Meet The Early-Stage VC Designed For Everyday Founders.
Mother Superior’s Venture Foundry partners with entrepreneurs outside the margins of traditional venture capital to launch social purpose ventures.
Why we’re here.
Today, 10% of the population holds 70% of all household income. 50% of the population have attained zero gains over the last 30 years. Worker productivity continues to rise, yet wages have remained stagnant since 1980. These statistics carry real human impact in the fallout out of the middle class and for millennials as the first generation who will not attain higher economic status than their parents. Contributing to this perfect storm of economic quicksand, venture capital continues to create phenomenal wealth at scale for a privileged class. For everyone else, venture capital is out of reach or, when it is acquired, optimized to drive value back to investors.
The recent wave of acknowledgement and action around VC investing in diverse founders and setting diversity quotas is long overdue, critical and valuable. However, extending startup capital to diverse founders is an incomplete solution because the fundamental structure of venture capital is not designed to meet a majority of founders with the tools and resources critical for success.
“Balanced access to opportunity, wealth and power follows equitable opportunity, and precedes the ability to have a voice in the discourse of our economy.”
Mother Superior is a Venture and Social Purpose Foundry. We’re doing the work to redefine venture possibilities through redefining what investment means to founders, and creating a social purpose engine that helps founders build, retain and invest their wealth to create an uplifting, exponential impact in their communities.
Along with access to capital, Mother Superior aims to address the systemic issues that keep founders from building and sustaining profitable ventures. This novel approach to VC is designed with success as a feature. Over the past two years, a small and mighty team deployed the first two parts of our systemic solution — the Venture Foundry and The Everyday Founders Fund.
Venture Foundry
The Venture Foundry exists to redefine early-stage venture capitalism. Too often we hear stories of founders who, once funded, feel abandoned and fleeced out of their life’s work. We believe in venture, not vulturism, and have created a system that prioritizes the success of every Mother Superior founder. Getting funded is not the end goal. For Mother Superior, funding is a mid-stream milestone that precedes countless hours spent advising, building and preparing our founders to be competitive entrepreneurs. This is our unique approach to venture.
“A systemic crisis of wealth inequality demands systemic solutions, by way of innovative opportunities for accessing wealth.”
The Venture Foundry is designed to do exactly this by addressing the inroad of a venture system that isn’t broken, but rather, lacks the infrastructure necessary to include Everyday Founders from participating and building generational wealth.
We partner with entrepreneurs who fall outside the margins of traditional VC, and we call them Everyday Founders. They don’t have a Stanford MBA or connections in Silicon Valley. Instead, they have unique ideas, a fierce work ethic, a will to improve their communities and the scrappy mindset to build proof-of-concept prototypes in their garage.
We focus on helping Everyday Founders launch and retain a majority stake in their ventures so that they can succeed in a system designed for the few. We sign up as co-founders who hold a minority stake and invest our skills and experience to de-risk the investment. Mother Superior builds a foundry team to provide critical services that help founders focus on building the best product or service, while we provide the Legal, HR, PR, Finance and Marketing infrastructure necessary to succeed.
The Everyday Founders Fund
Our founders recognize that their own success is not enough, and that’s why we created a social purpose fund that is raised in part from our launched ventures. Each launched venture pledges a 1% annual profit return to The Everyday Founders Fund. Mother Superior then uses this fund to seed new ventures as they go through the Venture Foundry model. This 1% return directly translates to funding 6 new ventures after the first 3 years from our social impact fund model alone.
To date, we have leveraged this first-of-its-kind model to work for the founding class of Mother Superior ventures: REYN, Minerva Minded Darlings, and a secret, yet-to-be-announced venture.
Venture is for anyone who wants it and is down to do the work for it.
Let’s get to work.
