What does it really take to thrive as a first-time fund manager in today’s challenging investment landscape, especially when you’re building a venture fund from scratch while championing diversity and innovation? This episode delves into the real experiences behind the headlines, inviting listeners to consider the often unseen hurdles and triumphs that define entrepreneurial journeys. Our guest, Laurel Mintz, is the founder of Fabric VC—a new venture capital fund spun out of her extensive 17-year run as the leader of a successful marketing agency. With a background that includes corporate M&A law, entrepreneurship, and marketing, Laurel Mintz brings a unique and practical perspective to the venture capital world. Her approach blends deep sector knowledge with a commitment to supporting underrepresented founders and championing women’s health, fintech, and consumer tech sectors. In this update, listeners get an inside look at the nuts and bolts of raising and deploying Fabric VC’s first fund—just under $8 million, already largely deployed across 23 portfolio companies. Laurel Mintz shares candid insights on the emotional rollercoaster of fundraising, the critical importance of diversity, and the creative approaches to supporting women-led companies, such as accepting investments via donor-advised funds and retirement accounts. This episode is a must-listen for aspiring investors, founders, or anyone interested in how real change is being made within venture capital. It’s raw, motivating, and packed with unfiltered advice on how to show up, take risks, and put capital to work for the next generation.
What does it really take to thrive as a first-time fund manager in today’s challenging investment landscape, especially when you’re building a venture fund from scratch while championing diversity and innovation? This episode delves into the real experiences behind the headlines, inviting listeners to consider the often unseen hurdles and triumphs that define entrepreneurial journeys.
Our guest, Laurel Mintz, is the founder of Fabric VC—a new venture capital fund spun out of her extensive 17-year run as the leader of a successful marketing agency. With a background that includes corporate M&A law, entrepreneurship, and marketing, Laurel Mintz brings a unique and practical perspective to the venture capital world. Her approach blends deep sector knowledge with a commitment to supporting underrepresented founders and championing women’s health, fintech, and consumer tech sectors.
In this update, listeners get an inside look at the nuts and bolts of raising and deploying Fabric VC’s first fund—just under $8 million, already largely deployed across 23 portfolio companies. Laurel Mintz shares candid insights on the emotional rollercoaster of fundraising, the critical importance of diversity, and the creative approaches to supporting women-led companies, such as accepting investments via donor-advised funds and retirement accounts. This episode is a must-listen for aspiring investors, founders, or anyone interested in how real change is being made within venture capital. It’s raw, motivating, and packed with unfiltered advice on how to show up, take risks, and put capital to work for the next generation.
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Laurel's first appearance on The Angel Next Door
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LAUREL MINTZ
0:00
Right.
MARCIA DAWOOD
0:02
Laurel, welcome back to the Angel Next Door podcast. I'm so excited for you to give us an update on everything that's happening in Fabric bc.
LAUREL MINTZ
0:11
Thank you so much for having me back. It's exciting to be here. No.
MARCIA DAWOOD
0:14
And you just closed Fund one. So exciting. So now you have some capital to deploy, and we want to hear all about different types of companies you're looking at. And also I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about fundraising process. But to start us off, give us a little bit about Fabric VC and who you are. Just remind everybody we're going to link in the show notes to the first episode. Sure.
LAUREL MINTZ
0:33
So Fabric VC is my first vehicle. It's a spin off of my marketing agency, Elevate. That's been around 17 years. 400 plus brands later. Before that, I was a corporate M and A attorney. Took over family business. Super young, sold that. But because of that background, a lot of private equity and venture firms were coming to us to market them.
LAUREL MINTZ
0:51
And that's really how Fabric came to be. One of the GP clients said, you're better at this than we are. You have this amazing early deal flow, this marketing special sauce, and this commitment to diversity. Go launch a fund. And I was just a little crazy enough to do that. So that's what we've done.
MARCIA DAWOOD
1:05
I love it. Okay, so you just closed Fund one, so we're allowed to talk about it, which is cool. And so tell us, how much did you raise? What did. What's. What type of companies you're going to be deploying the capital in?
LAUREL MINTZ
1:16
Yeah, we did just under 8 million, and we've actually already deployed most of that capital. So we did what's called a rolling raise, rolling deploy. As a fun one and a female gp, I felt very strongly that I needed to build the plane while I was flying it. And it's a. It's doing two jobs, let's be frank. It was really hard, but I think it was really worthwhile to speak to what we were actually doing, not what we were in theoretically, like theoretically going to invest in. I also felt very strongly about writing checks last year because the valuations were finally normalizing and we were able to capture so much value for our dollar. So I felt like there were those two factors, which is why we did the rolling raise, rolling deploy.
