Fewer than 1% of funded startups reach $1 billion. Only 7% of unicorn founders are women, and women of color lead even fewer. Payal is one of them. But the ClassPass we know today, with 100 million hours of workouts booked across 30,000 partners in 28 countries, is not the company she set out to build.

In this episode, I trace the full arc: from an MIT grad and lifelong dancer who couldn't find a single ballet class in New York, to spending $500,000 on a booking product that generated about ten reservations a month. I get into why the "OpenTable for fitness" thesis was built on a false parallel, the five distinct business models ClassPass cycled through, the $99 unlimited era that grew 50x while quietly bleeding money, and the decision to kill it in 2016 and lose 10% of the user base overnight.

I also dig into the part of the story that matters most to me: the rooms full of male VCs who sat in silence after every pitch, the fellow South Asian woman who wrote the first meaningful check and told her to bet on herself, and what that representation gap actually costs when you measure it in billions.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

In this episode, Eve breaks down the onboarding rewrite that took Alinea from near-zero to $80K in a single month, and the founder-led TikTok strategy that turned one 60-second story video into 50,000 downloads in a day. She gets specific on the mechanics of debt financing for consumer apps, why they waited far too long to charge for the product, how "Gen Z messaging" ended up converting 40-year-old construction workers, and what an AI investing companion that "thinks and acts for you" actually looks like.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Eve Halimi:


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eve-halimi

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genuine.jew/?hl=en
Website: https://www.alinea-invest.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:


https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:


Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

My daughter turned 1 last week, and this week I finally get to share my conversation with Laura Modi, founder & CEO of Bobbie. One of my proudest accomplishments.

The past year of starting our family, while building my business has been the most challenging year yet. I have an entirely new level of respect and appreciation for all working parents. Nothing about this is easy. As many moms do, I’ve found myself at the peak of my career in the midst of building a family. I’ve felt mom guilt deep to my core, and realized it’s simply not possible to do it all.

I take so much inspiration from leaders like Laura who have been able to build incredibly meaningful businesses, while also raising not 1 but 4 babies! So instead of asking Laura how she manages to do it all (because that’s literally impossible), I was dying to know how she has learned to manage and cope with mom guilt.

And what Laura shared really stuck with me. Laura said that mom guilt was really hard for her for many years, until the moment she realized her kids were watching her build something meaningful. And that was going to shape who they become.

As the eldest daughter to two entrepreneurs, I can attest that being able to watch your parents building something leaves lasting impact. And now when I’m overcome with mom guilt, I try to remind myself that my daughter gets to see what’s possible for her!

I’m so proud of my conversation with Laura. We get into why she started the infant formula company after a moment of shame in a pharmacy aisle. Laura built her career at Google and Airbnb before leaving tech to take on one of the most highly regulated, capital-intensive industries in America. Bobbie has since raised nearly $150 million, surpassed $160 million in revenue, and bought its own manufacturing facility in Ohio.

In this episode, Laura talks about the emotional reality behind Bobbie's founding story, what she learned about sugar and formulation by cold-emailing 20-30 experts a night, and the FDA labeling issue that pulled her product off shelves for 18 months when she had only 100 customers. She explains why she turned off new customer growth during the 2022 national formula shortage against investor advice, how she convinced her board she'd been wrong about owning manufacturing, and what responsibility every formula brand carries when a recall hits the industry.

Laura also shares how the Molly Baz Times Square billboard came together, why she hires the atypical candidate, the work Bobbie for Change is doing on federal paid leave and the Black maternal mortality crisis, and the moment with her daughter that finally loosened her grip on mom guilt.

I’m so proud of my conversation with Laura. It would mean the world if you checkout our conversation.

-Ruffin

Today I'm joined by Amy Moussavi, angel investor and advisor at Malo Partners. Amy took an unconventional path into venture. After studying cognitive neuroscience, with no background in finance, she was early at Snapchat, spent years inside a top-secret product group at Apple, and became an investor at a multi-billion-dollar VC fund before building her own portfolio of nearly 20 personal angel investments.

In this episode, Amy breaks down how she wrote her very first angel check (and the one category Apple would let her invest in), how she developed a thesis around "building for humanity of the future," and how she evaluates founders from pre-seed to Series A. She shares why she passed on Liquid Death, the speed and precision she looks for in breakout founders, how she works backwards from exit math on market sizing, and the categories she's most excited about now: women's health, longevity, AI hardware, live shopping, and Gen Alpha. Amy also gets candid about why fundraising can feel like "asking for charity" for women founders, the gotchas of stacked SPVs in today's AI-hyped market, and the advice she ignored for a decade: that in venture, relationships are everything.

More on Amy Moussavi:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-moussavi/

Pitch her: amy@malopartners.com

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

In this conversation, Morgan traces her winding path from accountant to waitress to yoga instructor to CPG operator, and unpacks why she and Mark Sisson kept 95% of Primal Kitchen by refusing outside capital. She breaks down the mechanics of actually selling a company, from the banker "bake off" to the four-day management presentations, and explains why the second time around she raised venture capital from Kate McAndrew at Baukunst instead of mortgaging her own peace of mind. Along the way she gets candid about lifelong imposter syndrome, building all-female teams, the unsexy grind behind a nine-figure exit, and why she believes being a woman in business is a superpower, not a setback.

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Morgan Zanotti:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-buehler-zanotti-31989620/

Website: https://drinkwaay.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Today I'm chatting with Hilary Coles and Emily Boschwitz, the powerhouse duo behind POCA, a better-for-you coffee syrup that lets people enjoy their favorite café drinks without the sugar crash. Before POCA, Hilary and Emily were on the founding team at Hims & Hers, which they helped scale to a $1.6 billion exit in just three years.

In this episode, Hilary and Emily trace their unlikely paths, from Hilary starting out as an admin and being turned down by nearly every "dream" company, to Emily learning to read in seventh grade and turning dyslexia into a marketing superpower. They break down the early days of Hims & Hers: why they launched with stigmatized products, how men dancing in showers with shampoo bottles became an accidental growth engine, and the channel-diversification strategy that fueled explosive scale.

Then they get into POCA, the consumer insight that coffee is "the last allowable vice," how they ran a paint-the-door test before building anything, the food science behind a syrup that actually dissolves in iced coffee, and why brand matters more than ever in the age of AI slop. Along the way, they share hard-won lessons on curiosity as a career strategy, growth marketing, and the AI stack every founder should be using today.

Let me know what you guys think of this episode!!! 💗

In this episode, I'm breaking down one of the most remarkable stories in modern consumer business: how FIGS went from selling scrubs in hospital parking lots to becoming the first company led by two female co-founders and co-CEOs to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 2012, Heather Hasson noticed a nurse friend stuck wearing shapeless, uncomfortable scrubs and saw an opportunity everyone else had ignored. Meanwhile, Trina Spear spotted the same gap from Wall Street, eventually quitting her job at Blackstone and liquidating her 401(k) to bet on it. Together they drove to hospital parking lots at 7 a.m. shift changes, coffee in hand, selling scrubs out of a car and listening relentlessly to the healthcare workers they served.

I unpack exactly what it took to build a multibillion dollar business: developing proprietary performance fabric designed for grueling shifts, going direct-to-consumer from day one, and engineering a word-of-mouth marketing machine so powerful their customer acquisition costs actually dropped as they scaled. I also dig into the hundreds of no's they heard before landing a $50 million check, the $200 million lawsuit from a legacy scrub giant they fought and won, and the way they brought 60 healthcare professionals to ring the opening bell and opened pre-IPO access to everyday investors.

It's a masterclass in product, distribution, community, and staying close to the people you serve.

I hope you enjoy!

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Sunday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm joined by Kate McAndrew, Co-Founder and General Partner at Baukunst, a $100 million venture capital fund backing exceptional founders at the intersection of technology and design. Writing first checks of $500K to $2M at pre-seed, Kate was the first institutional investor in Bobbie, the first clean infant formula in the U.S. since the 1980s, and has spent over a decade backing founders long before anyone else believed.

Kate is an "accidental VC" who broke into the industry without an MBA, management consulting, or a finance pedigree. She got her first taste of investing while volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity job site. In this episode, she shares what she really looks for at pre-seed (hint: the team beats the idea every time), why she describes her job to her five-year-old as being a "professional fairy godmother," and the anti-portfolio deal that still haunts her, passing on Mirror before its $500M sale to Lululemon. Kate also opens up about building her fund in public after a year of PR got her nowhere, how short-form video became her secret weapon for deal flow and LP relationships, her take on the "SaaS is dead" and hardware hype cycles, and why she's moving her own workflow toward more values-aligned tools. We close with rapid fire on killing imposter syndrome, the visioning exercise that changed how she shows up, and the legacy she wants to leave for the next generation of women.

More on Kate McAndrew:


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kateprestonmcandrew

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kate__mcandrew

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kate_mcandrew


Baukunst: https://baukunst.co/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:


https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:


Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

This past month has been a whirlwind! This week I was named a Create & Cultivate 100 honoree in the Money category - still pinching myself that I’m recognized alongside women I genuinely look up to, like Emma Grede, Allison Ellsworth, Kate McAndrew, and Phoebe Gates. Huge thank you to Jaclyn Johnson and the entire Create & Cultivate team 💗

Four years ago, I literally got laughed out of VC interviews for suggesting TikTok was a legitimate sourcing strategy, so I paved my own path instead. I’ll always be glad I bet on myself.

You can read my full interview, including the money lessons I learned growing up and my best negotiation pep talk, here.

Now onto the fun stuff… one of my favorite founder stories: Tiffany Lopinski and ShopMy.

Why I can’t stop thinking about ShopMy

Earlier this year, I wrote about why we’re in the era of the creator-founder and why audience and distribution have become a real moat in consumer brand building.

Tiffany Lopinsky is one of the women making that entire economy run. She’s the co-founder and President of ShopMy, the creator commerce platform that just hit a $1.5 billion valuation in late 2025.

Influencer marketing is now a $30 billion-plus industry. And for most of the last decade, brands poured money into it flying completely blind — paying for follower counts and view counts, with no real way to know if any of it moved a single unit of product. Meanwhile the creators actually driving those sales had no clean way to capture the value they were creating.

ShopMy fixed both sides of that problem. In five years it went from an idea to a $1.5 billion valuation.

Five years to $1.5 billion

ShopMy was founded in 2020 by Tiffany Lopinsky, Harry Rein, and Chris Tinsley. Five years later, more than $1 billion in annual sales runs through the platform, across 185,000+ creators and 1,200+ premium brands.

This explosive growth tracks the professionalization of the entire creator economy.

As creators stopped being hobbyists and started building real businesses, they needed infrastructure — the same way every other category of small business eventually gets its tools.

And ShopMy works for both sides of the market at once.

→ For creators, it turns a recommendation into a tracked, monetizable, measurable event. They can finally see what they earn, on what, and why, which means they can run their audience like a business.

→ For brands, it turns influencer marketing from a leap of faith into performance marketing. As Lopinsky has said, brands love the idea of paying per sale instead of flying blind.

Now to the story of how Tiffany built it.

Before she was a founder, she was a creator

In 2014, Tiffany was a sophomore at Harvard studying government. She launched an Instagram account called Boston Foodies, dedicated to the city’s restaurant scene, and grew it to over 150,000 followers.

Within six months, restaurants were comping her meals. Then OpenTable called and offered her $5,000 for five posts.

She was a college kid working as a research assistant. Five thousand dollars… for five Instagram posts. That number reframed what the creator economy could be, and her curiosity never really switched off after that.

Boston Foodies was a five-year crash course in everything she would later build a company around. The tension between authenticity and commercial pressure as a creator. The frustration of pitching brands and being told no.

The infrastructure that didn’t exist yet for people like her: people whose audiences trusted them, whose recommendations actually moved product, but who had no real way to capture the value they were creating.

She learned all of these lessons before she was 22.

The pink-and-turquoise moment

After Harvard, Tiffany worked at an advertising agency, then joined Popcart, an early-stage startup where she was a product manager. There she met Harry Rein, the lead engineer who would later become her co-founder.

One day Harry showed her an early prototype for a social shopping concept. The prototype was… pink and turquoise. She told him she loved it, but it needed to be black and white.

The aesthetic was wrong. It was what a man thought a woman would want on a social shopping platform, not what the women using it would actually choose.

That moment fits the entire thesis of why founder-market fit matters. The honest, instinctive, market-grounded “no” — from someone who lived inside the customer’s experience — is one of the most valuable things a co-founder can bring.

And it’s exactly the kind of contribution that gets undervalued when investors look at a team and see “the technical guy” and “the operator.”

The broken link-in-bio problem

The third co-founder, Chris Tinsley, came at the same problem from inside academia. At MIT Sloan, he wrote his thesis on the link-in-bio problem.

His research landed on a frustrating reality: creators were generating enormous consumer intent, but the actual transaction was broken. The monetization trail simply didn’t exist. A follower who wanted to buy something had to dig through comment sections, open new tabs, and guess at product names, walking through a maze just to find the cash register.

And the early tools that tried to fix it were walled gardens. An Amazon storefront could only route you to Amazon. The legacy affiliate platforms were gated, clunky, and built for an earlier internet.

