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My Investment in Encantos: A Multicultural Media Company for Kids

I talked about my recent investment* in Encantos on TWiStartups (episode 892), but I want to dive a little deeper into the digital media and consumer products opportunity and why I invested in a media company for kids.

Encantos is a West Coast-based digital media and consumer products company that designs and develops family brands and brings them to life via animated films, apps, books, toys and other play experiences — all with a multicultural lens. They are building a portfolio of new consumer brands that resonate with multicultural families — starting first with a bilingual baby brand inspired by LatinX culture.

LatinX families are the big beachhead market for Encantos, but this is a cross-cultural opportunity that will capture parents of many backgrounds who are interested in teaching their kids secondary language skills.

The first brand in the Encantos family is Canticos (“little songs”) —  a series of bilingual singalong videos in English and Spanish targeting children 5 and under. Canticos is already taking advantage of the cross channel opportunity and merging the physical and the digital. The apps can be found in the Google Play and Apple App Store, physical books are being sold online and are available at retailers including Barnes & Noble, Target and more. In addition, Encantos entered into a licensing and consumer products partnership with Nickelodeon for Canticos. Canticos Season 1 is live across Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. platforms and they will be launching Canticos consumer products this year.

Production on Canticos Season 2 is underway and this first round of outside funding will allow the team to expand into new product lines and consumer goods as well as help launch new brands.

But they’re not stopping there. The multiculti kid’s market is a big blue ocean.

Read the rest on Medium —
Encantos: The Future of Kid’s Media is Multicultural

 

In Good Company Conference – Women Raising Money

In Good Company Conference

In Good Company Raising Capital Panel with Bee Shapiro, Monique Woodard, Ariane Goldman, and Cheryl Contee

In Good Company ‘Raising Capital’ Panel with Bee Shapiro, Monique Woodard, Ariane Goldman, and Cheryl Contee

Last week, I was at the In Good Company conference for women and as I said on Instagram, I’m still buzzing from the high of being in a room that was in full support of  women founders, creatives, and mom entrepreneurs.

In Good Company didn’t just invite all badass women and moms in their network. They also set aside pumping rooms and milk refrigerators and created an overall atmosphere where pregnant women and women carrying their swaddled babies seemed both natural and welcome.

Of course, this is exactly what you would expect from the publisher of Mother magazine, but it’s also an example for how the rest of the business world should be — giving women the access and ability to be fully in the room at every stage of life.

In many ways, women have been shut out of the startup industry’s value creation. Women are disproportionally underrepresented on cap tables as both founders and employees and hold just 9% of the equity value in startups.

The disparity continues when it comes to raising money. Companies with female founders get only 15% of all venture capital dollars, with teams of exclusively female founders raising even less. Yet, when First Round Capital looked at their own portfolio, they found that their investments in companies with at least one female founder performed 63% better than their investments in all-male founding teams.

Now imagine how dismal those numbers are for women of color.

When I talked to the women at the In Good Company conference, I met a lot of women building businesses in retail, beauty, and other highly lucrative categories. But businesses in categories dominated by women consumers are often underestimated and as a result, undervalued and underfunded by venture capital.

Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake raised less than $50M before the company’s 2017 IPO and has been candid about being underestimated and not getting the same high-flying valuations as male founders in companies not built on women consumers.

Companies like Rent the Runway, Shine, The Skimm and more all have early examples of female founding teams having to prove themselves and build category-defining, innovative companies on far less capital.

Entrepreneurship is about solving big problems, but too often, the venture community is only funding problems that half of the world deems important.

Women often see problems that other people miss, but without the capital to execute, they sometimes end up building smaller businesses.

I’m confident that this will change as we get more women writing checks in venture.

I keep meeting women (on both the founder side of the table and the venture fund manager side of the table) who are so eager to figure out how to crack the code of raising capital.

And so many of the questions and answers that come up center how we can make ourselves better and more worthy of funding. Be more assertive. Wear this, not that. Show more confidence. And for god’s sake, don’t be pregnant. Most of these have no grounding in how great of a founder you are, but how we are allowed to show up as women in business.

Capital should rise up to meet the best founders, not the other way around.

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The thing that actually needs to be hacked aren’t you as a person or the mechanics of raising money, but who gets to distribute capital in the first place.

Thanks again to In Good Company for providing a place where women can show up and be their most authentic selves.

On Being a VC Who Travels

Planes Trains and Automobiles

“If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.” — Gloria Steinem

On the Road/Off the Road

I just finished reading My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem’s first-person account of her travels and being an activist who was (and still is) known for being in all of the places that it makes sense to be in no matter where they are ‒ the March on Washington, the 1977 National Women’s Convention, a third-class rail car in India on her way to an ashram.

Gloria Steinem - My Life on the RoadSteinem stresses the importance of personal connections ‒ the kind that aren’t made over Skype, but happen in cabs, on trains, and over dinner with one another.

I just came off of 5 weeks of straight travel ‒ New York, Martha’s Vineyard, Boston, Florida, New Haven, Cape Cod, back to Boston and then back to New York before finally returning home to San Francisco.

And before that ‒ New Orleans, Cleveland, Atlanta, LA, and Albuquerque.

I traveled by train, plane, car, and boat. Including one epic adventure with a fellow investor that had us stranded for 12 hours in a New York City airport and then taking a 3 hour Uber to Providence, snagging one of the last hotel rooms in town, and waking up for an early morning ferry.  If that doesn’t create bonds, I don’t know what will.

Traveling almost constantly for an entire month is not cheap and on a lot of days, it isn’t even fun ‒ but it is necessary.

Inside the Bubble/Outside the Bubble

Over the last several months, it’s been incredibly energizing to make regular trips outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.

We can get so caught up in living several years into the future that we get ever so slightly removed from the real life of a stay-at-home mom in Tampa or an Uber-driving military veteran in South Boston.

I find it fascinating to talk to people about how they do things, the products they use, and the ones they don’t or haven’t even heard of. Regularly talking to and interacting with people who don’t use an app to send their laundry out, still drive to physical grocery stores, and don’t own any cryptocurrency makes you think a lot harder about the products that do get venture funding.

It’s forced me to in a constant state of asking and answering the question of ‘yes, but ‘will it play in Peoria’?

Being in a perpetual state of travel has also given me the gift of deeper connections with founders and other investors. It’s one thing to meet up with non-Silicon Valley folks when they come to town, but it’s quite another to drop in on them in their hometown. I’m lucky to have not just friends all over the world, but people who will introduce me to good food and even better founders.

We all know that the founders building the most important technology of tomorrow might not be in Palo Alto or San Francisco, but how many of us are getting out to Atlanta, Cleveland or Kansas City to meet them?

Enjoy the Journey

When I was a kid, we traveled a lot by car ‒ autumn leaf changing in North Carolina, Jazzfest in NOLA, family in Atlanta ‒ and I’ve always been an “are we there yet?” kind of person. It’s one of the reasons that to this day, I hate long car rides. But being able to thrive “on the road” means embracing it as a state of being and you have to be just as excited about the journey as you are about getting  there.

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