I Started College at 16, Then Became a Yoga Teacher. Here’s How My Unconventional Journey Led to $100M.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Genevieve Gilbreath, co-founder and general partner of Springdale Ventures, a CPG venture capital firm focusing on early-stage brands. Gilbreath co-founded the Austin, Texas-based fund with fellow operator-turned-investor Dan Graham in 2019. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I started college super young — I was 16. I was already young for my grade in high school, then got tired of high school so I finished early. In 1991, I started at Baylor University, where I was an art and anthropology major. I was always fascinated by how humans heal and how they use plants to heal. That’s been a lifelong passion of mine and eventually motivated me to start a business. 

After some more twists and turns, I left Baylor and enrolled at Pacific University as a fine arts major. I graduated from there in May 1995. I went on to graduate with a master’s degree in medical anthropology at Baylor University. Then I worked as an adjunct professor at Baylor, and a couple of years later, completed a yoga teacher training program and started teaching yoga and doing independent health consulting on health, wellness and stress management. 

Fast forward to 2004 — I traveled to India for three months. I studied and taught yoga there. 

Starting a B2B supplement business with friends

Soon after, I started a B2B supplement company with some friends. We’d moved to Hawaii because of that passion for herbal supplements and how people use plants and culture to heal. That’s how I got into the consumer products industry in the first place — that passion. We bought plants from local farmers and would process them over in California. We never raised capital, but the business was paying all the bills. I ended up moving back to India and made orders from the back of a rickshaw.

Once I left India and moved back to Hawaii, I had been using this product in Sri Lanka and India that was really good for cold and flu. So I was always bringing it back to friends and family. Everybody loved it. I thought, Hey, I should just bring this back and rebrand it. So I did. I’d been running the other B2B export business so I thought, How hard could this be? It ended up being a shock to the system. First, trying to raise capital. Then understanding all the different channels and how to communicate with your customer and learn from your customer. But I managed to scale it to a few thousand stores, then sell the business, so it was a great outcome. 

Helping other founders navigate the business journey

Along the way, there were so many obstacles, and I wanted to help other founders and companies navigate the journey with a little bit less pain. After I sold that business, I was helping other founders, angel investing and running an accelerator out of Austin. During the process of that, I met my partner in the fund, Dan Graham, who’s also a really successful entrepreneur. Both of us were seeing a lot of success in our angel investments and the potential for success in so many of these founder-led brands to really scale. 

We also saw that a lot of these brands couldn’t raise early-stage strategic capital. They’d be going around to 20, 30 different angel investor meetings with folks who are doctors, lawyers, real estate investors or tech investors, and there just wasn’t a lot of folks who could really had the capital, especially on an institutional level, to be able to invest and help these brands scale and avoid obstacles essentially. Once they had $10 million in sales, there are a ton of consumer funds out there that would invest in them, but maybe not when they had $1 million to $3 million. So we saw the opportunity to really produce great returns for our investors and continue doing something that we love. 

Today, Springdale Ventures has $100 million assets under management. 

Growing Springdale Ventures with brands like Goodles

Like any entrepreneurial journey, growing the fund was a learning process for us as we built and became familiar with the lingo and models we needed, and how to communicate with our investors. So there was a lot of learning on the fly. But in the process, we also saw that while it’s not rocket science, it does take someone who’s been in the industry to make good picks. One of the very first brands we invested in was BeatBox Beverages, which just sold to Anheuser-Busch. Another really early one was Caraway, the home goods, pots and pans brand. And then the mac and cheese brand Goodles. 

Trusting founders and recognizing grit

In this business, it’s all about people. We have to be able to trust founders; they have to communicate well, have business acumen and the ability to lead. We love to see operators or founders who have proven these skills. It doesn’t have to be somebody who’s scaled their business to a huge exit, but somebody who’s seen the hard knocks and has some grit is really attractive. 

Another thing that should go without saying: It needs to be a great product. So many times, we’ll see healthy foods that just taste terrible. They might have the ingredient of the day, but nobody’s going to eat it after the first or second time they try it. So that’s not going to work. 

In that vein, one of the most important things that you need to vet is that the business is solving a real problem. A lot of people fall in love with the idea of some concept that they like, but it may not be solving a real problem. 

Learn from your business’s community as much as possible

Once you’ve identified that the business does solve a real problem for a real community of people, build that community before you ever launch a product. Having a really sticky community of people who love your brand or product and are willing to go out of their way to get it is something that we look for. Also, learn from that community as much as you can. That radically increases your chances of success. 

Consumer attention is incredibly fragmented right now. It’s less sticky than it ever has been. But again, authentic community still trumps that. Real connection cuts through the noise. Shelf space is also harder to come by and more expensive than ever. So making sure that founders and people building brands are really clear channel and distribution strategies is really important. Finally, the brands that are going to win have to have a real cultural reason to exist, not just a functional one.

Additionally, if you’re going the venture route or looking for investors, make sure that you surround yourself with investors who’ve actually operated. Because if you’re taking advice from folks who haven’t, then it’s just theory. 

Ushering Springdale Ventures into its next stage

Looking forward, I’m really excited to keep working with founders and to keep building our fund. It’s really fun for me to grow our team, see it come alive and take Springdale to the next stage. Now, we’re doubling down on our exact thesis as before, and it’s rewarding to have developed a thesis from the get go that remains true and continues to produce results. I’m also excited to see how brands will continue to evolve, which brands are going to make the most connection. I’m excited to see which brands become culturally relevant and how they get there. 

I think the winding path to get wherever you’re going is the most interesting and gives you the most depth of character. My path to venture capital was certainly not traditional, but coming from the perspective of being an entrepreneur, being somebody who’s lived in countries all over the world and learned how to relate to all different kinds of people, gives me a unique perspective and helped teach me not only boundaries, but also empathy. 

Whether we’re working with team members or portfolio company founders, having that breadth of experience to really draw on is really valuable. So I’m always encouraging people to take the path less traveled and follow your passions and see where it leads. It just adds to your character and makes you a better leader.