People

Monique Woodard is betting on the people Sand Hill Road keeps overlooking

The Cake Ventures founder sees three distinct demographic groups as ripe for startups to tackle: the aging population, women and people of color.

Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard

Monique Woodard is looking for opportunity in demographics that established investors aren't tackling.

Photo: Getty Images

In the coming decades, the United States is going to look a lot different than it does today.

By the year 2045, the United States will become majority-minority, according to the U.S. Census. Meanwhile, one in every five residents in the U.S. will be older than 65 by 2030, according to U.S. Census projections.

Monique Woodard is placing these impending demographic shifts at the core of her new firm, Cake Ventures. Woodard, a former venture partner at accelerator 500 Startups, believes these areas of demographic change should "change the way we invest in technology," she told Protocol.

The name of Cake Ventures, where Woodard is both the founder and managing partner, is an allusion to her investing thesis. The three layers of this venture dish are age, women and people of color.

The frosting between the layers? The changing "makeup of the internet user base," Woodard said.

If she's right, and her fund backs the right companies, the returns could be sweet.

Woodard did not disclose the size of her first fund, or the first two investments it has made. She did tell Protocol that First Close Partners, a firm that backs funds led by underrepresented minorities, is a limited partner in Cake Ventures.

A growing aging population

Historically, Woodard said, investors have placed enormous value on youth while failing to address the aging population. By 2034, Americans over 65 will outnumber those under 18. Plenty of investors have talked about aging-Baby Boomer bets — there's even a whole firm dedicated solely to lifespan extension.

But a key difference now is that Gen X is aging.

"I think it is the time to start focusing on the needs of an aging consumer, especially as everyone ages, as Gen X moves into 55 and over," Woodard said. "These are populations with more experience with technology and have more desires from technology. We've also seen the aging population very quickly adapt to and adopt ecommerce, online shopping, getting their groceries delivered."

Woodard made her first investment in an age-related startup back in 2016: Silvernest, a home-sharing service for seniors. But there are other types of companies that don't explicitly meet the aging criteria that can be helpful to people as they age, Woodard said. Estate planning startup Trust & Will, she said, is an example of that.

"You don't look at it and think, 'That's an aging company,' but if you think about the needs of people, as they get older, you're going to need a will or you're going to need a trust," she said. "So I think of those opportunities as less on the nose but also, in a lot of cases, more interesting to me and scalable than a lot of the truly, 'Oh, this is only for an aging population.' It's all about how do you improve the lives of people as they get older?"

What the future of work looks like for aging people is also something on Woodard's mind. Woodard bets that the traditional age of retirement, 65, is no longer the age at which the masses see themselves as leaving the workforce.

"Let's not ignore that sometimes people just need to stay in the workforce," Woodard said. "But there's also just desire. They don't want to retire yet."

Women as power consumers

The second layer of the cake is companies that can reach billion-dollar outcomes based on economic activity of women, Woodard said. In 2019, for example, 89% of women throughout the world said they were responsible for or jointly responsible for household spending, according to research firm Catalyst. Despite that, Woodard said she has noticed many investors discount the power of women as a consumer group.

"You see women either being the primary person responsible or a secondary person responsible for many purchases across many categories," Woodard said. "And I thought that had not been adequately explored."

Woodard pointed to Bumble, Glossier and Peloton as examples of highly successful companies with strong female user bases.

"But there are also companies that I think will eventually get there, like Modern Fertility," she said. "There are a lot of companies, not just in ecommerce specifically, but across health and wellness, future of work, fintech and financial services. I think that there's a lot of opportunity there that investors haven't tapped into yet."

People of color drive the culture

The third layer of the cake is made up of companies with significant numbers of people of color as users or customers. Prior to Cake Ventures, Woodard invested in companies like Mented Cosmetics, a cosmetics and beauty brand for women of color, as well as Blavity, a media site geared toward Black people.

"But I also look at TikTok and Clubhouse as really good examples of the kinds of adoption that these demographics drive on mainstream platforms," said Woodard, who is not an investor in those particular firms. "So if you look at Clubhouse, you can very obviously see that the platform sort of grew on the backs of Black culture and a lot of the activity of their Black users. So I think that's something to pay attention to. And it's a signal for a larger, broader, more important driver. We are culture and the culture of people of color will drive internet adoption."

Beyond the cultural influence of people of Black people and people of color, these groups also have a lot of spending power. In 2019, Black buying power hit $1.4 trillion, Latinx buying power hit $1.7 trillion and Asian buying power came in at $1.2 trillion, according to Catalyst. However, the combined share of buying power among Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American and multiracial consumers, comes in at 29.1%, which still falls short of white consumers' 81.7% share.

But given that these minority groups are on track to become a collective majority around 2045, Woodard feels confident that people of color will influence internet culture even more in the future.

"I would say that the rise of a new majority is going to impact every single platform that we know of," Woodard said. "When Jack [Dorsey] started Twitter, no one said that Twitter is going to be Black. Yet, Black Twitter does exist. And I think it has been an audience that has been underutilized when it comes to Twitter's growth. It's almost accidental. And I think the opportunity is in making something like Black Twitter more than accidental, but making it intentional."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins