784 Betsy Fore: Author of Built on Purpose

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

0:46Kara Goldin:As we head into a new year, a lot of leaders are asking the same question. Do we have the right people in the right roles to get where we want to go next? If growing or strengthening your team is part of your 2026 plan, LinkedIn Jobs is built to help you do it smarter. LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant helps you find qualified candidates faster and with more confidence. So you're not just filling roles. You're building a team that lasts. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30 % more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor. That kind of retention matters. And finding the right hire doesn't have to feel overwhelming.

1:29Kara Goldin:With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles, specific criteria, and highlights top matches. So you're not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you're running a business, you need a hiring process that's fast and focused. LinkedIn's AI assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It's a smarter, faster way to hire, and it's why I rely on LinkedIn Jobs. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden.

2:13Kara Goldin:Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Kara Golden to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today's guest is an incredible entrepreneur, investor, and now new author. So excited for her. Betsy Forre is the author of the USA Today bestselling book, Build on Purpose, Discover Your Deep Inner Why, and Manifest the Business of Your Dreams. Such a great book. I got an early copy here and finally got Betsy to come on. So very, very excited.

3:04Kara Goldin:So Betsy has spent nearly two decades building and backing companies as founder of Wonder Wolf, co-founder and former CEO of Tiny Organics, and co-founder of the nonprofit Natives Rising, and now founding partner of Velveteen Ventures, where she invests in solutions for children and the planet and healthcare. She'll talk a lot more about all of the things that they're doing for the next seven generations. And along the way, she's turned personal adversity, including a near-death car accident in her teens into fuel for building multi-million dollar companies and supporting founders as an investor and mentor.

3:53Kara Goldin:And in her terrific, terrific book, Built on Purpose, Betsy brings all of the experiences together into a powerful framework for discovering your deep inner why. I can't wait for her to explain a lot more about that. And this isn't just a book about tactics. It's also about purpose and healing and inner work and you are going to love it. So definitely we'll have all the info in the show notes, but so thrilled to have you here, Betsy. Welcome to the show. Kara, I'm so thrilled as well. I'm really excited for today. Thank you for having me. Totally. And so excited for you, you know, launching a book and writing a book, first of all, and then actually getting it published.

4:42Kara Goldin:And then the USA Today bestselling book. So, so huge. So very, very excited for you. So let's start with the purpose of the book. So what inspired you now to write Built on Purpose, and why was now the right moment to bring this message into the world? Yeah, absolutely. So after being a founder for over two decades, I had gained all of these insights and spreadsheets and KPIs and actually the healing work that you mentioned, Kara, in doing this. And when I moved to being an investor about six or seven years ago now, the founders I work with wanted to know what's my blueprint. And so I was trying to send them all of the insights and all the documents I created over the years.

5:32And it was like, why don't I just start putting this into a book? As I was going through the journey of writing the book over the past five years and giving birth to two of my babies during that time as well. So there was quite a few things going on. I actually unlocked something even greater, which was the mindset shift that you need to have as a founder, trying to encapsulate that within the book. Because I realized that over 90 % of the next generations want to be a founder. They want to be a creative and entrepreneur. All the data speaks to this. And I thought, what does that look like for them?

6:08Like for my kids, right? Like, what are you actually building on? And I believe it's on purpose. right? It's based on your values, which I call your deep inner why. And so I felt like I had to write this book, right? It was a labor of love. And I'm just so thrilled to see it in the market.

6:23Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. As we head into a new year, a lot of leaders are asking the same question. Do we have the right people in the right roles to get where we want to go next? If growing or strengthening your team as part of your 2026 plan, LinkedIn Jobs is built to help you do it smarter. LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant helps you find qualified candidates faster and with more confidence. So you're not just filling roles, you're building a team that lasts. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30 % more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor.

7:05Kara Goldin:That kind of retention matters. And finding the right hire doesn't have to feel overwhelming. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your role's specific criteria and highlights top matches. So you're not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you're running a business, you need a hiring process that's fast and focused. LinkedIn's AI Assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It's a smarter, faster way to hire, and it's why I rely on LinkedIn Jobs.

7:49Kara Goldin:Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Kara Golden to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Before we dive deeper into the book, I'd love to have you share with the audience a little bit more about your experience. You founded and co-founded multiple mission-driven companies and scaled them into incredible businesses. And now, as you mentioned, you're investing in founders. for the listeners who may not know your full story.

