The New Majority

Homemade in DC

Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

Industry:

The New Majority – Fintech

Homemade – Food and Beverage, Tech Marketplace

Founding Student Name(s): Mackenzie Loy

Brief Description of Solution: Homemade in DC is an online marketplace connecting local food entrepreneurs to businesses. We offer corporate catering and custom gift boxes, all sourced locally from women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs. In addition, our customers receive an impact report transforming their already allocated food and gift budgets into a DEI initiative.

The New Majority makes it easy for everyday New Majority investors to invest directly into founders who look like them. In the long run, we plan to become the premier equity crowdfunding (and revenue-based financing) platform for New Majority founders and investors.Today, our New Majority Investor Circle receives a curated list of the top New Majority-founded companies currently raising from everyday investors. We also offer a free newsletter for those who want to continue to learn and be involved, but aren’t quite ready to make their first investment. Poets&Quants readers can receive their first month free with the discount code: POETS&QUANTS Subscribe today!

Funding Dollars:

Homemade in DC – $65K (investment)

The New Majority – $6.5K (pitch competitions)

What led you to launch this venture? Homemade – I used to bake and sell cinnamon rolls from my kitchen in San Francisco and loved the idea of using resources I already had (my kitchen and a tried-and-true recipe) to drive supplemental income.    Homemade started off as a cottage food incubator and has evolved into today’s marketplace offering catering and custom gift boxes.

The New Majority – I wrote my thesis for my Master of Public Policy degree on equity crowdfunding and its relationship to increased entrepreneurship rates amongst women and people of color. I spent months scraping data, running multiple regressions, and hours of writing about the statistically significant but quite small effects on increased entrepreneurship and funding for women and people of color. From there, I decided, ‘why wait for the existing platforms to focus on this problem?’ In addition, I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to invest in founders I believe in building companies I think we need, but I’ve always said, I’ll do it later when I’ve built wealth. Truly, with equity crowdfunding, you don’t have to wait.  Many people can invest in these companies today and begin to diversify their portfolios, and also learn and refine what their personal investment thesis is.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? Simply launching both has been one of my biggest accomplishments. Taking the leap into full-time entrepreneurship has been incredibly rewarding, fun, and difficult.

For Homemade, I am so proud of how many entrepreneurs we are working with – 21 to date, of which, 19 are women, 13 are Black, three Asian, two LatinX, and two LGBTQIA+.  And I am very proud of the thousands of dollars we have added to their income statements. While the numbers are meaningful, it’s also the conversations I have with the food entrepreneurs and the stories of how a particular order helped them get through the month during a slow season.

For The New Majority, my biggest accomplishment has been our third edition. We put together monthly newsletters for both our Investors Circle and our free subscribers. After conducting customer discovery interviews, I made some major changes to our third edition, and thus far have received a really positive response. As we continue to build the community and build towards a full platform, staying close to the New Majority founders and everyday investors we aim to connect with is going to be integral to our success.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? McDonough surrounded me with resources and people who were supportive, knowledgeable, and wanting to help. Specific classes gave me the frameworks and some tools to get started (for example, building out my first financial model and first pitch decks). More generally, the classes I took through the MBA Certificate in Sustainable Business, the work I did with Business for Impact, and the pitch competitions and resources from Georgetown Entrepreneurship have all helped me get to where I am today. In addition, through Business for Impact and Georgetown Entrepreneurship, I’ve been fortunate to work with several undergrads and grad students as interns for both Homemade and The New Majority – helping students gain practical, hands-on experience at a social enterprise and start-up while also benefiting from their passion and fresh insights.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? My mom is an amazing mom, a founder, and businesswoman who took a risk quitting her corporate finance career to build her company, teamCFO, from scratch.  She saw a need within small to mid-sized businesses for an interim CFO and used her unique skill set to help hundreds of businesses survive multiple downturns and thrive. Part of why both of my businesses are about supporting other entrepreneurs is because of her. She truly believes that entrepreneurship and business can drive enormous impact and create generational wealth, and I do too.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Startup Factory with Eric Koester and Entrepreneurial Finance and VC with Arun Gupta. Startup Factory was a pressure cooker week where we did 100+ customer interviews and really wrestled with the business model. This was a sneak preview into what becoming a founder and full-time entrepreneur would be like. I’m grateful for Professor Gupta and the experiences he brought to the classroom that helped bring the case studies to life. The tensions and relationships between investors and founders we explored along with the technical details around cap tables, valuations, and term sheets gave me a head start relative to many other founders who are building high-growth startups. This has been especially valuable as a female founder of color given the abysmal funding rates for women and people of color.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Melissa Bradley. I first heard the term “the new majority” from Melissa and was simultaneously nodding my head at how true it was and yet floored that it was my first time hearing it. Having the words to express an idea or a reality is incredibly powerful, and that’s a large reason why we decided to call our company The New Majority.  We are both highlighting New Majority founders who are building potentially incredibly impactful and profitable businesses as well as opening the door to new investment opportunities for everyday New Majority investors.

For Homemade in DC, Melissa played a great mentorship role. She heard the first iterations and supported our evolution to where we are today both as a professor, mentor, and investor! She encouraged me to apply to the IIEIF fund from the DC City Gov which is run by 1863 Ventures. Without this funding, we wouldn’t be as far along as we are today.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? I attended DC Startup Week for the first time this year and it was incredible to see how many people are part of this ecosystem, and the energy and impact that is brewing. Shoutout to the organizers who will hopefully become customers of Homemade as we all seek to support each other.

In addition, I participated in the Techstars Founder Catalyst program sponsored by JP Morgan and their Women on the Move team. Our cohort of 20 female founders in the DMV area has consistently lifted me up, provided critical feedback, and made introductions that have turned into revenue.

The energy here is only growing with founders, and in particular, female founders and founders of color as we pool our resources, knowledge, and connections to build our companies.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? For Homemade in DC, I envision a Homemade in every city that highlights and turbocharges the local food ecosystem with a focus on women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+. Food is a universal language, and through our food marketplace, we hope to build connections that will strengthen local supply chains, reduce global warming emissions, support small businesses, and encourage new ones.

For The New Majority, my goal is to build out the first equity crowdfunding platform built for and built by New Majority founders and everyday New Majority investors. Not only are these founders more likely to build impactful businesses, but this is also a way for historically marginalized and underrepresented communities to invest in each other, invest in the companies they want to see shape the world we’ll live in, and truly receive the benefits of doing so. This is one way to create intergenerational wealth and close the racial and gender wealth gap.

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