So in 2020, Tiffany, Harry, and Chris came together to build ShopMy. They spent months interviewing creators and brands, and found a market full of friction on both sides. Creators were recommending products from Amazon, Sephora, small Shopify brands — dozens of places at once — with no premium central home to house any of it. Brands were spending heavily with no way to attribute a single sale.

Their first move was an ungated storefront: software that let a creator link literally anything, from a $5 Target spatula to a Dior foundation, all on one cohesive page. They handed creators the tools to operate like independent retailers.

Making affiliate not a dirty word

By the time ShopMy launched, the category looked won. LTK (founded as RewardStyle back in 2011) was the entrenched incumbent, and most of the industry assumed the race was over.

ShopMy made a different bet.

Instead of chasing the largest possible creator base, they targeted people with real authority: editors, founders, dermatologists, Substack writers, stylists, interior designers. People whose audiences came to them for expertise, not entertainment.

The brands followed: Khaite, Dôen, Rhode, Net-a-Porter, Gucci. Premium brands needed distribution partners that matched their brand equity, not affiliates pushing Amazon dupes.

But they had a cultural problem to solve first. “Affiliate” was a dirty word.

We all remember it — the lifestyle creator who suddenly pivots mid-feed to read a stiff script for a vitamin C serum she’s clearly never used. Affiliate marketing felt sleazy. It actively burned the trust creators had spent years building.

So ShopMy reframed the entire thing. They didn’t sell affiliate links as a way to sell. They positioned them as infrastructure for word of mouth, and word of mouth has always been the most powerful force in commerce.

What ShopMy actually does

So what is the product, five years in?

For creators, ShopMy is the home base. One premium storefront that aggregates every brand they’d ever recommend, with native links that work across the open internet rather than locking them into a single retailer’s inventory.

It’s also a dashboard. Creators see their commissions in real time — what they earned, on which products, at what rate. They see their own conversion data: what their specific audience actually buys. For the first time, a creator gets the same performance analytics a brand gets, which means they can negotiate from data, double down on what works, and treat the whole thing like a real business.

And it’s a marketplace. Beyond affiliate links, ShopMy runs structured brand partnerships and gifting programs, so creators can stack paid collaborations on top of commission income.

Most of ShopMy’s top 100 sales drivers aren’t household names. Some of them are people you’d only know if you were deep in a specific industry — a dermatologist with an engaged audience, a Substack writer with a few thousand readers, a niche fashion editor.

The fundraising reality

ShopMy had product-market fit. They had real revenue, real creators, real brands. They had a genuinely differentiated product in a category most VCs claimed to care about. And when they went to raise, most VCs didn’t engage seriously.

The investor who actually dug in was Alexa von Tobel at Inspired Capital, a former founder herself. Tiffany has spoken openly about why von Tobel was different: she wanted to understand how the product actually worked, why creators used it, what made the brand-side economics tick. Most other VCs didn’t bother.

Once one investor took the product seriously, the rest of the market caught up fast.

• In January 2025, ShopMy raised $77.5 million at a $410 million valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

• Nine months later, it raised another $70 million — this time at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Avenir.

The valuation nearly quadrupled in nine months.

And look at who else wrote checks in that round: Sofia Richie Grainge, Aimee Song, Gregg Renfrew of Beautycounter, Raissa Gerona of Revolve. Female creators and brand founders investing in the platform they use.

Why this story matters

Tiffany’s path from a college Instagram account to co-founding a unicorn looks inevitable in retrospect. It wasn’t.

She had to keep convincing people to take her seriously at every stage: as a creator, as a product manager, as a co-founder, as a fundraiser. The platform she built is now the infrastructure thousands of other women use to make a living.

There’s a generational shift happening in who gets to capture economic value from cultural influence, and it almost didn’t happen, because most of the investors she pitched couldn’t be bothered to understand the product.

This is exactly why I’m building Brydge Club. We need more women in the rooms where these decisions get made. More women writing the first checks. More women taking the second meeting when everyone else has passed.

The next Tiffany Lopinsky is out there pitching right now. The question is whether the people she meets will recognize her.

P.S. If you’re an angel investor looking for a community of women doing this work together — apply to join Brydge Club.

Female Founder Lore We’re Following

• Lucille, founded by Jess Haghani, raised a multimillion-dollar round led by Iris Ventures for its better-for-you senior nutrition shakes

• Melinda French Gates announced $215M in new women's health funding — the first major philanthropic investment to include menopause (which gets less than 1% of aging research!)

• Caroline Dell is building Goodword, a relationship management platform

• Plot, founded by Megan Duong, raised a $10M follow-on seed to scale AI agents that decode social video for brands like PepsiCo and Benefit Cosmetics

• Oura, the smart ring that’s become a go-to for women’s health tracking, filed confidentially for an IPO at a ~$11B valuation.

• Joan Nguyen launched Bennie, the first AI family assistant — text it to book childcare, camps, and appointments!

  That’s all for this week!

April absolutely flew by - we have SO much going on here at Brydge Club! Here are a few of my behind the scenes highlights:

💫 Filmed my first podcast feature on the Built In Public show with Courtney Johnson! Talked about how I built my personal brand and why I believe owning your audience is the future of business. I’ve seen this play out firsthand in my own journey, and in so many of the founders we cover here.

💫 Officially welcomed Amy Moussavi as an advisor to Brydge Club! Amy has an incredible background building and investing in consumer and consumer tech businesses. Prior to launching her own advisory Malo Partners, Amy was a SVP at Anthos Capital where she invested in companies like Kalshi, Erewhon, Honey, Olaplex, and more. Before that she was early at Snapchat and made her first angel investment while in Product at Apple. Since then, Amy has built a personal angel portfolio across companies like Headspace, Sunny Fine Foods, swsh, and Conceive! We’re so grateful to have her support shaping what we’re building.

💫 Built out a 4-week Angel Investing curriculum for all new Brydge Club members — and we’re launching our first official cohort on May 27th! 🎉 If you want to learn how to write your first check (or get sharper at the ones you’re already writing), this is built for you. Apply here to join us!

💫 Received an award and did my first-ever full glam photo and video shoo. Wind-blower and all (!!). So honored and excited to share with you guys very soon!!! I would not be here without this community. Forever grateful!

Speaking of writing checks: today’s case study is about a founder who pitched to rooms of silent men, burned $500K on a product that didn’t work, and still became one of the first women of color to build a unicorn.

The ClassPass Story: How Payal Kadakia Pujji Pivoted Her Way to a Billion-Dollar Company

Fewer than 1% of funded startups hit $1B unicorn status. Just 15% have a female founder, and only 7% of unicorn founders are women. BIPOC women lead even fewer.

Payal Kadakia Pujji is one of them.

In 2020, ClassPass hit a $1 billion valuation — making Payal one of the first women of color to found a unicorn. She was nearly nine months pregnant when the deal closed.

However, the ClassPass we know today — the app, the subscription, the 100 million hours of workouts booked — is not the company Payal originally set out to build. Her path from “MIT grad with an idea” to “unicorn founder” wasn’t a straight line. It looked like five different business models, $500,000 in wasted product development, hundreds of silent VC meetings, and a founder who refused to stop pivoting.

The Origin Story

Payal grew up in Randolph, New Jersey, one of the only Indian kids in town. She was bullied, racially teased, told her food smelled. But from the age of three, she had dance. Kathak and Indian folk in family basements, then ballet, then modern, then contemporary. At MIT, she founded the school’s first Indian dance company.

After graduating, she spent three years at Bain as a management consultant. When her manager eventually asked whether consulting was really what she wanted, it forced a reckoning. She didn’t want business school. She wanted to stay in New York and keep dancing. So she moved to Warner Music Group as a digital strategist — a job with shorter hours that let her keep building her own dance company on the side.

Two years into Warner, she took a trip to San Francisco and met entrepreneurs for the first time. She came home and gave herself a 14-day deadline to come up with a business idea.

Thirty-six hours later, she spent an hour after work trying to find a single ballet class in New York City. Studio schedules were scattered across dozens of fragmented websites. There was no way to search, no way to book, no way to know if the class was still open.

That was the idea. She knew she was the right person to build it as an MIT grad with Bain training who’d spent her whole life obsessed with getting to dance class. Nobody else had that exact combination.

She quit her job. Her VP at Warner (a former Bain alum) handed her a $10,000 check on the way out because he knew her reputation from the Bain network as someone who did good work. Her first investor.

The Product That Didn’t Work

Payal co-founded Classtivity with Sanjiv Sanghavi, pitching it as “OpenTable for fitness classes” — a search engine where you could find and book workout classes. They joined the TechStars NYC accelerator, built the platform, and launched in June 2012.

The result? About 10 reservations per month.

As Payal put it on Diary of a CEO: “We spent half a million dollars building a product that didn’t work.”

What she realized later was that she’d built on a false parallel. OpenTable worked because everyone has to eat. Not everyone has to work out. Searching for a workout class wasn’t a transactional need — it was aspirational, intimidating, easy to put off. The mechanic that made restaurant reservations work couldn’t be lifted and dropped onto fitness.

Most founders would have quit then. Payal pivoted.

The Pivots That Unlocked a Billion-Dollar Company

First came the Classtivity Passport in early 2013 — $49 for 10 classes over 30 days. It drove some traction, but the real opportunity was buried in the data: people weren’t using the pass to pick one favorite studio. They wanted to keep exploring. They loved the variety itself.

By mid-2013, Payal launched a $99/month unlimited subscription. The company rebranded to ClassPass in January 2014. Growth was explosive — 50x. (Who else remembers this golden era of ClassPass?! Too good to be true!)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140625035144/https://classpass.com/

However, the economics were brutal. Power users attending four and five classes a week were being subsidized by casual subscribers. Studio owners also hated the pricing model because it was so much cheaper than their actual packages. By 2016, ClassPass raised prices, then killed the unlimited plan entirely in November 2016. They lost 10% of their user base overnight.

The final evolution came in 2018: a credit-based system with dynamic pricing, where off-peak classes cost fewer credits and premium slots cost more. That was the model that unlocked sustainable scale. By January 2020, ClassPass had booked 100 million hours of workouts across 30,000+ partners in 28 countries.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190819082314/https://classpass.com/

This success story took five distinct business models. A decade of iteration.

Pitching a “Female Product” to Rooms Full of Men

After TechStars, Payal and her co-founder flew to San Francisco for back-to-back VC meetings and came home to silence. As Payal has described it: “People always tell you when VCs are interested, they follow up. But there was just silence after every single one.”

There was a structural problem Payal was selling a product used predominantly by women to rooms predominantly populated by men. In her words:

Her first meaningful investor was Anjula Acharia, a fellow South Asian woman, and one of the only South Asian women at the time who’d raised venture funding. Payal sought her out specifically because she’d been there. And when Payal was wavering on whether to take a safer job at Spotify instead, Anjula told her:

Payal sent her a business plan that same evening.

From there, ClassPass raised roughly $550 million across ten rounds from Temasek, General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Google Ventures, and L Catterton. In January 2020, a $285 million Series E closed at a $1 billion valuation. Payal was nearly nine months pregnant when the deal closed.

She became one of the first women of color to found a unicorn.

Why This Story Matters

I love Payal’s story so much for many reasons: the relentless pivoting she had to go through, the refusal to pretend to be anyone she wasn’t, the decade of grinding through rejection and still landing on a billion-dollar valuation while nine months pregnant. It’s an awesome, inspiring story about what it actually takes to build a company.

And yet.

Her first meaningful investor was another South Asian woman because the male VCs sitting across the table in San Francisco couldn’t see what she was building. Those investors who sat in silence missed one of the most successful consumer businesses of the last decade.

ClassPass has facilitated more than 62 million reservations and generated $2.3 billion in incremental revenue for the global fitness economy.

The company’s exit strategy has been equally significant. After being acquired by Mindbody in 2021 for $1 billion, the parent organization merged with EGYM in 2026. This latest deal valued the combined business at $7.5 billion.

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/two-fitness-companies-are-merging-with-jared-kushners-backing-be76c05d

That’s the cost of the representation gap. It’s billions of dollars in missed opportunity, year after year, because the people writing the earliest checks can’t see the opportunity sitting in front of them.

Payal is clear about this too:

“We need more diversity on the other side of the table,” she told Marie Claire.

That’s exactly why I’m building Brydge Club. My mission is to get more women into the rooms where these bets are being made, so the next time a founder like Payal walks into a pitch meeting, the people across the table actually see what she’s building.

Representation on the investor side is how you stop leaving billion-dollar companies on the table.

P.S. If you’re an angel investor looking for a community of women doing this work together — apply to join Brydge Club.

Female Founder Lore We’re Reading

• Babylist, founded by Natalie Gordon, approaches $1B in sales as it eyes IPO next year

• Inc shared its Female Founders 500 list for 2026 - celebrating the top female founders of 2026 (Awesome stat to see: this list represents $12.3 billion in revenue and $12.2 billion in funding to date 👏)

• Westman Atelier, founded by Gucci Westman, secured $15M funding from Prelude Growth Partners And Imaginary Ventures

• Y Combinator backs female-founded construction tech Trayd (founders Anna Berger and Cara Kessler) in $10M Series A

• Joyful Health, cofounded by Eliana Berger and Warren Green, raised $22M to help healthcare providers recover billions in unpaid insurance claims.

Resources for Female Founders

• Here is an awesome AI LP Fundraising Team built on Claude - this system of agents can help you do investor research, qualify leads, prep for outreach and more.

• Another fun download! Drew F. put together this Consumer Goods M&A Tracker that tracks the top deals in the space for 2026.

Female Founders Hiring Now

• Soxton, founded by Logan Brown, is hiring lawyers

P.S. If you’re a founder looking to hire, send us a note! We’d love to pair more of our readers with awesome jobs!

That’s all for this week! Stay tuned for some exciting news in next month’s edition 🤩

It’s been an exciting few weeks. I partnered with March Capital to cover the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica — a gathering of leaders from the fastest-growing AI and tech companies. Still pinching myself that I was invited. Special shoutout and thank you to Melissa Montan and the March Capital team for having me!

Some highlights from the week:

💫 Learning from Emily Yuan firsthand about how she scaled Corgi AI from $0 to $40M ARR in six months. We also bonded over being corgi moms (fun fact: I’m mom to a corgi named Monty… this meeting was clearly meant to be!).

💫 Meeting fellow creators building at the intersection of venture and new media, like Madison McIlwain, Claudia Laurie, and Alex Konrad. Loved meeting IRL; many more collabs in our future!

💫 A fireside chat where Grant Lee shared how Gamma hit $100M ARR — after investors laughed at his idea to take on PowerPoint. Instead of hiring a marketing agency, he interviewed creators himself (I can attest!!) and learned to be a creator himself.

💫 Interviewing an incredible lineup of women at the conference including Ali Riley, Wardah Inam, Melissa Montan, Emily Yuan, Carly Roddy, Alex Chung, and Amy Moussavi. Lots of fun content loading — left so inspired by what each of these women have accomplished.

💫 An unforgettable welcome party. Lucy Guo on the DJ set with the Getty Villa as the backdrop. Enough said!

In today’s newsletter, I wanted to go deeper on something I shared last month: my investment in POCA. I’m so proud to be an investor in the Seed round alongside Offline Ventures, Jeni’s Ice Creams founder Jeni Britton, Glossier CEO Colin Walsh, Kate McAndrew (GP at Baukunst), and Vinay Menda (co-founder of Blank Street Coffee).

This month, I thought it’d be fun to do a deep dive on why I’m so bullish on this company, their massive target market, and their unique founder story.

The duo behind one of the biggest consumer brand stories of the last decade

Hilary Coles co-founded Hims & Hers. Emily Boschwitz scaled its marketing. Together they helped build a company now worth over $5 billion — one of the most successful DTC-to-public-market stories of the last decade.

With POCA, they’re taking everything they learned — the brand building, the DTC playbook, the deep consumer instinct — to build POCA

So what is POCA?

POCA is a zero-calorie, plant-based coffee syrup that’s packed with fiber.

Think: the indulgent, café-style flavor you want in your morning latte, but without the sugar, without the artificial junk, and with a functional boost that actually does something good for your body. I’ve been loving taking POCA on the go to sweeten my daily Starbucks or at home mixed in my Siggi’s yogurt with some catalina crunch 😋.( I still need to try making a strawberry matcha latte!)

https://insider.fitt.co/press-release/poca-launches-a-new-era-of-sweetness-without-the-crash-out/

My friend Kate McAndrew at Baukunst has a great analogy for what they’re building: “What Poppi did for soda, POCA is doing for coffee syrup.”

Poppi looked at the soda aisle — dominated by legacy brands pumping out sugar water — and said, what if we made this better? What if we kept the fun and the flavor but swapped the garbage for something that’s actually good for you? And it worked. PepsiCo acquired Poppi for nearly $2 billion.

POCA is using the same playbook to the coffee syrup market. And the opportunity is massive.

Why now? 3 tailwinds that make this the perfect moment

I think there are several things happening right now that make POCA feel incredibly timely and relevant.

GLP-1s are changing how people eat.

The Ozempic revolution is fundamentally reshaping eating habits across America. As these drugs suppress appetite, people are eating less of everything, including the fiber and nutrients their bodies need. Researchers have flagged fiber deficiency as one of the most significant nutritional risks for GLP-1 users.

America had a fiber problem long before Ozempic. Only 5% of Americans meet the recommended daily fiber intake. Five percent! POCA delivers 3 grams of fiber per pouch — sourced from inulin and chicory root — making it a frictionless way to sneak more fiber into your day.

The at-home coffee craze is exploding.

As you’ve probably seen on TikTok, everyone is making café-style lattes at home. We can thank rising prices at coffee shops and the aesthetic of the at-home barista setup, for this trend.

This behavioral shift is opening up a massive lane in the sweetener market, which is projected to surpass $156.26 billion in the next decade, and is directly tied to the fact that 75% of 18-to-34-year-olds customize their coffee with syrups.

POCA’s single-serve pouches are designed exactly for this behavior, especially for health-conscious consumers. They slip into your bag, travel with you, and turn any cup of coffee, matcha, or tea into something special.

Sugar is the new cigarette.

I wrote about this in my February newsletter and I truly believe it. While I still love sugar in my sweet treat, there is a growing movement of people looking to cut sugar out of their daily lives.

Consumers are actively rejecting sugar and artificial sweeteners, and looking for alternatives that don’t sacrifice taste. POCA threads the needle: zero calories, no artificial junk, and it actually tastes like the indulgent café experience people want.

It’s more than sugar, too. People care more than ever about what they’re putting in their bodies. Fiber has been dubbed “nature’s Ozempic,” #fibermaxxing blew up on TikTok, and brands like Grüns and Cymbiotika have proven there’s massive demand for products that are both convenient and actually good for you.

POCA sits at the intersection of all of it.

The competition: a wide-open lane

The coffee syrup market is dominated by legacy players — and none of them are built for the modern consumer.

Torani and Monin are the workhorses of the coffee shop industry, but they’re built for cafés, not your kitchen counter. We’re talking giant bottles loaded with cane sugar, designed for B2B foodservice.

Jordan’s Skinny Syrups took on the calorie problem, but they rely on artificial sweeteners like sucralose people are now trying to avoid.

POCA is building in the white space these brands leave open. Premium café-inspired flavors, zero calories, clean ingredients (allulose, monk fruit, chicory root fiber), and a portable single-serve format designed for how people actually live today. Nobody else is doing this.

The market opportunity for POCA

POCA sits at the intersection of several massive, growing markets: global sweeteners (valued at $113.17 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $156.26 billion by 2034), fiber supplements ($11.2B, growing 8.2% annually), U.S. coffee syrups (approaching $400M), and the emerging GLP-1 nutritional support market ($4.1B, projected to reach $13B by 2035).

For context on what’s possible in the functional CPG space:

• Grüns hit a $500M valuation in two years with $100M+ in ARR.

• Cymbiotika bootstrapped to $150M in revenue before taking outside funding.