8:36Kara Goldin:Who is Betsy for and what shaped your path, I guess, to becoming an entrepreneur? So I would say it all started with this mindset I've had since I was a child, not realizing it at the time, but this idea of why not me? So I actually grew up in a very rural village of less than a thousand people between there and my reservation in North Dakota. I'm Turtle Mountain, Chippewa. And between these two sheltered bubbles, I was always in the garage tinkering, building something. My dad's a motocross racer. And my parents and my family taught me that if I could dream it, if I believed it, I could build it.

9:12So I actually became the first person in my family to go to college, became an industrial designer, thinking I might actually design motorcycles for a living. what wound up happening is I designed toys which is so much more fun than it even sounds I mean I couldn't believe this was a real job I got to design toys for George Lucas and the Star Wars franchise for Mattel Barbie for Polly Pocket Hasbro games and oh my goodness Kara out of all of those companies that I built for and all of the different designs that I created only a few of those make it to market so it taught me very early on in my journey not just how to fail fast but how to approach each idea with the same enthusiasm, which would serve me for decades on.

9:53I wound up looking into and researching the UK market and had discovered someone who I thought, this is the next Branson. What he's selling, I'm totally buying, right? And everyone knows who he is now. His name is Michael Acton Smith. He's the founder of Calm, the meditation app. But previous to that, he was building another company called Mind Candy, where the hero product was Moshi Monsters. Having built toys during this early part of my career, I flew out to London not knowing anyone, walked into our old, old offices in Battersea when there was only a few of us there at the time and just asked to see Michael with this massive portfolio in hand of the foam core mock-ups I'd made based on his digital brand.

10:37Again, why not me, right? What do I have to lose? I just walk in there. I later found out that this was not very British to do that, right? That this was kind of an American thing to do. But, you know, I walked in there and, you know, the rest is history. So he, after we did finally meet on the fifth time, so kept showing up, right? He hired me on the spot. We chatted for over two hours. We grew that company to over 90 million registered users online, the number one toy brand in all of UK for six years on beating even Star Wars and Lego. And it was during this time where Michael had coined the term Silicon Roundabout, which was like our Silicon Valley in London.

11:12And I was doing hack hackathons on the weekends because I wasn't getting to actually build anymore. I was having to lead all the product team of over 300 people we had at that time. And so I invented the first Fitbit for dogs, which became my first company. That's actually around the time when I'd met you, Kara, for the first time at an entrepreneurial event when you were building with Hint and we were in the throes of it. And I had built this for my little terrier who was one years old at the time. He just turned 14. And it was to extend his life because he could get down to his goal weight based on the device.

11:43I had thought, oh, it makes complete sense. I'm going to launch this thing at Harrods, a 24 karat gold version of it. I mean, no other founder would necessarily think that makes complete sense, right? But this was the early 2010s. So really, D2C was just taking off at the time. We were one of the first brands to launch with it. That was a very long story that we might get into more of, but we became the best-selling pet wearable at the time, making Oprah's favorite things list in every major retailer across North America. I got Forbes or under 30 for manufacturing and industry, having built the hardware by hand with my team in the Far East.

12:17And when I was going through acquisition with that company, I thought, well, I really only know how to be a founder at this point, right? What's the next thing, right, that I'm building? Well, I was actually pregnant with my first son, Sebastian. And I thought, what's the greatest gift I could give him in life? It's probably a love of vegetables from the very first bites. So I built my company, Tiny Organics, which I grew to over$13 million in revenue in the first 24 months. All three of my children have grown up on tiny and prefer vegetables because of it. And then I became the first Native American to ever raise a Series A round of funding.

12:48And I thought I've got to make sure there are many, many more Native founders to come. So I founded my nonprofit, Natives Rising, where we serve over 100 tribal communities through our membership and Indigenous technologists and founders. We've actually increased the number of Indigenous women graduating with STEM degrees by 50%, and we've 3x the number of Native founders receiving funding for their companies. So then all of this to say leads us up to today, where I've been investing for about six, seven years out of two different firms and launched Velveteen Ventures.

13:21Kara Goldin:I absolutely love it. So back to the core of the book, you talk about discovering a deep inner why. For someone hearing that for the first time, how would you describe it? And why does it matter so much? When you look at your life, and as illustrated through what I just shared with you here, some of these things don't even feel like how could they be connected, right? The thing that actually connects them are your values. And that's the underlying purpose of your life. That's the thread. And so when I talk about your deep inner why, it's actually an exercise that you go through in the book where I include the seven grandfather teachings of my tribe, the Anishinaabe.

