Velvet

Emma had built and sold Moonlight, a developer hiring platform that reached $55,000 in monthly revenue. But instead of jumping straight into another venture, she made an unusual decision: pursue an MBA at Chicago Booth. During her MBA, she worked at a VC firm on the investment side before transitioning to an entrepreneur-in-residence role. This gave her both the breathing room and strategic perspective to explore what to build next.

While in business school, Emma developed a systematic approach to idea validation. She created roughly ten different Webflow micro-experiences and used Typeform to capture signups, testing each concept's viability with real users. She posted these experiments on LinkedIn (her most effective acquisition channel) and in relevant online communities, tracking which ideas converted the best.

Emma kept gravitating back to the same problem: onboarding and payment infrastructure. She'd redone onboarding at least three times a year at every company she worked at, and noticed most companies do it incredibly poorly—forcing users through 20+ steps before they can actually use the product. She was also deeply influenced by her exploration of web3 during 2021-2022, particularly the user experience of wallet-based authentication: one tap to log in, one tap to sign for a payment, one tap every time you return.

Velvet's long-term vision is to become the Shopify of digital goods—creating a cross-platform identity and payment layer that users can carry between different digital products. Short-term, it's a no-code tool that handles the infrastructure layer companies typically build repeatedly: authentication, payment processing, user management, and conversion optimization.

Emma raised a $1.2M pre-seed round very quickly, with Chicago Ventures taking most of the round. This was dramatically easier than fundraising for her previous company, Moonlight (which she bootstrapped for half its life before raising VC). Having a successful exit, connections from her MBA, and working at a VC firm as an entrepreneur-in-residence gave her credibility and access to capital. She used pitch meetings as additional data-gathering sessions, calling up VCs regularly to test her hypothesis and get feedback.

Emma's MBA decision revealed something unconventional: while most founders see business school as inefficient and expensive, she valued it specifically for time to go deep on a problem space. She forced herself to maintain accountability by launching a blog called "Search Founder" during her MBA—if she didn't start a company, she'd be publicly embarrassed. This commitment device worked.

Her ideal customer is a company running a real business with millions of end users (or planning to get there) that needs sophisticated tooling for onboarding, keeping users engaged, and processing payments—not e-commerce, but digital subscriptions and digital products like Headspace or The New York Times.

Emma also recognized that her MBA studies in finance, accounting, and the case-study method gave her skills she wouldn't have acquired otherwise. Working with top economists on topics like banking crises and bubble cycles provided nuance unavailable outside academia. She's applying this rigor to Velvet.

With her technical co-founder, Emma is building Velvet with a long-term vision to disrupt how users authenticate and make payments across digital products. She's VC-backed, unlike her first company, because she genuinely enjoys having collaborators, managers, and working toward a billion-dollar outcome. She raises money deliberately, pitches investors regularly (which she finds fun), and is building sophisticated infrastructure technology that requires capital to scale.

Emma is aware she's making trade-offs: cutting sleep, exercise, and personal time to focus on work, relationships, and building. She's thoughtful about the reality that you can really do only three things well per life phase—and right now, her three are business school (finishing), starting Velvet, and maintaining relationships with existing friends and family. She's deliberately not having kids, pursuing art, or prioritizing health, because time is finite.