Moneda Moves Podcast
She Has A $60M Fund Investing In Overlooked Markets | Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures Samara Hernandez
Today we are honoring the Midwest by shining a light on Samara Hernandez, the Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures. Samara and her team are the perfect examples of the incredible talent living in our hometown of Chicago.
Chingona Ventures is an institutionally backed pre-seed stage fund focusing on investing in tech and tech-enabled companies across the U.S. The fund has $60MM in AUM and has made more than 40 investments across technology sectors in Financial, Food, Future of Work and Learning, and Health/Wellness.
Samara is on the advisory boards for Coolwater, an organization to support the emerging manager community; Angeles Investors, an organization investing in early-stage startups led by Latinx founders; and Venture Forward, a non-profit working to get more diversity in the venture capital ecosystem.
She started her career at Goldman Sachs where she continually ranked in the top five for selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting business practices. From there, she became an investor at Math Venture Partners across two funds where she led investment review, diligence, and execution.
While the Midwest can be overlooked by investors, we have a lot of hustle over here and with Samara’s help, business owners with marginalized backgrounds are starting to get the funding they need to do great things. This is especially important as founders with minority backgrounds find it hard to get funding.
In this week’s episode, Samara shares how her path to investing was a reaction to her environment. As a result, Chingona Ventures focuses on industries that are massively changing and founders whose backgrounds uniquely position them to create businesses in growth markets that are often overlooked. She and her team focus on areas in financial technology, the future of work, the future of learning, food technology, and health/wellness. Chingona Ventures invests in founders with a racial or ethnic minority with both cold and warm intros. She and her team have reviewed over 7,000 cold and warm inbound submissions, averaging five to six deals reviewed per day, at the time, invested in more than 40 different companies. That is such a high volume for such a lean team!
No te lo quires perder.
Latina-Owned JZD Prepared For A Launch At Target, Years Ahead | JZD Founders Jen & Vero Zeano
Mi gente, it’s your host Lyanne and your are listening to the last Moneda Moves episode of 2022! To close out the season, we are featuring a staple Latina brand near and dear to my heart that we’ve followed for years, the iconic apparel and accessories company Jen Zeano Designs. Its Texas-based founders and couple Jen and Vero Zeano are community-builders at their core having engaged their family, friends and locals in their business as they bootstrapped on their way to their historic debut in Target in 2022. A bit of background JZD and what it stands for: You may have run into their work via Jessica Alba or Jenna Ortega who have both worn their work, or their relatable, empowering and witty designs that echo phrases engrained in Latine culture (think Poderosa, Vibras Bonitas). Having created their renowned Latina Power design in 2014, and launching as an Etsy store, they were far from an overnight success, but what they did learn was how to lean on each other, harness the power of their community as they expanded their social media, sales as they quite literally prepared to land in a retailer like Target this year during Latinx Heritage Month.
The Business Behind Building A Trailblazing Latina Network | We All Grow Latina Founder Ana Flores
We speak with the founder and CEO #WeAllGrow Latina, Ana Flores, a digital and IRL lifestyle community of impactful Latinas and Femme-Latines who support and uplift each other. Their goal? To increase visibility and grow our social and economic power. The community started in 2010 and since then has grown into a following of 253K and counting on Instagram and bringing people together in person from their Las Founders events out west to their annual summit which just made a return this year. I first attended their summit several years ago, where I had the opportunity to meet other Latinas growing businesses and spaces of their own from writers to life coaches and ecommerce.
How To Start Managing Your Finances Like A CEO | Her Dinero Matters Host Jen Hemphill
We are deep in the fourth quarter of the year and while personally it’s a time of gratitude, it’s also a time when companies are knee deep in the annual budgeting process to set themselves up for the new year. So naturally, we're also thinking about building! What are our goals, visions and plans for the new year? These are the kinds of questions we encourage you to begin thinking about as well. Today, on Moneda Moves we have a guest who is a firsthand expert in this space to share her story and practical tips for our listeners creating their financial plans for 2023: Jen Hemphill, money expert and podcast host of Her Dinero Matters. Jen is an Accredited Financial Counselor and started her podcast to talk about the importance of learning your money story and how to build confidence in personal finances.