I’m joining Maveron!

I’m thrilled to be joining Maveron as a Partner to focus on supporting founders building enduring consumer businesses. Today also marks a new milestone for Maveron, with the launch of its eighth $225M fund, to back more of tomorrow’s great consumer entrepreneurs on their journey from obscurity to ubiquity.

I can't be more excited to join a dedicated consumer fund with a world-class team. I’ve spent the last decade analyzing, building, and investing in companies reimagining the world we live in. Over the last 4 years, I’ve had the chance to partner with entrepreneurs early in their journeys, building transformative companies such as Elemy democratizing access to pediatric behavioral healthcare for families and children, Good Dog creating the first trusted platform to find trusted pet breeders and shelters, Living Carbon fixing climate change by inventing trees that capture more carbon, Sendoso reimagining human connection through corporate gifting, Trialspark expanding access to life-saving clinical trials for patients, Voiceflow democratizing the ability for anyone to easily create voice and conversational interfaces into any product, and more. 

I love building with founders at the earliest stages. 0 to 1 is risky, hard, messy — but also boundless and full of possibility. It is superhuman to be an entrepreneur – I’ve had a front-row seat to observe their incredible tenacity, grit, vision, and unshakable purpose in changing the world. Investing across a breadth of sectors has allowed me to sharpen my pattern recognition, and gave me a holistic view of how all sectors ultimately impact people and the way we live our lives, as well as valuable learnings and insights that could be applied across sectors to help builders think outside the box. I am forever thankful to my Felicis family for giving me the opportunity to learn from some of the best investors and teammates. The privilege to partner with visionary entrepreneurs has given me immense purpose and fulfillment, and makes me certain that this is the work I want to be doing for many, many more decades.

I’ve always been fascinated with technology’s power to transform consumer lives, behavior, and culture. My investing career is built on the foundation of analyzing companies as an investment banker, and driving innovation as a strategy leader at Walmart during a time when the proliferation of mobile and the internet gave rise to new digitally native brands and consumer experiences. At Walmart, I created strategies for new category experiences and brands, and helped develop new consumer experiences leveraging fast-changing tech infrastructure such as AI, voice shopping, subscription commerce, streaming media, AR/VR, digital health, last mile delivery, and fintech. Walmart’s massive platform reached 265M people and I was fortunate to be able to see consumer products rollout at tremendous scale. It was also the biggest playground for me as I eagerly jumped into many strategic projects that led me around the world to study business models and consumer behavior across markets. Through partnering with the best operators and builders, I learned how to translate consumer pain points into business ideas, and how to build the infrastructure needed to grow these ideas into scalable and enduring businesses that ultimately transform how people live and thrive.

Today, I’m so excited to be joining forces with the Maveron team. People have always been at the core of how and why I invest, and what a dream come true it is to partner with a team that has been focused on consumer investing for more than 20 years. Maveron has backed many of the most loved and iconic consumer brands and platforms such as eBay, Zulily, Trupanion, Everlane, General Assembly, Imperfect Produce, Pacaso, Modern Fertility, Lovevery, Allstripes, and more. The highly focused, thesis driven, and highly collaborative approach to working with founders aligns closely with how I like to invest and work with entrepreneurs.

Besides Maveron’s incredible portfolio and stellar performance to date, I’ve gotten to know and admire the Maveron team over the years. Eventually it became clear to me that we not only had an overlap of investing style but also a deep alignment of values — a focus to place equal weight on profit and purpose, to always do the right thing, to prioritize team before self, relationships over transactions, and to celebrate being non-normal to eschew the status quo. Maveron became a Certified B Corp in 2021 as part of the team’s dedication to prioritize both purpose and profit, and that both are the cornerstone to building enduring consumer brands. These values matched what I heard from founders, who spoke to Maveron’s highly collaborative investing style and deep consumer expertise, all of which have helped builders on their journey from obscurity to ubiquity. Incredibly excited to team up with Dan, Jason, Anarghya, Natalie, Jerry, along with the broader team, founders, and LPs at Maveron.

We have seen drastic shifts in consumer lifestyle and values, as society continues to adapt to a post-pandemic world. Over the last few years, we’ve experienced dramatic dislocation of how we work and live. Consumers leaned on modern commerce rails to access goods and food online as ecommerce penetration increased significantly. Virtual interactions born from necessity have started to mature into the norm, ushering in a new era of telehealth, online education, remote work, and online communities whether through crypto or the metaverse. Consumers are prioritizing mental health, especially with our younger generation. We saw the Great Resignation as employees adopted flexible work and tapped into new employment models driven by the creator economy. We also developed new perspectives and values around how we build and operate our families (I myself became a new mother during the pandemic). All in all, despite the uncertain economic conditions, this is such a compelling time to rise to the occasion and build. I can’t wait to partner with the next iconic platforms that meet consumers during this time of drastic change to improve their health, work, life, communities, and livelihood for generations to come.

If you are building something new that is transforming the way consumers live, I’d love to chat with you.  matter how early you are on your journey — you can find me at grace@ maveron.com or reach out to me on Twitter @graceychou.

Let’s build magic together! ?