POCA’s opportunity is to combine the daily habituation of a coffee syrup (something people use every single morning) with the functional benefits and premium pricing of the supplement market.

Here’s what their business model looks like:

POCA is launching DTC at pickpoca.com. A box of 10 single-serve pouches retails for $19.00 — $1.90 per serving, compared to $6–$8 for a flavored latte at Starbucks. They’re also building a subscription model with a 10% recurring discount — the kind of high-LTV engine that makes CPG unit economics sing.

The single-serve format is also a marketing driver in itself: it’s portable, shareable, TikTok-ready. Every pouch is a potential piece of user-generated content.

Why POCA’s founders are building in public

Another thing I love about this story is how the founders are building in public. They’re sharing the journey on social media: the early days of launch, the wins, the chaos of building a company while raising kids.

As I wrote in my February newsletter about the era of the creator-founder, this is one of the smartest strategies in consumer brand building right now.

We know that founders who build their own audience have a serious advantage. They own their distribution, their customer acquisition costs are lower, and the loyalty they build is deeper. We’ve seen it over and over: Allison Ellsworth and Poppi, Nadya Okamoto and August, the Cakes Body twins turning organic content into a $100M+ revenue business. It works.

Hilary and Emily get it. I’m super proud to play a small part in their journey!

If you want to give POCA a try, use code RUFFINLOVESPOCA for 20% off at pickpoca.com.

And if you’re an angel investor looking for a community of women doing this work together — apply to join Brydge Club.

Female Founder Lore We’re Following

• Zunu Mittal, Co-Founder of Quince, the manufacturer-to-consumer e-commerce brand known for affordable luxury products, raised $500M in Series E funding at a $10.1B valuation.

• Insiya Jafferjee, co-founder of Shellworks, raised $15 million to scale Vivomer, a biodegradable plastic alternative.

• Little Spoon, co-founded by Angela Vranich, Lisa Barnett, and Michelle Muller, just launched organic infant formula — making them the first end-to-end feeding platform.

• Cat Goetze (CatGPT) is launching Cat Labs, a creator-first product studio where her audience decides what gets built

• Costco just entered the fertility care space, partnering with Sesame and IVI RMA to offer members IVF, egg freezing, and IUI with up to 80% savings on medications — a huge move for the 1 in 6 Americans facing infertility

• Lauryn Menard, founder of GOB, created the world’s first mycelium earplugs — fully biodegradable and named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025. A few days ago, she appeared on Shark Tank.

Female Founders Hiring Now

• CAKES is looking for someone to lead performance marketing

• Bobbie is hiring a social media manager

• Known and Corgi AI recently teamed up for a hiring blitz. They’re hiring across several GTM and engineering roles

• Live Tinted is hiring a Senior Director of Finance

• Halfdays is looking for Director of Global Merchandising

• Chief is hiring across several senior roles, including product marketing, B2C sales, and GTM strategy.

• Sarina Virk Torrendell is looking for a Fractional Content Lead

• Atomic (the incubator behind Hims & Hers) is hiring for a Director of Growth for D2C business.

• Resort Pass is hiring a Head of Marketing

• Rella is looking for a Customer Support & Success Specialist and an AI Engineer.

• Sophia Amaruso is building something new and looking for an engineer.

• Smooth Media is hiring for several roles across the org!

P.S. If you’re a female founder looking to hire, send us a note! We’d love to pair more of our readers with awesome jobs!

Can’t believe it’s almost March — 2026 is flying by!

I’ve been heads down over the past few weeks supporting some of my portco founders with fundraises (exciting announcements coming soon!).

One of the exciting bits of news I shared this week is my investment in POCA! When I was pregnant, hazelnut lattes were my guilty pleasure 😋 But to my surprise, a sweetened latte has more sugar than two donuts. Yikes!

When I first met Emily Boschwitz and Hilary Coles, I immediately resonated with what they’re building. Emily and Hilary helped build hims & hers from the ground up — one of the most successful consumer brand stories of the last decade. Now they’re taking on the sweetener category with POCA, a better-for-you sweetener 🍭

As I wrote last month, sugar is the new cigarette of our generation. This is one of the trends I’m most excited about heading into 2026 and beyond, and POCA is exactly the kind of brand I want to back: built by proven operators taking on a category that’s been overlooked for too long.

If you want to give it a try, use code RUFFINLOVESPOCA for 20% off!

The FIGS Story: How Two Women Built the First Healthcare Apparel Brand to Go Public

In 2021, FIGS became the first healthcare apparel brand to IPO — and the first company led by two female co-founders and co-CEOs to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Today, it has a market cap of ~$1.8 billion, generated over $555 million in revenue last year, and has completely reshaped the healthcare apparel industry. I’m so inspired by Trina Spear and Heather Hasson’s story, from how they built FIGS from a hospital parking lot to a publicly traded company to the lessons their journey holds for every woman building something new.

The Origin Story

In 2012, Heather Hasson was grabbing coffee with a friend — a nurse at Cedars-Sinai — who showed up wearing awful, boxy scrubs with the size printed on the back. As someone who’d been a premed student herself and later worked in fashion, she knew exactly how demoralizing it was to spend long shifts in shapeless, uncomfortable scrubs and how unnecessary it was.

At the time, the scrubs market — $12 billion in the U.S., $79 billion globally — was controlled by legacy players like Cherokee, Dickies Medical, Barco, and Landau, all selling commodity products through third-party retailers. Basic cotton blends, boxy fits, limited colors. A set ran $15 to $35. No one had stopped to ask whether the people literally saving lives might deserve something better.

And yet nobody thought it was worth reinventing. Why would they? The margins were thin, the product was “just a uniform,” and the conventional wisdom was that healthcare workers wouldn’t pay more for scrubs. The industry had been operating this way for decades.

Meanwhile, Trina Spear was on Wall Street — first at Citigroup, then Blackstone — and had spotted the same gap from the finance side. She’d looked at medical supply companies as an analyst and noticed that massive vacuum left by hospitals no longer providing uniforms. She saw opportunity where everyone else saw a boring commodity.

A mutual friend connected them. Trina flew to LA on four days’ notice. Over the next few months, Trina flew out every few weekends, and they’d drive to hospital parking lots and sell scrubs out of Heather’s car — waiting by the doors at 7am and 7pm for shift change, free coffee and hot chocolate in hand.

“It was really early stages, but we were swiping credit cards on the side of a road outside of an emergency room. That was really what gave me the confidence to leave Blackstone, to leave Wall Street,” Trina later said.

(Which btw she didn’t just leave. She liquidated her 401(k) to go all in.)

The Power of Staying Close to Your Customer

Every decision FIGS made came back to one question: what do healthcare professionals actually need?

