an angel check. It's incredible. Like the distribution along that way and what we really like about the space, which is quite cool. And I'll talk about it, right. I have friends who are in other sectors.
RICH PALMER
27:22
It's much more cutthroat in terms of like VCs stepping over each other if you do the deal. Like it's just, it's intense in our space. It is like collaborative. And so like even when we were angel investing now turning into the VC side of it, we were on cap tables where multiple VCs are all like working together. And usually we do it too. If we pass for any reason, we can say we help the founder talk to the other VC about who can come into the round because we want them to succeed. Right. And that just feels that trickles down to the types of people we meet and the types of LPs that are in there and all of our partners in a way that's just.
RICH PALMER
28:04
It's a nice way to make money and have impact.
MARCIA
28:09
Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
RICH PALMER
28:11
Yeah. Cool stuff.
MARCIA
28:13
Very cool stuff. So tell us, where can people find you? Entrepreneurs, potential investors, all the people.
RICH PALMER
28:22
So maybe Britt, I'll steal a bit. And then one thing and on two fronts, Adaptation vc, venture capital, VC is. You can see all sorts of stuff on there. We intentionally. You go to a lot of VC websites, maybe this is a shots fired kind of comment, but you go to a website and there's nothing or just like a picture and it doesn't scroll and it says info at, right? Yeah. We did two things that I think are really important for us to tell people about. One, every resource that helped Britt and I start and sell companies, we've actually put on that website too. So if you go into resources, you can see everything from pitching to how to put together fund models to white papers, to even invest other investors.
RICH PALMER
29:09
Which is just an incredible way of just saying, here's everything we wish somebody helped us do, because we can help you skip a whole bunch of research steps and all that on one side. And then founders have the opportunity to apply to a vc. It's very strange, but, like, we read every single application. Like, we never ghost folks as long as they put in a serious, serious pitch. But like, it's a way for us to give founders a true entry point rather than feel like they have to like work like crazy to get in touch with us or that they're being ghosted or anything.
BRITTANY PALMER
29:46
So we never received their email. Anything like that allows us to stay very organized. But we respond to everyone so that people are not left hanging wondering if we review things. Sometimes we take a little bit longer than we'd like to get back to people, but everyone gets a response for
RICH PALMER
30:10
those, as you can imagine too, like, the. The space has been missing something like this for so long and founders have had to go knock door to door. And while at 1 in 5 US households is accredited, going knocking door to door is just. It's a tough journey. Right. And so now we've put the beacon up and so our door. There's a line at the door right now for the founders, but like, we're working through all that and just doing everything. And then for anybody who's like, interested in investing, that's it's the same process.
RICH PALMER
30:37
Like they can reach out to us over like LinkedIn or anything with that. But we have on the website a interest form. So if. And we have folks that come in, they're interested in investing. That's how some of our LPs have come in. We have folks that come in and just want to learn more about the process. We are. This is what you get too.
RICH PALMER
30:56
It's like not a hard sell. You know, people are people, I think are refreshed when they talk to us because it's all out in the open. This is, this conversation is too.
BRITTANY PALMER
31:06
And we look at. In that investor interest forum, we ask for what are your areas of expertise and are you interested in sitting on boards or are you interested in doing diligence or being an advisor? Because we want to include if someone has a very specific expertise and they could be of help to a company that we're looking at, we want to make sure that they get connected.
MARCIA
31:29
Yeah.
BRITTANY PALMER
31:29
And yeah, so it's just, it's different but it's been working very well for us.
MARCIA
31:35
I love that. I love how you're getting LPs involved in diligence, that they're getting to see all the pitches so they're learning along the way or they're getting on boards. It's just. Yeah, I love the model. So happy you're doing it. It's very needed in the space and
RICH PALMER
31:50
I just realized we're missing one resource because we have a book list and I think unapologetic wealth has to go up there. And I mean that. And not us not brown nosing a little bit, but like the books and the way we approach is for the benefit of both the startups and the LPs and people thinking through how they're deploying capital, how the investment even happens. Like one of the things that we've. You want to talk about philanthropic capital?
MARCIA
32:15
Oh yes.