LAUREL MINTZ
2:00
And I'm hoping that my left eye will stop twitching any day now.
MARCIA DAWOOD
2:03
I'm doing. Oh, my gosh, I love that. That's so great. That's such a smart way to do it. So Give us an example of a couple types of companies that you invested in along the way.
LAUREL MINTZ
2:14
Sure. So we focus on consumer tech, health tech and fintech. We've eight of our current 23 portfolio companies are in the healthcare space, specifically femtech, although I hate that word, we don't call it the other thing for men. So we've done quite a bit in menopause, longevity, fertility. We have a lot in the consumer tech space, which I know very well from the marketing agency side of the fence. We're just throwing all our children, of course. But I'm very proud to say that in the last 18 months we've come over a 30% graduation rate to Series A, which is pretty unheard of.
MARCIA DAWOOD
2:46
Wow, that is incredible. That's like the hardest hurdle, right for women to get from the pre seed seed era and actually graduate into Series A.
LAUREL MINTZ
2:56
And that was part of our thesis as well, was being the last checks in on the round. I hope that people saw that I didn't have an ego about being a first time GP and in fact felt quite the opposite. And so we did most of the checks we wrote were last checks in or over subscribed rounds, really following the coattails of smart VCs that had done this many years before us. And I thought that was also aside from the marketing layer of diligence that we do something that didn't necessarily differentiate us, but it made us smarter in terms of how we approached our investment thesis.
MARCIA DAWOOD
3:28
And so that way more of your portfolio could actually get to that Series A correct. Nice.
LAUREL MINTZ
3:34
Correct. You got to prove it early, right?
MARCIA DAWOOD
3:36
Yes, exactly. Can you give us some examples of what the some of the companies do? Sure.
LAUREL MINTZ
3:43
They're all my children, so I can say who I want to talk about. So I'll talk about. Our first check ever that we wrote was to a company called cadence keepyourcadence.com they're these little pods that you put your cream and jewelry and serums and pills in for travel. So very much a consumer play. But then they magnetically attach and magnetically label so they have this very interesting IP protectable moat around it. And that's really what we want to see in the consumer plays. Because consumer, while I love it on the agency side, it's really hard to see a lot of these companies scaling to that hundred million doll revenue rate so that they can be targets for some sort of M and A activity. I think consumer as a whole is really splintered.
LAUREL MINTZ
4:21
So that's an example of a company that has that tech moat around it they did their Series A. We, we came in as a kind of a strategic because they needed some support and introductions to big box retailers. So we introduced them to the team at rei. They got introduced to the Container Store and then they wanted to do some pop ups their first or second year. And so we did some introductions to our real estate partner so they could do pop ups for holiday. So that was a really fun experience and it was nice, something that you could actually like, touch and feel as a product. Because so much of what we invest in is our platforms as well.
MARCIA DAWOOD
4:55
And tell us the URL so that we can go check them out.
LAUREL MINTZ
5:00
Keep your cadence dot com.
MARCIA DAWOOD
5:03
Okay. Because we'll put that in the show notes.
LAUREL MINTZ
5:06
Go. Yeah. So that's an example of a cool one. And then we've got so much in the health space and longevity space. We have a company called the Metapause which is focused on building a platforms for women's health, specifically in menopause and products to support our health. Because I know you know this, but it's just shocking how few dollars went towards women's health even though we're 50% of the population. So we're now starting to see that pendulum finally swinging back and I think there's a lot of opportunity in that space.
MARCIA DAWOOD
5:35
Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about that. So you are actually starting to see more dollars go to women's health companies?
LAUREL MINTZ
5:42
We are, yeah. I think that we're starting to see more female gdps, so that that pendulum is starting to swing a little. And because of that, women have a tendency to invest, as men used to, in things that we know and want to see thrive and survive. So women's health has been at the forefront for me particularly. I'm like perimenopause and starting to go into that world. And that's something that I want to make sure women after us don't have to deal with. Yes.
MARCIA DAWOOD
6:10
Yeah, that would be great. I tell all my friends, I'm like, when you get there, call me.
LAUREL MINTZ
6:14
Yeah, let me know. Let me know what's working.
MARCIA DAWOOD
6:16
Now we can talk about it. Yes. Because my mom never talked about it. I don't think she ever talked about it with her friends, with anybody. I barely knew I was living with her. I didn't realize that she was having hot flashes or couldn't sleep at night or any of those things. Just wasn't.
LAUREL MINTZ
6:30
I knew about the hot flashes. Mom had one of those. You. I think it's a USB plug into her phone. It had a little fan that goes. She would be on her phone talking about FaceTime and have a fan.
