How We're Raising Money in 2025: Annie Evans, Dream Ventures

0:00Hey, business festies. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. And today I'm chatting with Annie Evans, the founder of Green. And cheers. Welcome to the show, Annie. So excited to be here. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Garnsworthy. And I have to say thank you for coming to Female Founder World Summit recently and being one of our mentors on the money train and speaking to all of our founders about funding and fundraising. I appreciate you. Thank you. Oh my gosh. It was so much fun. Had an absolute blast. It was like the most energizing Saturday in I don't even know how long.

0:37It's a great community, right? Like it's a good group of women. Oh my gosh. The best. Exceptional. Brilliant. Powerhouses. For people that don't know Dream Benches, what are you guys building? We are building an ecosystem to connect more women to capital. And we do that through connections, through our network, helping them network map in their own network and just sort of being the dot connector. I love that. we actually have like a weirdly similar story, you and me. You worked in media and then you had a startup that closed and you ended up building Dream Ventures. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you got into angel investing and into this startup space?

1:17Sure. So similar to you, after having your own startup, you have immense empathy for others and want to share your learnings. It's a great way, especially to heal if you've gone through any like PSD from your startup to share those tips and tricks to others and avoid some of those like heartaches and lessons learned. And so started Dream Ventures out of the wing in 2016, just with the mission to help more female entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life, make connections and help along the way. So started angel investing in 2019. I was helping iFund women raise their seed round and I was hosting a event for them to raise 2 million.

2:02They had a bunch of guys on their cap table and the founder came to me and said, I need help getting women on the cap table. So I hosted an in real life event. We did a breakfast and a lunch. 20 women came to the breakfast, 20 to the lunch, Rebecca Minkoff, Sally Krawcheck, Alexandra Wilson were around the table. And after helping them, I realized that I really wanted to do my first angel check. And the way that I went about it, I was working a corporate job. I had just gotten a sales bonus of$17 ,000 and after taxes, it was$10 ,000. That was the minimum check size to join the round. And I just went for it.

2:43Amazing. So who have you invested in? Oh my gosh. So I have 28 companies. Some of them include Topicals, Vareo, Brightland, Hany, Marlo. Amazing. Yeah. I want to like focus this conversation around your advice for all of the founders listening who are just sitting here like, I just need like more money to like build this thing and I'm really struggling to get access. And so we're going to talk about that in a minute. But I want to keep on your kind of like early story here and about learning how to become an angel investor and write those checks for women who are interested in doing that. What advice do you have for folks who have never written a check before and want to get into angel investing?

3:28The first thing I would do is just sit down and start to think about, like, I call it your investment thesis. So when you think about your legacy, and especially if you're a mom or if you're not, you know, what do you want to contribute to the world? So maybe that's products that are better for you ingredients or a more sustainable way to do something. So think about what you really care about and start writing those kind of pillars down. And then when it comes to brands, you know, sometimes you can just, if you're like a consumer and a customer obsessed with a brand, sometimes you can just literally email them and say, are you guys raising capital?

4:05And if they are, see if there's like any opportunities to join that way. Not a lot of brands are saying no to money at the moment. So I would send that cold email. Exactly. Okay. So you are an angel investor and you've built this fund. I think now you have raised more than 25 million. 25 million in the last few years. Wow. For women-led companies. For women-led companies. Amazing. Talk to me about what an angel syndicate is and how that plays into what you guys do. So what it is, is all it means is a group of angel investors. So typically minimum check size to join a round is typically for a seed round around 25 ,000.

4:45And this is a great way to join as a group. And you can start anywhere from$5 ,000. And so that's how I've been able to, you know, build a portfolio of 28 companies is by doing it through angel syndicates. And so when we lead a syndicate, it's usually about 25 to 30 women and they do checks around five or 10K. So then collectively, it's about a quarter of a million into each company. Amazing. I made my first angel investment this year. I was like on the list of things I wanted to do and I was looking for the right one. And it was like a very small amount. I invested in a company called Craterway.

5:22The founder is Kristen Berlin. She's been in the community for a long time and she's amazing. And I was blown away by how easy it was. I think I'd thought that it was going to be this like really difficult, complicated process, but like the whole thing was actually really simple to get into. And I was like very surprised by that. I want to talk about your accelerator program now because you are, I think we have a lot of overlap in our communities between your accelerator and the female founder world community. I know a lot of people are kind of like involved in both, which is very cool. What is your accelerated program and how did you get started with this?

5:57So I started in January 2022 and I had a lot of people reaching out for sounding board around fundraising. And one of my advisors, Laura Cox, had just sold her company that she built. And a lot of people were reaching out to her on how to sell and have an exit. And so she and I started it together in January 2022, just with the goal to create a safe space container for a small group, seven-week process, and just demystify the process for fundraising. and what we found is that a lot of creative visionary founders just don't have the skill set if you don't have a finance background on how to raise and being able to learn and be surrounded by other women and get to ask questions.

6:43Knowledge is power. What we've also seen is like the commodity and the community that comes out of it. So isolating to be a founder and so these small groups they become like family by the end of the seven weeks. I love that. And I feel like you've also created a space where the women in the group feel like they can be vulnerable enough that they can ask questions without feeling like they should already know it or have that you know have that knowledge and that information I think that's something that earlier in my career I was very much like I wasn't asking a lot of these questions because I just assumed everyone else knew and I think that's something you guys are really good at of just being you know very open and creating that kind of culture where asking questions and learning from each other is really encouraged.

7:24For sure. And I just want to add that I now co-lead it with Kelly Arena from Golden Hour Ventures, former investment banker. She's also invested in 30 women-led ventures as well. And she's the one that I co-lead a lot of these angel syndicates with. She does all of the content. She's absolutely brilliant, amazing. And I'm so lucky to be able to do it with her. I know that everyone listening to this is going to be thinking, okay, this sounds amazing. How do I get involved? Like, how do you choose people to become part of the accelerator? and where do people go to learn more about joining this? So it's dreamventuresaccelerator.com and we get hundreds of applications.

8:01We choose the top 20 to 25 founders that have business viability and a strong founding team. And we do it every season. So the next one will be in the winter, January 22nd. Amazing. Yeah. Okay, let's talk for some of the people who maybe like won't get into the program or haven't applied. What knowledge are you sharing in there? Like let's get specific about some of this stuff that founders need to learn as they're navigating this process. Like what's your FAQs that you're getting? So we really start from the beginning is just getting organized and figured out like who are the right investors for you.

8:37Yeah. Also, are you ready to raise capital? So I'm a big fan of, I really like to encourage founders to have an MVP and find product market fit because having a startup is stressful enough. And when you bring in investors, especially ones that are not, you know, people that you know, you're trying to figure out product market fit and you have taken investor money trying to figure out your business. Pressure. Pressure. And then you're trying to do all these investor, you know, reports. So I always encourage people for that first initial capital. I'm a big fan of crowdfunding. I know there's a stigma behind it.

9:16I've done it myself. I raised 50K for my company in a month from iFundWomen. Grants, crowdfunding, there's a lot of pitch competitions. I just think getting that kind of capital rather than angel investor or VC is what I recommend. Okay, amazing. So let's say someone is ready to raise their first round and they want to actually bring investors into their business. They're ready to do it. What are some of those documents, conversations, what do they have to have ready to send out and what do they need to know how to share and say? So they need to have a data room with their legal documents. What's a data room?

10:04So a data room is one central place. So it could be Google Drive or... Literally like a folder. Yes. Yes. A folder. A folder. Which is, you know, your files and your legal documents and any other, you know, relevant information that you want to put in there. And then in terms of being ready, my favorite thing, I don't know if we're ready to go into this. Let's do it. Or not. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So the way that we raise capital is because you have a process that you recommend, which I think is very cool. We have a fun way to do it. So we do in real life investor events. We do a lot of stuff in private homes, especially for consumer brands.