14:04So things like love, humility, bravery. And then I include about 40 other values within that exercise where you hone in on your top five to 10 values that you carry in your life today. Those can ebb and flow, but I find the top three usually remain consistent throughout your life. And the idea here and the real key is not just knowing what your values are in terms of how you make your decisions. It's embodying them. So one of the first practices I go through in the book is called anchoring, where you think back to one of the many times in your life that you have felt that value, whatever it might be, let's say bravery.

14:44So I'll think back at one of the many times where I felt in this moment I was so brave and I was courageous. I'll actually hold my thumb in forefinger together and meditate on this moment, remembering every single detail that can come to mind. This is actually a process through neurolinguistic programming. I'm an NLP practitioner as part of the healing work I've done with my nonprofit Natives Rising and the healing retreats that we lead there. And this was the real unlock that I mentioned earlier, Kara, where it's like you actually have the ability to rewire your brain through positive thinking that can illuminate your life because it attracts everything you want towards you.

15:25And that energy you put out in the world, that's what you get back. But if you're anchoring in that place of your values and where you find that core strength, your decision-making reflects that. And that can be the thread that leads your life, no matter what company you're founding or what you're building.

15:41Kara Goldin:So, so interesting. So blending neuroscience and personal healing and entrepreneurial strategy, you must be an incredible investor and mentor to so many, whether it's people that you're investing in or your nonprofit, people that you've come across, your employees. When did you realize that this inner work and the business work were actually inseparable? I think it's the journey you take as a founder where you get to a certain point that some people call it burnout. Inevitably, if you're in the ring for long enough, you experience this. And I remember waking up in the middle of the night, just with so much anxiety and thinking about all the fires I had to put out for my company, right?

16:37What I was building. And I'm like, I know I'm not alone here. I feel like I'm working in a silo trying to get all the revenue and the projections and the, you know, everything that we have to do, right? As founders. And yet, Yet I hadn't focused on the most important relationship of all. And that was with myself. I was so consumed with the relationship with my customers or with my what I call my founding families, right? My co-founders in this work or even my team, right? And the employee engagement and everything. But I wasn't doing, I wasn't looking or creating the time and the space to have that inner work and that healing journey within my own self.

17:15So I think children will do this to you. And it's like the biggest blessing that it forces you to pause. And I think as founders, we're so prone to action, to doing right that like to to to pull back. That's really what my book is looking at is to pull back and really have that time of reflection and doing the inner work because it feeds your soul. but it actually allows you to show compassion, not only to yourself, but to everyone around you, because you have done it, right? So there's many different processes. There's 18, actually, that I learned through going through the neurolinguistics programming and becoming a clinician in it.

17:53And I share and weave many of those throughout the book and these practices that have honestly healed myself in doing that inner work and really changed my life, because that's what creates sustained success.

18:07Kara Goldin:So what's the biggest misconception people have about manifestation, especially super high performers? Yeah, so I've heard everything, right? That it's so woo and it's not, you know, not real and not back to it and all of the things. But, you know, whenever I had the idea for this book originally, I'll never forget, I was sitting in a cafe with Michael, my ex-boss from Calm in London. And I said, I said, what you've done for meditation by making it accessible and less woo, I want to do for manifestation, because I believe we all have a creator spirit within us that's waiting and willing to be unleashed if we can shift from the scarcity to the abundance mindset.

18:46So I wanted the whole book to be around that and inspiring founders to live in that reality, right, that they can anchor in. You know, Heathen helped me and we've in so many ways, you know, co-authored this book. And because, you know, at the time when he was launching Calm, this was now over 12, 13 years ago, meditation was still considered something that you don't really talk about necessarily, you know, to friends or you don't think about what, you know, it's not a it was sort of taboo or woo or whatever you want to call it. And I believe that's where we are with manifestation today. I was just at a conference last weekend with Andrew Huberman and on the main stage, he was talking about visualization.

19:30the entire talk. And actually, it was the same language I use for manifestation. It was just a different term, right? And we hear it across everything in mainstream media now, and especially in the future generations, right? Talking about they know there's something bigger. It's something spiritual, something otherworldly, the universe, right? It's there and it's waiting and it's willing. And that's what I really delve into and is the crux of my book. So HarperCollins Business, They've never launched a book like this because it was merging the nuts and bolts of building multimillion dollar successful businesses, billion dollar businesses, right, with the spiritual aspect of of really like engaging with with yourself, doing the inner work, but the universe and how that plays a part in your journey.