MARCIA DAWOOD
6:41
I'm like, that's awesome.
LAUREL MINTZ
6:43
It was a pretty funny product. Yeah.
MARCIA DAWOOD
6:45
So good. Okay, so tell us a little bit about the fundraising journey. What are. What were some of the highs? What were some of the lows?
LAUREL MINTZ
6:54
I think honestly more lows than highs, if I'm being totally honest. This was a very challenging fundraising environment. I'm not one to back down from a challenge. So my thought process was, if I can build this in this environment, when we go out to raise our next fund, which we'll be doing shortly at a 10x, we'll be able to do that with more efficiency. But it was really hard. We had to have way more conversations than I ever thought humanly possible. I was doing 18 meeting days. 20 or.
LAUREL MINTZ
7:22
Yeah, 18 meetings a day, 20 minutes each, and then two or three events a night. I was in hard, aggressive hustle mode for the last two years. And so now my cortisol levels are trying to rebalance and like my body is in this very interesting state of readjusting to what life should be, which is not bad. Not the bat. And I think some of the good. Some of the good is we had some women and men who really showed up and wrote checks and really supported us. Our LP base has been fantastic. We have a 70% diverse LP base and in every major city that we do fundraised in, our LPs, hosted incredible events to support those efforts.
LAUREL MINTZ
8:01
And so I would say once we got more women into writing checks, the ones that did really showed up and that was very meaningful for us.
MARCIA DAWOOD
8:09
That's awesome. And then. So what are some of the ways. I know you encountered some challenges in talking, especially with women or even people that have never invested in this asset class before, but what are some of your thoughts around how do we make this easier? How do we get the mindset to shift?
LAUREL MINTZ
8:26
I think there's a lot of education that needs to happen and I did so much of that. I called it the work in the work. Right. Educating and empowering women and specifically women of color to have a seat at this table. But there's still so much work that needs to be done. I think we were talking in the pre call about it took 5, 6, 7, 8 conversations for a woman to write a check than it did for the their male counterparts. And that's a real problem. And we have to call it out not from a shaming perspective, but from a.
LAUREL MINTZ
8:56
Women need to stand up and take bigger risks and bigger swings and Write bigger checks as well. Like, the size of the scale of the checks was also tended to be smaller from women. And I think it's just a factor of us, again, not having access to capital or credit until the 70s. And we're on again, this really interesting pendulum swing as this great wealth transfer is happening. But I think I just want to encourage women to show up in bolder ways. It's been amazing those that have shown up, and it's been disappointing to see how some are like, so excited. Waste your time. Never write a check.
LAUREL MINTZ
9:33
Never. We're going to write a check. I think the women need to be supportive and bolder and just get in the game. Like, they're not going to all be winners. Things are going to fail. That's how life is. But I think they. The saying is closed mouths, don't get fed.
LAUREL MINTZ
9:49
Open your mouth, try a different asset class, and hopefully you can pick some winners.
MARCIA DAWOOD
9:53
Yeah, I found that I had a lot of women that were really interested. Like, I think they were more curious than they were interested in necessarily writing a check. But they were just so excited that somebody was actually out there raising money for. To try to help women. And they thought it was such a great idea. And I'm like, okay, then why won't
LAUREL MINTZ
10:14
you actually write a check? And that's the gap.
MARCIA DAWOOD
10:16
Yeah. Behind it. And yes, that is definitely where I find that too, which is why I keep writing books. Hopefully that helps. I don't know.
LAUREL MINTZ
10:26
But anything that we does, every little bit helps. And we've just got to be louder. And frankly, I've been called aggressive a lot of times, and I'm fine with that. I think we need to be aggressively optimistic about putting women's money, wealth and money to work. And I think we still have a lot. Long way to go.
MARCIA DAWOOD
10:43
Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm excited that you're hearing or actually seeing that there's more going on in women's health. What was it, 1993 that they actually decided to have women included in clinical trials?
LAUREL MINTZ
10:57
Yeah. Shocking. Go figure.
MARCIA DAWOOD
11:00
So many things, right? But this whole mindset is so interesting because, like, women couldn't even get a credit card in their own name until 1974. In some ways, I think. Okay, yeah, it's not. It's not women's fault. It's not men's fault. Somebody's fault. Okay. This is just like our society.
MARCIA DAWOOD
11:15
This is how it is. But we do have opportunities now. And I really worry that we are modeling behavior or there are some women who are modeling behavior that will actually hurt the next generation.
LAUREL MINTZ
11:29
I don't think you're wrong with that. One of the sadder stories, I would say, during my fundraising journey is there was a woman out of New York who just kept. She would come to every event. She would set calls with me every month or two. She happened to be a billionaire, and she never wrote a check. She just kept pulling me in, wasting my time, clearly. And part of me when that happened, and we were like, we're final close. Like, you've been along this journey.