10:45So the way that we do it is we have the founder come, they share their founder story and everyone gets to try their product. So if it's beverage, they're drinking it, fragrance, they're smelling it, you know, makeup, they're trying it and they get to the angel investors attend. We facilitate the Q &A and then we invite everyone to participate in the round. So it's a little like Shark Tank, but like a safe space. But what we find is the magic is instead of sitting on Zoom and having pitch after pitch, you can go into a room, connect with potential angels in real life. And we find that it helps convert a lot higher because of the connection and the emotional and the energy in the room.

11:32And again, if there's 30 people there, instead of you having 30 Zooms and saying the same thing, you can just host events. And we usually say do it in the place where you have the most condensed like networks that could be, we do a lot of stuff in New York, LA, Miami. And then we always say have a virtual one. So that way everybody can attend who lives outside of that city. I love this idea. I'll talk about the virtual one in a second. But, you know, for someone who's listening and they're kind of like, I can't even get an investor to reply to my email. How do I get them to come to an event? What's your advice here about finding a way to like bring people together into a room?

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13:27Use the code FFW25 at checkout and step up your branding game. We put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. So I love that. I always say like, if you have a advisor that's well-known, that's like, you know, a well-known founder or... Ask them to host a lunch. Exactly. And that's a great character's angle. Another thing is positioning it like, let's say you're doing it in LA, Women Power Lunch, bringing together the top angels in LA to meet each other and introduce themselves. And there's going to be this company that's going to like share their founder story. I love that. Something that I think about a lot is like, if you're not getting invited to the places you want to be, like be the host, like be the one hosting it and bring those people together.

14:15And you'll be surprised who says yes in those situations. If you're not getting invited into the room, create the room. A hundred percent. Let's talk a little bit about that actual like pitch and the pitching process. What do you think is really important for a founder to be able to communicate and show to a potential investor at that really early stage? Like what kind of traction do they need to have and how do they sell themselves? Confidence is everything. Confidence and conviction is everything. And it's not knowing everything and you can be, you know, humble and you can take feedback. But I think being able to articulate the problem you're solving and the pain point in 30 seconds is so crucial.

14:58The founders, I remember topicals. I had a call with Alamide. She was pre-product, pre-revenue, did not have a jar of anything. She also would have been like 21 or 22. 21, 22. We had a phone call. Within two minutes, I was convinced that I wanted to be on the journey and she didn't even have a bottle or anything. It was her vision and the way that she could articulate it that had me wanting to be on the journey with her and send her a check like that week. Wow. That's really interesting. Are there any brands that you look at now in your community, in the broader founder community that you kind of think like, they're up and coming.

15:35This is really interesting. Yes. I love, since becoming a mom, I'm very drawn to parenting solutions. So anything that makes, you know, helps with childcare or family logistics or alleviating some of like the mental load, I'm really drawn to right now. Okay. Interesting. And you recently had your accelerator program and one of the women who's in our community was in your, So it was in your community. Tell me about Kwanee and how she was involved. Okay. So when Kwanee from Safros applied, I literally got so excited when I saw her application because it was such an innovative, exciting brand that had me excited.

16:16And so I felt so honored. And then getting to know her during the seven weeks, she was a complete standout rock star. And she ultimately won the Dream Ventures Pitch Competition in a room full of VCs and angels. So on the judging panel, we had Estee Lauder VC. We had the founder of Experiment. We had Jamie Woodward, who's Hannah Bronfman's partner for her new VC. And she won and ended up, she was super emotional and grateful to win. And we were all like crying tears of joy. And she, I think she's going to crush. I think she's going to absolutely kill it. What I want to like understand is like, what makes these brands that cut through, like what makes them special?

