What, Like It's Hard? How Carrie Colbert Invests in Women and Makes Money

Carrie continues to find success by investing in *checks notes* a segment made up by 50 percent of the world’s population. How does she do it?

I first wrote about Carrie Colbert’s fund Curate Capital because of her stand-out branding and visual identity. At first glance, you might not even know Curate Capital is a VC fund because it looks nothing like the rest of the industry.

But that’s exactly her goal: to break the existing patterns of VC. “If we act as a kind of gatekeeper, it keeps people from really feeling like it's approachable and understandable,” Carrie says. “So a secondary mission of mine is to have more people both understand and participate in the asset class.”

Her primary mission? Deploying as much money as possible into female founders.

After raising their first fund in 2022, Curate Capital has invested in nearly 14 companies. But like many of my favorite badass fund managers, Carrie doesn’t come from finance. She simply saw an often-overlooked opportunity to make a lot of money.

How Carrie Stepped into Venture Capital

When Carrie retired from her 20-year career in the energy sector, she needed to recover from her burnout. She traveled the world, attended fashion shows, and shared her adventures on Instagram, eventually building a following as an influencer of sorts.

But what she wasn’t sharing (yet) was her work as an angel investor. “I was basically reinvesting all of my money back into female founded businesses,” Carrie says, “and that happened very naturally. I just started connecting with brands I liked and investing in them.”

She was seeing so much success and enjoyment from the process that when Carrie decided to raise her $10 million fund, she thought it would be easy enough. “I was thinking I would go out to some of these high net worth individuals from my oil and gas background (mostly old white guys), and I thought, ‘Well, this guy will give me half a million, this guy will give me a million. And we'll just raise this real quickly, right?’”

She did not, in fact, raise it really quickly.

“I got lots of questions,” she recalls. “They asked me: ‘Are there really that many businesses that women started? Will there be enough businesses for you to invest in? Do we really need to have a whole fund for this?’”

She thought that they would be convinced by the data about women funders being underfunded yet over-delivering. But after realizing these were not going to be her people, she soon learned who would be.

An Unconventional Approach to Meeting LPs

Throughout her fundraise, she took to Instagram to share her insights and experiences with that same following she built while traveling. “I just took the more organic approach,” Carrie explains. “I’d say ‘This is a company we invested in this time, this is what we're doing, we're raising a fund. It's hard, and here's what I'm going through.’”

Unsurprisingly, many first-time investors found Carrie’s story approachable. Women were reaching out and asking if this was something they’d be able to do, and whether or not there was a test to become accredited.

“I talk about it from a personal perspective, rather than a hard sell. When you talk about things naturally and organically, women get it. And then they start asking, ‘How do I be part of what you're doing?’”

Instagram became the perfect platform for reaching women who want to learn more about money but aren’t participating in the conversations at their workplaces, at their dinner tables, or in other online public forums.

This isn’t to say that women need to be infantilized or that finance-related content needs to be dumbed-down for them. Women are generally less comfortable talking about money, even with their close friends. But social media and private online spaces have been incredible gateways for women to access more information in a seemingly warmer, safer, and more welcoming space.

Providing Fuel for Women-Owned Companies to Launch and Excel

As Carrie now has a few years under her belt as a fund manager, her thesis has naturally found more focus.

“Early on, I would have said that we were industry agnostic, and that we were just more looking for the best opportunities by women, for women,” Carrie says. “We are leaning more into CPG brands right now, just because we know we can add more value there and be such good partners in those ways.”

It wasn’t a mistake that Curate Capital took this direction. Many of the LPs are influencers and women who have a strong connection with CPG brands, which are often founded by women and are very successful because of their majority-women audience.

It’s amazing how Carrie continues to find success by investing in *checks notes* a segment made up by 50 percent of the world’s population. Investors would be wise to keep an eye on this niche.