LAUREL MINTZ
11:55
Are we doing this or not? And she totally ghosted. Part of me wanted to call her out on it and say, this is the problem. You are the problem. And then the rest of me was like, you know what? It's not my responsibility. She knows what she did and what she didn't do. So it's. It's challenging, especially with a woman like that who literally could have written a check to close the entire fund.
MARCIA DAWOOD
12:19
Right? Yeah. I was just talking to somebody the other day who said, oh, I was pitching someone who, like that had a considerable amount of wealth, and at the end of the day, because the investment really wouldn't have made much of a difference. Like, I don't think in their own situation, I think they. They were just like, oh, that's the big deal, or when. Why bother? Which. But they don't realize, like, even that small amount, getting female GPS to be able to raise $8 million is amazing. That is extremely hard. Even getting to a million dollars, extremely hard.
MARCIA DAWOOD
12:54
Eight million is incredible. But getting women to be able to raise 50 million, a hundred million, and a billion dollars, like, we need to get to that level too. And I think that the only way to do that, obviously through institutions helps, but when we have the wealth and people who are writing checks of philanthropy that are relatively large, like, why can't they do that for gps?
LAUREL MINTZ
13:17
Well, thank God for the daf, right? That's an approach I think has worked for a lot of folks. We've had some LPs come in through 401k and Roth money, so that's been another interesting avenue. So I think we're trying to figure out all the different paths to profitability on that. But, yeah, just. I think that was an age gap issue, and I just think that particular woman couldn't see her nose despite her face, and see the impact that she could have had. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of women with money want. Just want to be in the mix, but they're still afraid to take a big swing. I'm not Complaining.
LAUREL MINTZ
13:51
I'm happy and I'm so proud of what we built, but I just want to make sure that when I'm on any podcast or any platform that I'm calling it out. So hopefully it resonates with one or two women. And they said, they say themselves. You know what? I have been talking to this gp. I thought I was going to write a hundred thousand dollar check. Really, I should write a 250? Or maybe I should just say yes. Even though we've had. We've had three conversations, it's time to say yes.
LAUREL MINTZ
14:14
So if I can just truncate that time from first point of contact to close of LP commitment, then I will feel like I've done my job.
MARCIA DAWOOD
14:22
Okay, so first of all, I think it's amazing that you took money through IRA 401k and then also donor advised funds, because that's something that I talk about a lot. I have both of those methods of investing in my first book, do good while doing well. But I've especially been very vocal about trying to get more women, especially to learn about investing using philanthropic capital, considering I think that's where they are, that's where we're beating them.
LAUREL MINTZ
14:50
Right.
MARCIA DAWOOD
14:50
So meet them where they are. And so tell me a little bit more about how you did that with the donor advised funds.
LAUREL MINTZ
14:57
Yeah. There's a bunch of different third party platforms that make it seamless. So someone says, I've never written a check before. I love what you're doing. I really been spending more of my dollars in philanthropy. The next conversation is great, we can make that work. Right? Like it's fitting it into any box you can. And so that's what we did.
LAUREL MINTZ
15:18
And especially again, as a fun one, we kept hearing that a lot and the bells were going off and I was like, I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out a way to make that make sense. And so we hired a third party. I believe the company's called Lagos. I want to say I'm blanking on the name, but they. It was so easy. It was so easy. They literally just set up the.
LAUREL MINTZ
15:38
I think it was an LLC to pass through the dollars. And it was done. It was pretty. It was basically just a lot of docusigns.
MARCIA DAWOOD
15:45
Oh, that's great. Yeah, just in a lot of cases there. Well, we know there are hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in donor advice funds that are maybe in a mutual fund or who knows what they're invested in, whatever the financial planner's thinking about at the time. But to be able to use that and use it toward for good to actually put to work toward investing in women led companies, but also, of course, in women led funds.
LAUREL MINTZ
16:12
Yeah. Well, like you said, if that's where they are, then we have to meet them where they are, period.
MARCIA DAWOOD
16:17
Yeah. Well, it's, it's so refreshing that you came back with such a great story of what happened with fabric VC fund 1. And I can't wait for you to come back and tell us all about Fund 2 and Fund 3 and all of the amazing things and the difference that you're making in the world. Laurel, thank you so much, much for coming back to give us this update. And we look forward to what happens in the future. And we'll make sure everybody knows how to get in touch with you.
LAUREL MINTZ
16:41
Thanks so much, Marcia. You're such a great champion for us. I really appreciate it.