16:59Like what makes those amazing investors like see Kwani and see her brand Softrose and think like, yeah, this is going to be really big because it's, it is hard to like fundraise right now, but then there are these like breakthrough brands that just seem to, I don't know, like get traction really quickly. Like what is that magic and like, how do people replicate it? I, I don't know if it's like the easiest thing to like quantify and like a podcast conversation but I just want to like understand what you're thinking here and like what you see authenticity yeah you know she just her founder story and from when she was little is just so just has like the secret sauce and then she actually created um branded like gifts for the judges that was very like shark tank that was for soft rose like if somebody was checking out at retail with like the receipt it was like genius amazing okay I want to talk a little bit about resources and resource recommendations.

17:55Obviously, you know, joining the Dream Ventures Accelerator or applying to join Ultimate Resource if you're looking at fundraising. But what are some of the other places people can go to try and learn how to do this? We, well, one other thing I'll add is that if people aren't able to do the accelerator, we have bookable hour sounding board sessions. If somebody just wants to book an hour and they're debating if they're ready to raise, They can just easily do that. I would say that in the early days, some people were surprised that I would charge and not, you know, I get hundreds of emails to pick my brain about fundraising.

18:34And if I took every call, I would be on the phone all day. And so what I've realized is that if someone's ready to invest in an hour strategy session, that they really mean business. They're going to take it seriously. and I'm able to like carve out the time to really put my thinking cap on specifically for them. One other thing I'll add is just pick your brain is like a pet peeve thing. So I would say if you're in the fundraise process, just a pro tip. If you're reaching out to someone, position it more like I'd love a sounding board because you're an expert here. You know, could I share something with you?

19:11I also think like reaching out and asking for like really specific, like I need help with X, Y, Z, because often if people reach out to me and they say like, can we get a coffee or can we whatever? And I'm like, I haven't, I haven't seen my sister in two weeks, man. Like if I'm going to have a coffee, I'm going to, like, I need to see her, you know. But if someone reaches out to me and says, I'm trying, I'm looking for X, I'm really confused about Y and like, you know, here's a link to my product. I'm like, okay, I can voice note you for 15 minutes and let's have this conversation now. Obviously, we want to help.

19:46But yeah, I think being really specific with those requests when you're talking about mentorship is really important too. 100%. I love a voice note. Send me a voice note of the problem you're trying to solve and I will voice note you back some thoughts. When you think about the year ahead, we're going into 2025. when this comes out it'll be like pretty close to the end of the year what do you think the funding landscape is going to look like for women in consumer because it's just been such a shit year like it's been hard it's been really hard well I'm manifesting that people are whipping their checkbooks out because everyone's really feeling good and happy um so I have I have high hopes for 2025 I think it's going to be a good year okay I'd love to hear that I want to like dig into a little bit more about your expertise on the different types of raises that people do.

20:41So like from when you start out to kind of like when you sell your business, like what are those different steps and the language that people use around those different rounds? Just to clear up some of this language, because I do think that there's a lot of assumed knowledge in this space and a lot of people come to these conversations just being like, you know, I've built a brand or a product that solves my problem. And this fundraising piece is a big question mark for me. For sure. We get this all the time. So starting with pre-seed is the, you know, the earliest round. I describe it as, you know, pre-products, pre-revenue.

21:17And that's really like usually friends and family or a few angels that invest specifically in your space. And then seed round is post-revenue, post-products. So you've been in business for like maybe a year, year and a half. and that's usually you know two to five million dollar raise on average then a few you know 18 months later two years later some people decide to go for a series a and that's really to like catapult you know your rocket launch that you're on and take it to the next level grow to new cities really expand the team maybe like put some marketing efforts behind like a big retail partnership.