They developed proprietary fabric — antimicrobial, four-way stretch, moisture-wicking, anti-wrinkle — built to survive the reality of 16-hour (sometimes 32-hour) shifts. They designed jackets specifically calibrated for hospital temperatures between 62 and 65 degrees. They thought about the entire system: what healthcare workers wear on the night shift, commuting to work, at work, and heading home.

The distribution model was designed around the profession too. Healthcare workers don’t have the luxury of shopping during business hours — so FIGS went direct-to-consumer from day one, with 98% of sales through their website and app. No more trekking to a medical supply store between bedpans and knee braces.

The brand also made a contrarian bet for a DTC brand to not rely on Facebook ads or cracking algorithms. Instead, it was built on real people in real hospitals loving the product and telling their colleagues.

Think about the physics of word-of-mouth in a hospital: hundreds, sometimes thousands of professionals concentrated in one building, seeing each other every single day. When one nurse shows up in FIGS, everyone notices. As Trina said: “Our customers are walking billboards. They are acquiring our next customer for us because they are trusted colleagues. We don’t have to pay for that.”

The numbers are wild. The majority of new customers come through word-of-mouth. 70% of revenue comes from repeat buyers. They launch new products every week, and healthcare workers on the night shift dial in at midnight to see what dropped. Styles sell out in a day. And here’s the kicker — their customer acquisition cost actually decreased by 61% as they scaled. Every other DTC brand watches that number go up. FIGS went the opposite direction.

This is what happens when you stay relentlessly close to the people you serve. From those early days selling scrubs out of a car at 7am shift change, Trina and Heather never stopped listening. They gathered feedback at every touchpoint and used it to refine the next version. That direct relationship was exactly what the legacy players never had.

In Trina’s words: “You build a community around a profession, you build relationships with real people, you build a brand people love, you build a product people come back over and over and over again to buy. That’s the hard way to build a company and that’s what we’ve done.”

They Fought a Giant to Get Here

The road wasn’t easy. FIGS got hundreds of nos from investors before their first yes. They raised just $75 million total as a private company (compare that to Poshmark’s $153M or ThredUp’s $304M in the same IPO year). They were profitable by 2020.

And then they had to fight a lawsuit from the industry’s biggest player.

In 2019, Strategic Partners Inc. (now Careismatic Brands), the parent company behind Cherokee, Dickies Medical, and other legacy scrub brands, sued FIGS. The lawsuit alleged false advertising and unfair business practices. But FIGS’ own internal evidence painted a different picture. Internal emails from Careismatic’s CEO showed the company scrambling to respond to FIGS’ rise — asking “How do we attack them?” and later admitting “We are getting our asses kicked.”

After a three-week federal trial in 2022, a jury ruled entirely in FIGS’ favor, rejecting all of Careismatic’s claims. The litigation settled in early 2023 with no payments from either side. FIGS’ chief legal officer called it “a powerful win for fair competition.”

Taking It All the Way to the NYSE

On May 27, 2021, Trina and Heather rang the bell at the NYSE. But they didn’t bring their board and their bankers. They brought their community. 60 healthcare professionals were at the IPO. 12 of them stood on the podium to ring the bell.

And then they did something that had never been done before.

FIGS became the very first IPO to offer retail investors early access through Robinhood. Pre-IPO access is typically a Wall Street insider privilege — the kind of thing reserved for institutional investors and well-connected funds. FIGS opened that door to their healthcare workers and everyday investors.

A company built its entire brand around serving healthcare workers from the product, to the distribution, to the community. Then at the single biggest financial milestone of the company’s life, they said: we want our community to be able to invest in this too.

The stock surged 36% on day one.

Why This Story Matters

I absolutely love Heather and Trina’s story. It’s a masterclass in building a modern consumer company — the intentional choices they made around product, distribution, community, and staying relentlessly close to their customer. Everything about how they built FIGS is worth studying.

And yet, it’s maddening.

At IPO, FIGS’ early investor Tulco, controlled by Thomas Tull, owned the majority of the company. He’d put in $50 million total. At IPO, Tulco sold nearly 22 million shares at $22 each — roughly $480 million in gross proceeds from that single offering.

Heather and Trina retained significant ownership positions. They absolutely created life-changing, generational wealth. But the investor who wrote a check walked away with more liquidity at IPO than either of the women who built the company. Who spent years in parking lots. Who cashed out their retirement savings. Who got hundreds of nos. Who ran the business as co-CEOs through a pandemic, a lawsuit, and explosive growth.

That’s just how early-stage investing works — the earliest checks carry the most risk and capture the most upside. But it raises the question I can’t stop thinking about: why aren’t more women writing those early checks?

This is exactly why I’m building Brydge Club to get more women into the rooms where these bets are being made, so the next time a Heather and Trina come along, there are women writing those early checks too.

Female Founder Lore We’re Reading

• Midi Health, led by co-founder and CEO Joanna Strober, raised a $100 million Series D and reached a $1 billion valuation. Midi is the first insurance-covered menopause care platform and is helping women finally get access to care that has been ignored for too long

• Chiyo, a women’s nutrition platform, has been acquired by Epicured, a national leader in food-as-medicine

• InScope, an AI-powered financial reporting platform founded by Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick, raised $14.5 million in Series A funding

• Vivian Tu’s nonfiction book Rich AF will be turned into a scripted series at Amazon MGM Studios

• Olympic skier Eileen Gu went viral for her epic response to a reporter who asked whether winning silver medals was ‘disappointing’

• Loyal has raised a $100M Series C to advance the first longevity drug for dogs

Female Founders Hiring Now

• Alinea is looking for a Head of Finance

• Fora, a modern travel agency platform, has several open roles

• Logan Brown is building Soxton.AI and looking for a head of legal operations (3+ years of EC/VC experiences) and founding GTM lead

• Artemis is hiring for several roles across its care tech portfolio companies

• Ariana Ferwerda is looking for a Director of Brand Marketing at Halfdays (Denver-based)

• Ava is hiring a part-time Social Media + Creator Partnerships Manager

• Bobbie is looking for a Director of Innovation and Product Marketing

P.S. If you’re a founder looking to hire, send us a note! We’d love to pair more of our readers with awesome jobs!

You might not have seen me in your inboxes in a while, so I wanted to pop in and say hi! I’ve been busy building Brydge Club over the past few months and really slowed down to welcome my first baby girl in August 💗

Becoming a mom has completely changed how I see the world - and reinvigorated why I do what I do. It’s never been more important than now.

I grew up with a mom who ran a successful business and was one of the few women in her YPO chapter. Watching her showed me what was possible long before I had the words for it. That example is one I hope to pass on to my daughter. She deserves to grow up seeing women build, lead, and shape industries. When you can see it, you can be it - and I want her to know that truly anything is possible.

That belief is behind everything I’m building at Brydge Club. The female founder stories. The angel collective. All of it is about getting more women into media, tech, and finance.

