I Went From Teaching Yoga to $100M AUM: Springdale Ventures

Key Takeaways

- Gilbreath drew on her lifelong passion for healing to start two businesses.

- Her experiences as a CPG founder motivated her to become an angel investor for other brands.

- Here’s how taking the path less traveled set Gilbreath up for entrepreneurial success.

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.

Image Credit: Springdale Ventures. Genevieve Gilbreath.

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;