21:56And then series B is usually a round that's maybe the one before exit. You know, oftentimes we hear that and, you know, some people end up doing a series A round. And so it just kind of depends on, I would say, the industry that you're in too. But it's like the alphabet, you know just keep going I want to dig into the specifics of building out your pitch deck this like hero document that goes out to investors and is really selling your brand and selling your vision what are some of the key elements that people need to put in there and that you think like really helps you know sell an investor on a certain business so I would say just high level I like 12 sides max like short keep it short sweet and really really simple like minimal copy you know you can have a nice design but just really minimal copy on what you're saying so when I get a deck that's like 36 pages long and there's a lot of copy I'm not reading it but when I get a deck that's like 12 sides and it's really nicely designed and it's like short and succinct then I'm going to look through it.

23:11People on average, I think it's like 90 seconds that they go through your deck and they're like, yes or no. And it's like on their phone in an Uber. Yeah. You know? So it really needs to be, it just needs to be clear. Problem, solution, why you're the person to really do it. What's, what makes you the one that's going to be successful? You know, total addressable market. So what's the big market opportunity there? And how do you calculate that? That's something that I feel like people ask as well. Like, how do I calculate that number? Looking at market research and what else is out there in your industry and just kind of like doing that research and diligence.

23:49Google. Yeah, Google. Exactly. Do you guys have like any downloads or free resources from Dream Ventures that are like templates or workshops or anything like that? Or if not, we should totally like co-create something for people, I feel. We should. We don't. We have Kelly Arena created a resource library in our accelerator that everyone has access with all the templates. But we have not done the free downloads yet. We should do a free download together that's like really entry level guide to this kind of stuff because we get these questions all the time. And there are just not enough resources out there that are just like clear and like really demystify this and just speak in like plain English about it.

24:33I feel like some of it is intentionally trying to scare people off or something because it's not as complicated. A lot of these words mean really simple things, you know? 100%. Amazing. Okay. So the last thing I want to ask you, Annie, is for resource recommendations. You've already given us a bunch through the show, but is there anything else that you recommend folks who are either like fundraising or just through your experience of being an entrepreneur and in this space in general, any books, any other podcasts, habits that folks should go and check out as they're building their own businesses?

25:03Um, first, I would definitely become a member of Feedball Founder. Yes. Thank you for the plug. Come and be a member. Um, and second, I would just, honestly, I'm just a big fan of communities. I think so much happened there. I would surround yourself. The biggest advice is just surround yourself with peers that are at a similar journey to you, but maybe one step ahead. Um, and everybody can share resources. I see so often where a founder will meet with an investor and say, come back and say, you know, they weren't, they don't invest in my space, but let me make an intro for you. And also be that person that pays it forward.

25:43Be that person. That is how you network is you're the one that is giving, like be a giver and then the things will come to you. I believe in that so strongly. Same. I, the founders, I have, you know, hundreds of my network and the founders that add value to me and they ask how they can help and then they make a connection, they stand out so much more than someone that's just constantly asking and taking and asking and asking and asking. So I think it should be an even exchange. In terms of a book, one of my favorites is Backable. Oh, I haven't heard this one. And it is all about what makes investors take a chance on you.

26:24So it talks about, you know, the founder of Altar Voices and Glossier and all of these amazing founders and why it's storytelling, storytelling, confidence and conviction. So even for myself, I feel much more comfortable being the hype woman for, you know, your best friend or your founder than I do talking about myself. And so I think if it's not something that comes naturally, then invest in a pitch coach and someone that can really, you know. Pitch coach. Okay. Amazing. How does someone find a pitch coach? Well, our favorite is Katie Dunn, Power to Pitch. Oh, yeah. Katie Dunn. We sent her into, I'm going to write this down.

27:03I'm going to ask her to do a workshop with us. Yeah, she's incredible. And just practice, practice, practice. But yeah, confidence is everything. I said that was my last question, but I have one more. Like you're seeing and speaking to so many up and coming founders. And I'm curious about some of the themes about like the common issues everyone's facing. and like what you see across all of these different businesses and different categories and women with different backgrounds. What are some of the common themes and the problems that you see the founders in your community experiencing? Is it like purely just like access to capital?