20:17Kara Goldin:So what is it about founders that makes them uniquely wired to turn kind of intention into reality? Oh, I love this question so much because I believe that founders are the ultimate manifestors. We make something out of nothing, right? Like our vision board is our pitch deck. And we believe it before it's actually been fulfilled. That is manifesting. That is manifesting. So that is the idea that, you know, you've created a reality beyond what's currently in front of you because you're living as if it's realized and you're envisioning that new reality of whatever that impact you're hoping to create in the world so intently that it just becomes real.

21:01So really, founders have already been doing this for centuries, right? And who better to teach this inner work of how to build the thing and do it from nothing or do it from zero to one? And so I actually interview over 20 founders throughout the book, and over half are women, a third are Native American. Some have IPO'd, some are double unicorns, but the thing they all have in common is that thread of your purpose, right, that carries you and those values, because those are the things that when you lean into, you can envision a life for yourself beyond your wildest dreams.

21:38Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. You highlight leaders like Elisa Marshall of Maman Bakery. She was actually on our podcast a while ago and unlocking these breakthroughs using your deep inner why method. and can you talk about that story in particular and what results she saw? Yes. So Elisa, she worked with her teams from a point of, you know, when she was envisioning this company from the jump, it was actually her, I believe, hold on, let me just get this right, Carrie, because I haven't read that part of the book in a long time. So hold on, we might have to back up a minute. She, because I believe it was her, No, it was her husband's grandmother who had these gorgeous plates that she was envisioning.

22:29She was envisioning creating an ambiance around these plates, a feeling that when you walked into a space, it would convey this sense of home. And especially in like a fast paced Manhattan, where at the time anyway, many cafes were in and out. You weren't really getting that sense of I'm going to sit down. It's more of that European culture, right? I'm going to really enjoy this. I'm going to drink it in. And so she was a trailblazer when it came to building those type of spaces. And by doing it through her purpose and her values, it discusses in the book that she was able to scale to over 30 locations whilst keeping that intent around the authenticity of the brand and even bringing it back to that very first story around her getting these gorgeous blue and white printed plates from her mother-in-law.

23:21Um, and, and she said most of them have cracked now, but yeah, she, she used them on the show floor and it was like, don't recommend that. But, um, but I think, you know, she, when she trains her teams, uh, she always tells the stories of, you know, how it came to be. And I, um, yeah, that, that is really driven by her deep inner why. And those things that a lot of the founders in the book didn't even really know what to call it, but it is, it's their sense of purpose, uh, that has guided them.

23:49Kara Goldin:I love it. So you talk about seven generations investment philosophy, and I'd love for you to describe this and how does that worldview inform the kinds of companies you ultimately invest in at Velveteen Ventures? Yeah, so Carla Brolier, my partner and I at Velveteen Ventures, are the first Native American women to launch our own fund in the nation. We believe want a mini to come, but our perspectives are very different, highly differentiated. And when we had built a group together previously for Native women asset managers, there was only a dozen of us in First Nations in Native America. I'll never forget, we were driving up the California coast after one of our retreats one year, and she was building for Yvonne Chouinard the Patagonia Purpose Trust and then spun out the Home Planet Fund, where all the revenue for Patagonia now flows back to the Earth.

24:44But her entire background has been in climate and standing up seven climate funds previously was Al Gore's right hand on his climate reality project as well. And, you know, we were just I said to her, I'm starting to build this fund focused on seven generations, thinking what is so ingrained in us culturally, honoring our ancestors and then looking forward seven generations within our actions and what we're building. for me it made complete sense coming from the children's space that it would be children's focused solutions that I'd be investing in. For Carla the children need to have a planet to inherit right this is what we believe in the work that we do that these are two things that are interwoven to create this beautiful tapestry and I think our LPs really resonate with this as well so when we decided on that road trip of the coast to join forces it was like wow because you know So to, yeah, I mean, to combine forces in this way to make an even greater impact together has been, yeah, one of my greatest joys.

25:48I think the founders that we get to back, they're working in climate, they're working in pediatric health. We just did a consumer tech deal this last week in the children's space. and for us to be focused on these issues and solving solutions with founders that have experienced the problems firsthand. Yeah, our LPs and it seems the market are just thrilled to have this diverse perspective in market getting to do this work.

26:16Kara Goldin:There are so many founders who would love to lead with purpose and be able to have investors like you who get it, who are not only previous founders, but also who are really putting their money where their mouth is, right? That they're leading with purpose. They're looking for people who are really trying to lead with the same kind of ethos overall. What advice would you give to founders who are out there looking for an investor, for a partnership beyond money? And maybe what are the signs? Like, are there one or two questions that you should start asking as you're thinking about trying to figure out who is the right one to raise from?