Why does this matter? Power comes from influence and capital. And as Melinda French Gates said recently, “if we bake bias into our system, it is going to be very hard to get it out.” It’s why she’s investing in getting more women into these spaces - and it’s why I am too.

Like everyone else, I’ve spent the past few weeks planning out my year ahead and reflecting on the trends I’m excited about as an investor. And if you haven’t heard—2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse.

The Fire Horse symbolizes radical independence and explosive momentum. Action, freedom, speed, breakthrough. Moving boldly forward without fear of obstacles.

I really resonated with Jing Gao's (founder of Fly by Jing) tips to prepare for this era:

1. Pick a direction

2. Declutter your life

3. Stop people pleasing

The Fire Horse means breaking free from structures that once validated you. For me, that’s leaving my role in venture to go all in on building Brydge Club – fully betting on myself and my mission to get more women into positions of influence and capital.

Fire brings passion, intensity, clarity. It’s a time to be bold and move fast - so let’s get into it!

Investing trends I’m paying attention to in 2026

1. Consumer health is having a moment.

This keeps coming up in the pitches and decks I’m seeing: sugar is the new cigarette of our generation.

Part of this is frustration with the system. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly half of Americans are worried they won’t be able to afford healthcare in 2026, the highest level recorded.

When the system stops feeling reliable, people start taking matters into their own hands. Add the COVID wake-up call, which forced many to reckon with the importance of baseline health, and you get a generation investing in prevention rather than waiting for something to go wrong.

The pressure on food companies is mounting. San Francisco filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against major food manufacturers in December, arguing that ultra-processed foods are fueling a public health crisis. A three-part Lancet series published in November linked UPFs to harm across nearly every organ system in the body. Big brands like PepsiCo are already scrambling to reformulate.

Then there’s the GLP-1 effect. These drugs are reshaping eating habits and, in turn, what consumers expect from the products they buy. As access expands and prices fall, entire categories are being disrupted. That opens meaningful white space for challenger brands building cleaner alternatives.

The opportunities here are endless. At Brydge Club, we’re tracking companies across categories like:

• Protein, protein, protein!!! (Waay, David, GoodCulture + more)

• Preventative health platforms (Function & SuperPower)

• Continuous hormone tracking (Eli Health, Incora & Lume Health).

I think we’re just scratching the surface of what consumer health will look like over the next decade.

2. We’re in the era of the creator-founder.

VCs and founders alike have realized how powerful having an audience and owning distribution is when you’re building a brand. Those that already have attention can launch faster, iterate in public, and build loyalty before they even have inventory.

Lower CAC + higher retention = better business.

I’ve seen this in my own journey of navigating VC and now building Brydge Club. The time I’ve invested in brand building has directly led to the amazing community I’ve now built.

Allison Ellsworth and Poppi is one of my favorite examples. Poppi was one of the first CPG brands to create a real presence on TikTok, with Allison sharing authentic, silly videos and telling her personal stories about pitching Shark Tank while 9 months pregnant, her health journey, and behind-the-scenes content of building a company.

The result? Over 3 billion views. And she started selling out stores. In May of 2025, PepsiCo acquired Poppi for nearly $2 billion.

Cakes Body is another example. Twin sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai built a $100M+ revenue business from organic founder-led content. They later landed a $300K investment from Emma Grede (their first and only investor!).

Then there’s Nadya Okamoto and August. She wasn’t on TikTok at all before launching—but in the early days, she posted 80-100 videos a day to figure out what resonated. Now she has 4M+ followers and has built a movement around destigmatizing periods. August is now in Target stores nationwide.

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, former Stanford roommates, built Phia, an AI-powered shopping app that just raised $35M+ from investors like Kleiner Perkins, Sarah Blakely, and Kris Jenner. Their podcast The Burnouts—where they document their journey as first-time founders—has half a million Instagram followers and millions of views.

They call it “un-gatekeeping” entrepreneurship: building in public, learning out loud, growing an audience that becomes a user base.

And John Hu (jayhoovy) built Stan, the creator monetization platform, almost entirely through TikTok. He documented his journey starting the business publicly, scaled from $1.7M to $14.7M ARR in a single year, and now serves over 30,000 creators. He’s proof that founder-led content works for both B2B and consumer brands.

Creators are also acting more as owners, taking equity in brands instead of just doing sponsored posts. Think Alix Earle taking a stake in Gorgie, or the Sauz x Bullet Pitch SPV.

3. Moms need more support.

A record number of mothers with young children are leaving the workforce. Among women with children under five, labor force participation fell 2.8 percentage points in the first half of 2025—the largest six-month drop in 40 years.

What families need today has completely changed from our parents’ generation. Most of us live far from grandparents and need dual incomes to raise kids. Without better solutions, we’re forced out of the workforce whether we want to leave or not.

As a new mom, I’ve felt firsthand how many gaps exist in the products and services designed for us. And the market opportunity is massive: women control or influence 85% of consumer spending (!!).

We’re the household decision-makers. Yet investors have somehow overlooked the very categories that impact our health, our time, and our sanity.

These underinvested areas present opportunities for big wins.

Joan Nguyen, building Bumo, is one of the founders I admire working in this space. She ran a daycare in LA and realized she had a never ending waitlist but also daily/weekly no shows. Bumo lets parents book these open slots so parents can have more flexible options and daycares can support more families.

There are also several companies like Perelel health, Conceive, and Mavida Health that focus on improving maternal health, building what should have existed decades ago.

And then there’s the invisible labor. Companies like Sundays, Ohai AI, and Ava AI are tackling the mental load we carry, like endless logistics, scheduling, and decision-making that falls disproportionately on moms. It’s the kind of work nobody talks about but every mom feels.

Female Founder Lore We’re Reading

• Spring Health, a leading global mental health platform, is acquiring Alma (In 2021, April Koh, the CEO & co-founder, became the youngest female founder to lead a unicorn company! The company is now valued at over $3.3B)

• Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s Phia raises a $35M Series A to ‘make shopping fun again’

• I loved reading this profile piece of Flodesk founders Rebecca Shostak and Martha Bitar. After being rejected by Y Combinator, they bootstrapped Flodesk to $36 million in ARR. (A true Fire Horse story!)

• Claire Zau breaks down the startup math behind Brex’s $5.15B acquisition.

• NowThis has acquired Salary Transparent Sheet, a media brand founded by Hannah Williams, for a 7-figure sum.

Female Founders Hiring Now

• Moxxie Ventures is looking for an early-career investor (SF)

• Yardsale, an outdoor gear brand co-founded by Cristina Ashbaugh and Kelly McGee, is hiring a GM for their flagship retail location (SF)

• De Soi is looking for a Director of Marketing (LA)

• Alinea Invest is hiring across roles

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