RICH PALMER
32:15
I wasn't even feeling like I find myself in that space. But like we having run Launchpad and gotten. Brit and I both had a significant number of angels. Some of them are. They've been investing for quite some time and so they're looking at their current direct investments and saying I don't know if I love the startup game but I'm not sure this is how I can stay involved is directly investing anymore. And so we have a whole bunch of folks who have set up like donor advised funds or have set aside philanthropic capital who we've talked about on the show before and had some folks related to it before who were mission driven or funds. So we have a charitable partner that we work with where you can effectively invest your philanthropic capital into venture. And that is unlocking some incredible things on two sides.
RICH PALMER
33:10
One, angels who either have that money that's just sitting collecting fees. Let's put it to work. Once it gets in the hands of these founders, we see them being like Brit and I like the second that exit happens, they're going to right back into the ecosystem. So it's this virtuous. That's the point of philanthropy, to create this virtual virtuous cycle for good. And this is just another way of doing it. And then the other side, which is really interesting, the impact investor side, sometimes they've got that earmarked philanthropic capital. They hadn't really thought about venture before like at all.
RICH PALMER
33:46
And this is one way of dipping toes in getting. We're very structured so like the flow and the diligence and everything is extremely structured. So you get to learn from the best of all those worlds. But it's. You can pull from your charitable pool so it feels familiar as well. It's cool.
MARCIA
34:04
I love that. I'm all about that.
RICH PALMER
34:06
Yeah.
BRITTANY PALMER
34:06
And the charitable partner that we work with, they're focused on this space actually. So they, their goal is to support disability and neurodivergent startups. And so it's like that flywheel of that DAF money, some of it goes back to them and then they can do more good with it and more companies. So it's a great. Yeah, I think we've developed a pretty good plan on the philanthropic side that people feel comfortable with.
MARCIA
34:38
Yeah, I was, I actually read an article this morning about DAFS and it said three. Yeah. $326 billion is sitting in DAFS. And it's. To your point, Rich. It's just making charging fees and doing whatever it's doing, but it's certainly not helping and doing some of the good it could do.
RICH PALMER
34:59
And it's one of those things of. I want to be super. We accept it, but it's not just about us. Right. Like other mission driven funds can be accept. Can accept it. Startups of all different kinds in and out of our space. And so yeah, we'd love our founders to have more capital but like in general that money needs to move.
RICH PALMER
35:18
It needs to get put to work. And so we are on a nice little. We're definitely sitting on, standing on the, the soapbox and what's cool and we, we've, we talked to LPs and we meet people here and there and we get a lot of intros but we recently, I won't call them out, but we love you. We pitched an angel group which was quite interesting. I don't know if you and I have not talked about this, but when's the last time you heard of a fund pitching an angel group?
MARCIA
35:43
It's a great idea.
RICH PALMER
35:45
Yeah. When it doesn't overlap with take away from their core focus, usually like a regional focus. And part of it was talking about the philanthropic capital because folks were curious about how to deploy it. We are just one way like a one mechanism of doing that. This one particular group, I think about half the members were excited to do diligence on us and about half of those people ended up becoming LPs, give or take. So it was one of those awesome and we're even teaming up now on diligence co investing. It's one of those kind of incredible experiments that I think across the US it may be something worth considering.
MARCIA
36:26
All right, so people can come be an LP by investing directly. They can use philanthropic capital through a DAF or they can use their self directed ira. Right, right. Okay. So we got lots of options. Definitely want to check out Adaptation vc. Well, thank you so much, Rich and Brittany, for being on the show and telling us all about this amazing, amazing. I won't even call it a fun, like an entire, like whole ecosystem that you're creating.
MARCIA
36:54
Right.
RICH PALMER
36:55
We've been like hybrid this, that. So, yeah, let's just say it's an ecosystem. And for us too, the fund is part one. We want to build a firm. We want to do this in an enduring way that helps as many companies and as possible and as many people to get involved and play the sport on the field as if you will get out of the stand. So that's our goal.
MARCIA
37:16
I love that. Thank you.
RICH PALMER
37:18
Thank you for having us.
BRITTANY PALMER
37:19
Thank you.