Print PageInvesting in Women Entrepreneurs
In a special 4th of July weekend podcast, we spoke with Lori Wachs, Partner at Springboard Growth Capital.
Springboard focuses on providing capital to women entrepreneurs in the Series C stage and beyond.
The deal structure that Springboard offers to clients is quite interesting. Instead of one large private capital fund that invests across various growth capital and private market deals, Springboard investors choose to invest one deal at a time, even with modest amounts of capital.
Given many companies’ tendency to stay private longer, Springboard Growth Capital aims to help capture and fund business growth that used to occur in public markets.
Springboard is not shy about courting women clients as investors in these businesses.
The team at Springboard Growth Capital includes Co-Founder Kay Koplovitz, former Chairman & CEO of USA Networks, who was the first female network president in television history. Koplovitz has trained over 700 entrepreneurs to raise capital through involvement in Springboard Enterprises, and the team at Springboard Growth Capital leverages that network to source deals.
We spoke with Wachs about the dichotomy of business performance across the economy.
One of Springboard’s portfolio companies is Hint® water, which is a direct consumer product but has an online-oriented business and subscription model that is performing well in today’s virtual consumption world.
However, on the other side is ClassPass, which recently raised over $300 million to fund global ambition and expansion plans to provide access to boutique workout studios. They saw 90% of their revenue evaporate within 10 days during the pandemic.
That type of pandemic risk will be increasingly top of mind for investors and may offer better terms for investors looking forward.
This was a very interesting conversation. You can listen to the full conversation below:
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Jeremy Schwartz has served as our Global Chief Investment Officer since November 2021 and leads WisdomTree’s investment strategy team in the construction of WisdomTree’s equity Indexes, quantitative active strategies and multi-asset Model Portfolios. Jeremy joined WisdomTree in May 2005 as a Senior Analyst, adding Deputy Director of Research to his responsibilities in February 2007. He served as Director of Research from October 2008 to October 2018 and as Global Head of Research from November 2018 to November 2021. Before joining WisdomTree, he was a head research assistant for Professor Jeremy Siegel and, in 2022, became his co-author on the sixth edition of the book Stocks for the Long Run. Jeremy is also co-author of the Financial Analysts Journal paper “What Happened to the Original Stocks in the S&P 500?” He received his B.S. in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and hosts the Wharton Business Radio program Behind the Markets on SiriusXM 132. Jeremy is a member of the CFA Society of Philadelphia.
